🧠 How to get more SaaS customers (Building 101 #4)

Hey all,

Welcome to part 4 of Building 101 🎓, this week we’re looking at how you can drive more customers to signup for your products and therefore increase your MRR.

If you didn’t catch part 3 all about building MVPs, then you can read it here. And you’re free to access any of the discussions at any time here.

What I’m reading this week… 📚

• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries (link)

  Relevant for part 1 - iterating like a startup

• Hooked, Nir Eyal (link)

  Relevant for part 2 - keeping customers engaged

Let’s jump in… ⬇️

1. Iterating like a startup

When most of us decide what to build next, we generally make assumptions based on what we think our customers want. But in reality, this can be very different to what they actually need.

The last few decades of VC-backed tech have ushered in a new way of “validated learning” that we can all apply when building our own products.

Instead of guessing, we treat our products like science experiments. We continually talk to customers, measure how they use our products and collect data points that we can learn from to decide what to build next.

There are generally two main ways you can start putting this into practice with your own products:

Conduct customer surveys

If customers really love your product, those that get the most value from it will likely be happy to help you improve upon it.

Arrange calls with these customers every few months and ask questions like:

1. “What’s the one feature you use every day?” - direct

2. “Did you know about feature [X] that we just released?” - direct

3. “What’s something you wish the product could do for you?” - indirect

4. “Explain to me how you would do [X] using the product.” - indirect

Asking direct questions gives you instant feedback on how well your product is communicating its intentions to solve the user’s problems. (It also gives you a free upsell opportunity…😉).

Asking indirect questions helps you continue to gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s needs and if the assumptions you are making are in fact correct.

🚨 Spoiler - they’re probably not…

There’s no better feeling than coming away from a user interview with a list of features you know that, if you build, you can add revenue with a snap of your fingers!

Use product analytics tools

User interviews are great, but we still need to understand how the other 90% of our customers use our products - otherwise, we’re flying blind!

With every change we make, we should also release analytics features that are designed precisely to give us instant feedback on how users are getting along with it.

The best solution for newcomers to product analytics is MixPanel. But in general, for any analytics tool, the approach will be:

1. Integrate the platform’s SDK into your product’s code.

2. Write code to trigger events when users visit specific pages or click certain buttons that you consider meaningful.

3. Include customer attribution data in your tracking events.

4. Use the platform’s analytics tools to track customer behaviour over time.

Regularly review the data you’re collecting and see if the features you worked so hard on are being used to their full potential.

Being data-driven in your decision-making is the best way to build things customers will actually pay for over the long run.

2. Keeping customers engaged

Keeping customers engaged with your product from the moment they sign up is not only key to preventing them from backing out soon after (or ‘churning’) but also to improving conversion rates when it comes to upsells and add-ons you offer.

Here’s 3 things you can do to increase engagement:

Communicate with your customers

Outside of your product, the best way to achieve this is to start a newsletter. You already have your customer’s email addresses, so tell them about all the cool things you are doing!

For every product update, send out the following emails:

1. “Here’s what’s coming soon…” (pre-release)

   Include high-quality screenshots and short-form demo videos alongside a limited-time promotional event for early adopters.

2. “It’s live…” (immediate post-release)

   This lets customers that didn’t convert know that they missed out.

3. “It’s not too late…” (one week later)

   If your changes were successfully adopted by some of your users, share the analytics you collected and give those that missed out a second chance to convert.

Start applying gamification

There are also strategies you can apply inside your product to increase engagement on a daily basis.

I always refer to Todoist Karma as the best example of this. At a high-level Todoist is a task tracking tool and ‘Karma’ is a points-based system the platform uses to incentivise users to keep creating and completing tasks.

In reality, this can be applied to any product. You decide for yourself what you want your users to optimise, whether that is ‘do more’ of something or ‘minimise’ a statistic relevant to them. Then incentivise them to do so.

It plays right into the wheelhouse of Todoist as their free plan is limited to 5 projects, so incentivising users to create more projects pushes them into a position where they feel they need to upgrade.

Leverage product psychology

The more customers feel like they can see your product evolving, the more you’re convincing them that they are buying into a platform that continues to work for them.

By including a button to manually update to the latest version of their app, Todoist again keeps customers engaged and communicates that the team is constantly at work improving the product for them.

This is again a strategy all of us can add to our products with minimal effort (even if the button doesn’t do anything for now other than just refresh the page! 😉).

3. Building in public

Driven by modern media, there is a growing trend among almost all creative sectors that creating content documenting your journey striving towards a goal can make the effort all the more worth the while when you eventually get there.

For us builders, creating content documenting our journey in building out our products is a great way for us to get the word to the wider building community, and our customers.

Here are some of the best places to do that in the tech space:

Twitter

Examples like the one below are rife in the #buildinpublic community - not only does this create hype for your product, but as you can see an established account can use Twitter as a top growth tool:

Reddit

We all know the action is in the comments so leverage these niche communities to drive traffic to your own products.

Ask Redditors to roast your landing pages and post status updates asking for feedback.

But also post useful discussions in targeted niches where your customers are likely to hang out to try to find some more users. GummySearch is awesome for researching niche subreddits.

Take a look at this post on Reddit (link) that, while not entirely related to tech, generated 90 upvotes and 23 comments whilst getting to the top of r/Entrepeneur:

Blogging

If socials aren’t for you, you could post on IndieHackers or Dev.to and start writing about your product journey.

Doing this for a while will naturally improve your SEO and provide all the content you need to send those all-important product updates to your customers!

While getting started creating content can seem hard going at first, it pays off in the long run - the sooner you get started the sooner that day will come.

P.S. Check out the official IdeaHub Reddit community where you can share ideas with other builders - I’m also taking applications for mods if you are interested in growing the community with me!