Optimizing a SAAS business – finding PMF & reducing friction of on-boarding / user adoption

“We need help. We feel we are spinning our wheels. We have a great product, follow all SAAS practices and recommendations, have customers, a healthy traffic and sign-ups but we don’t seem to be converting any sign-ups to paid customers.”

I was invited by a SAAS startup to help them out last month. I advise SAAS startups on product & marketing professionally. I have some expertise on software business domain given my 30+ years of background in product and experience of global sales at large companies and running my own software services business for nearly 10 years.

So we setup a deep dive and spent 5 hours reviewing the key aspects of their business

• Current customers and their top use-cases, how they were acquired, what their perceived value gained was, how their relationship had grown and health of the account.
• Registrations in the last 3/6/12 months and their activity post registration, acquisition channel and positioning, landing page, email experience, product experience for first time users
• Engagements with the registered users, inquiries and conversion pipeline

The outcome? Even after 2 and half years of being in business, they had not figured out a target customer, specific offering and a predictable channel which would deliver a predictable sales/revenue metric. No PMF had been achieved.

We could clearly see the immediate gaps in their product, positioning, communications, sales methodology and on-boarding that was leading to leak from their registered users and possibly getting unrelated traffic / sign-ups on their product. Detailed discussion on these gaps with the founding team and staff verified the assumptions about the gaps and achieved consensus on the need to fix them / address them before scaling the operation.

In the last 4 weeks, we have been reviewing / discussing and re-doing many parts of their “made for SAAS’ portions of the product (the marketing and customer on-boarding parts which are separate from the core product but that ride on top of the core product).

Interested to follow our re-engineering and how we are optimizing the business for SAAS? Share your email on the comment below and I will share our first case study from this project. I will also add you to my email list where I will share details of this project as we turn the corner.