Who would pay for your SaaS?

In the early days, my idea of running a SaaS business involved a startup that generated all this revenue while I sat on a beach sipping mojitos. Then I got to work on some real SaaS platforms and got a better grasp of how things work. I went freelance, built some fairly successful niche platforms for clients and eventually started something a bit more serious of my own.

That’s the bit of the SaaS world I know. I’m hardly a Silicon Valley startup guy, but I’ve worked on products that have had a reasonable amount of commercial success. The people behind them have often had an in. Maybe they had ex-clients who needed the software, or former colleagues who were still dealing with the problem it solved.

Marketing’s the tough bit

An idea can sell on its own merits. It just seems to be rare. In my experience, building the thing is the easy bit. Building something people actually want and getting it in front of those people is where I’ve seen smart people come unstuck.

Sometimes they’ve spent ages building something, only to get to the point of selling it and realise nobody actually wants it. Other times the product is good and people do want it, but getting in front of them and turning that into sales conversations is difficult and expensive.

If you’re starting from scratch, your job at that point is to become a marketing pro. You can spend days DMing people on LinkedIn or spend money running ads. It’s a slow burn.

The first five to ten customers

If I were looking at a SaaS idea, I’d want to be able to name five to ten people with the problem I was trying to solve. Then I’d go and ask them, “If I could build this, would you pay for it?”

Five to ten customers might be a fair way off where you want to be financially. But they might cover your costs and leave you a bit of money for further development or marketing. You’re off the ground and you’ve got some actual revenue coming in.

You’ve also got people using the software. They’ll have ideas of their own and can help shape what you build next. If it works well for them, you’ve got someone to ask for a testimonial. They might even know the next person who’d buy it. That’s the sort of thing that makes finding customer number eleven a little easier.

Your in might be a seat on an industry board. It might be that you go to the conferences and know half the people there. Either way, I’d use that access to try to pre-sell the thing. By the time you go live, you want a little black book of people who’ve already said, “Yes, I’d pay for that.”