9 Lessons Learned Building SaaS
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9 Lessons Learned Building SaaS eFounders
description
eFounders is startup studio building SaaS companies. We’ve been crafting SaaS products for 3 years now and we’ve learned many things on the way. In this presentation Mailjet, Textmaster, mention, Pressking, Front and Aircall, 6 eFounders family members, are sharing tips they’ve learned while growing a SaaS business.
Transcript of 9 Lessons Learned Building SaaS
9 Lessons Learned Building SaaS
eFounders
Building SaaSeFounders is startup studio building SaaS companies. We’ve been crafting SaaS products for 3 years now and we’ve learned many things on the way.
In this presentation Mailjet, Textmaster, mention, Pressking, Front and Aircall, 6 eFounders family members, are sharing tips they’ve learned while growing a SaaS business.
http://efounders.co
ProductAt eFounders, we mock the entire product up before writing any line of code. This gives us a very good idea of what the whole project will look like. By making mockups as sharp as possible it almost doubles the speed and efficiency of coding, design and content writing.
Thibaud Elzière eFounders Founder
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Sales
Edouard Level Mailjet Head of Sales
At Mailjet, sales teams need to understand and master storytelling. It's very important to know how to tell a story when you are involved in sales, even for a highly technical product.”
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Customer Acquisition
Thibault Lougnon TextMaster CEO
Customer acquisition costs must be kept to a minimum, otherwise your entire funding will disappear in just a few months.
My best tip is to keep your advertising budget as low as possible, extensively use social networks with low-cost strategies to target your first users and leverage them to spread the word through affiliate programs, contests, games, etc.”
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Finance
Quentin Nickmans eFounders Founder
Many SaaS founders are obsessed with fundraising before they understand how their business really works. Your #1 aim is to master your key business metrics: CAC, ARPU, CHURN, Cohort behaviours and MRR*
Once you’ve understood how they work and what your leverages are, your fundraising strategy will follow.”
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* see last slide for details
Marketing
Clément Delangue mention Head of Marketing
Nobody knows what can or cannot work. Take time for the things that “can’t work just because.” Prove “because” wrong. This is how @mention we could close great partnerships, like the one with Buffer, or that we got some amazing media coverage.
Don’t be scared to be creative and bold even if your are selling software to businesses.”
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Public Relation
Bertrand Besse PressKing CEO
SaaS founders have a tendency to reuse their marketing pitch when they contact a journalist. Instead, they should explain why it is relevant and newsworthy for the journalist. Marketing and PR are 2 completely different fields. And writing a press release is different from drafting your sales pitch.
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Pricing
Olivier Pailhes Aircall CEO
Don’t be afraid to price your product while in closed Beta. One of the first questions our beta users ask after trying Aircall is “How much will it cost?”. B2B users need to know your pricing as soon as possible because it inspires trust. Don’t overestimate the power of free.”
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Development
Laurent Perrin Front CTO
The number of 3rd party APIs and services which developers can use to speed up product development is exploding. These tools are great but nowadays, when you build your tech stack you must absolutely take into account all the inherent risks: service discontinuation, tos changes, service getting acquired, pricing changes etc. Risk management for 3rd party services is becoming increasingly important.”
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Design
Didier Forest eFounders Partner
UX and UI standards have increased dramatically in the software industry. Crafting a beautiful and easy to use product is now compulsory to appeal to users and to compete with the myriad of new SaaS coming out every month. Design should be a priority from day one. ”
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Mailjet@mailjet
Aircall@aircall
mention@mention
Front@frontapp
Textmaster@textmaster
PressKing@pressking
Thank you
Finance *Here are additional information from Quentin’s tip:
CAC: Cost of Acquisition of a (paying - long term) customer
ARPU: Average revenue per user (or account)
CHURN: Often split into short term (first 3 months) and long term (after first 3 months) churn behaviour / analysed per monthly cohort
MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue = compilation of signups, conversion, ARPU and churn - resulting in the bottom line figure =>MRR
We’re talking about post seed rounds (A and more)
