GTM for small ticket SaaS

Okay, I think we are live now. Are we live? Yeah. Let's hope so. Okay. Let's hope that we are live and let's start. So, hello and welcome to Momentum Officers. My name is Yash and I'm joined by my co -founders Harsh, Jay and Kaushik to discuss the topic of the week which is GTM, Go -to -Market.

for small ticket SaaS. Our goal with this office hours is to provide you with actionable insights and practical strategies that you can apply to your own products. Throughout the session, we encourage you to ask questions and share your thoughts. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from each other and give you insights that can help drive your SaaS initiatives forward. So let's get started. Jay, Harsh, Kaushik, how are you doing today? Great. Lots of work.

Lots of work. That's good to know. is in a different time zone today. Technically, all of us are together over here in an office in India. But Harsh has chosen to take a break from the three of us. He's taking his break in Seattle, US. Yeah, no, in Chicago. Chicago. Awesome. And why are you there, Harsh? What are you

Yeah, actually I want to attend my brother's that's why. Yeah, actually here it is 6 am. wow, it's 6 am. Yeah. For all the people who might think that we are torturing Harsh, we did ask, we asked him. What is the convenient time to do this life and he said that he wants to do it at this time.

Which we agreed to because we were between meetings so we didn't calculate the time zone. Why are you up at 6 am for the... Actually everyday I wake up around 5 am. wow! Yeah because here everyone sleeps around 8 -9 pm. Okay. And around 4 am there is a morning here. Okay. I was going to say good things about

But that's what everyone is doing. What I was about to say is that for people who think that they should start a business so they can have control of their life, you can witness Harsh who is taking control of their life by waking up at 6 am and going on a live. But everyone in Chicago is doing that. It doesn't sound special. Coming back to the topic of the day, so GTM

for small ticket sales. And this is a topic that's close to all the four of us, given that we've worked on small ticket sales before. We've the journey of founding it, building it, growing it, acquiring customers for it, and then exiting. And that's why we wanted to talk about this today. A large number of SaaS companies are small ticket sales. So let's define small ticket. Small tickets typically

If your average order value per customer per year is $10 ,000 or less, we'll calculate, we'll look at that as a small ticket SaaS. So the reason why we want to have a differentiation between a small ticket and a big ticket is because there are different motions that can take us through to acquiring customers for a SaaS that is implemented or licensed at different values.

If you are selling for $10 ,000 or more, 20, 25, $30 ,000 per customer per year, you can afford to do sales led motions. You can afford to have an outbound team. can afford to have a cold calling team. You can afford to do demos and things like that. But if you're a small ticket, if your customer is paying you round about $1 ,000 a month or $10 ,000 a year, the economics don't work for that to be possible. And in those scenarios,

How do you your go to market is the question that is there in front of us where you cannot have a sales team. How do you go about that? So what are, so that's the context. What are the early thoughts?

So to get started, Dheesh, first we might want to, one main question which I had from my side was a lot of people are confused about what are the GTM strategies for that and many people have been relying especially on SEO and performance marketing. But if we talk about more strategies than that, what according to you would be the top five strategies or top five GTM motions which one should opt for first one?

Great question. Thank you for taking away my obvious answers and making it more difficult for me to answer. So, SEO and performance marketing are fairly simple. Those are the couple of things that you will see more often than not. And it's not as simple. So, within SEO also, you have a couple of different ways of going about it. Within performance also, you have a couple of different funnest that you could build. However, if we take both of them away for a

There are, so the first that I would say is building resources. So, if you, the context, the pre -context or the pre -prep that you need before you start building resources is total and complete understanding of who your ideal customers are. If you absolutely know who your ideal customers are, then you know what their fears are, what their pains are, what their questions are, what are the challenges that they are wrestling with in their day -to -day life, work

And you'd be able to spend some amount of time and energy towards building resources that can help them answer those questions. And when I say resources, I don't mean e -books. I don't mean blogs. I mean, those things, they are great and they are useful as well. But these resources are actionable, are things that they can use. Like they can print it out or like these are templates or spreadsheets or cheat sheets.

or things that they will frequently use every quarter or every month or something like that. And just offer that to them for free. So build a page, build a collection of these resources, get them to get these for free, get their email address and then walk slowly walk up to the product that you are running. So that's one of the first channels that I would strongly recommend, which is building resources.

The second one that I would, that I would also recommend is essentially creating content that is not necessarily SEO, right. So, establishing yourself, so if you are, if you are targeting small and medium businesses, then you really have the potential of establishing yourself as a thought leader in that space. And so, video content,

you know, short videos on YouTube or TikTok or whatever the case may be. But essentially building a media plan that helps your ideal clients look at you as a person who knows about this particular space, who knows more about this particular problem or about this particular challenges than themselves. So that I would say could be a second good market.

channel on top of SEL performance. So yeah, so these two are good. And then there are others like emails and so on and so forth. But these two are good to start with. Yeah. So in the second, you discuss social media, right? So what are the different platforms, like the LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, right? So what is we can say different type of SaaS product have?

different strategies for different social media, right? So how do you define that? Which media we have to select for which type of products? So great question and a good way to think about it is that it doesn't have to be a strategy for a particular platform. A platform is not just like one platform does not behave like a monolith. So everything that happens on LinkedIn

is does not happen in the same way or Facebook it does not happen in the same way. So as an example, know, Facebook pages, the reach is dead. So there's no point of doing that. However, Facebook communities are great. So if you're able to identify and find communities where your ideal clients are, then you want to become part of that. You want to slowly start contributing to those communities in a meaningful way.

and then build a relationship with admins and moderators such that at some point of time they will give you or your product visibility to the people who are a part of that company. And so you cannot have strategy for Facebook but you can have strategy for communities on Facebook. And then a similar strategy is something that you can follow for communities on Slack as an example or communities on, there are different platforms like Circle .so and whatever the case.

physical communities, real physical communities that like need for events and things like that. So that might be helpful as well. So here are these, these are couple of things. The other thing that I would say, and it depends on the nature of your SaaS product. However, more often than not, you'd see that the meta is great for running ads, if you're selling a B2C brand or

direct to consumer product. However, from a SaaS B2B standpoint, it's great for retargeting. At a very broad level, would say you can use Meta for retargeting, can use YouTube for building your brand, you can use Facebook communities to engage with your ideal customers. Similarly, do the same with Slack communities and you can use LinkedIn to run ads. If you are even within the small ticket, you are on the higher range side. If you're on the lower side, then you just use LinkedIn

build a personal brand around the founders and then post about that. So based on what you just said, so let's say I'm someone who has an idea for a product, especially an SaaS product, and I want to start now. So what do you think is the first GTM strategy that someone who's starting should go for or should start with? Interesting question. So I'd say a good way to think about it

is that do not think about building the product on day one. think about building a community, like building some asset, some place, be a webpage, a blog, a YouTube channel, something that you own or like an email list on sub stack or followership on Instagram, whatever the case may be. Think about an asset that you own where you know for a fact that every month,

1000 ideal customer profiles are going to visit that asset. When you are able to do that, so when you know that okay and it's a six month one year journey, when you're able to use content, use resources, use media, whatever it is that you have within you that makes sure that 1000 ideal customers or ideal prospects are visiting that asset every month.

is when I would strongly recommend you should start writing your first line of code. Because now you have a captive audience that recurringly visits an asset that you have built and then it is a product that if they are interested in they might want to give it a try. So that is one that I would say. Second, if you, this answer does not do any good to people who already built their MVP and are now thinking about distribution

So, but there are a lot of people like that out there. And so for those people, would say that if you're looking for acquiring a very large number of customers in a very small amount of time, you can also consider thinking about market places like AppSumo, which is where you can launch. Again, it's not great for making revenues, but it's great for you to get exposure to a couple of thousand of your prospects who will pay some amount which will not be enough.

but we will pay some amount to get access to your product and then we help you build a short -term roadmap, become your product partners of sorts in terms of giving you feedback, holding you accountable when you do something wrong and praising you everywhere when you do something well. And so as founders, one of the things that happens that tends to happen is that you always take reports from everyone else, but you never report to anyone.

and it's sort of also a lonely journey but even that you stop reporting to anyone, AppSumo community sort of has been sure that you are answerable. Every couple of weeks they'll ask you, hey, know, what's been happening, what are you working on and stuff like So if you've already built an MVP, I think AppSumo is a great place to see if there's value in what you've built. Yeah. Yes, we can also say, it's like a SCO6

ask right if I want to I already have one right and I want to go to market so we can say on the first strategy or first GTM channel that I can use is the influencer or the affiliate marketing do you think it can be the first one which can because without cost we can get high rewards on this. So on paper it makes sense because the way that we think about it is

you only pay an affiliate for a success fee, even though it's a recurring fee, anywhere between 10 to 30 percent of the sales that they bring, even though it's a recurring fee. On paper it may seem like it's something that's a no -lose situation for you or the affiliate because they are only making a post which for them is free and you only pay them in case if they end up making a sale for you. However, it seldom works that way because one of the challenges that happens when you start reaching out to affiliates

is that an affiliate wants to promote products that are already working well in the market. they don't want to... So if you're very early, if no one knows about you, if the product is not yet stable, if there are not enough testimonials, if there are not enough badges, if you don't have enough proof to show that this product is going to be around for long, you are basically asking the affiliate to put their credibility on the

Which is a big challenge because their followers make good recommendations. And so more often than not, you might be able to find a couple of affiliates who might do it because they are also desperate and they are also very early in their journey and they are also looking for a couple of products to promote. But to build a GTM that is sustainable, scalable and repeatable, going the affiliate route on day one is a little bit of a challenge as

conscious effort. If they come in, if they sign up, if they want to promote it, you always want to have assets ready to help them. You want to do all those things for sure. However, reaching out to affiliates, discovering affiliates, that's a little bit of a challenge because that's point of, that's the first point of judgment, which is when the affiliate looks at you and says, okay, this brand or this product has the need to reach out to

And so the questions sort of start from there and never end. Yeah. And to add on what Koushik asked and what Harsh also added on top of that, one interesting channel which may be suitable for early stage small ticket sales platform is to have integrations built up, to have partnerships with other sales companies which are already doing in the market or addressing the similar target audience.

But providing complementary services or features, right? So building on top of that is something which can be helpful. For example, if you are building some scraping tool, then having built an extension that works on LinkedIn, I mean Chrome extension that works on LinkedIn, that could be helpful, just like what Apollo did. And there can be similar other examples. you are building a CRM, you might want to first partner with Zapier and just allow your platform to be open

hundreds of other platforms altogether with just a basic simple integration with TPA. So thinking of that, thinking of right, you know, partner product can be an interesting part as well. Yeah, so using other products as a distribution channel is also a great way to go about it. So, Yash, I had an interesting question.

When it comes to metrics, I guess it is little different when you compare it in general. So especially for small ticket businesses or small ticket SaaS platforms, what would be the key metrics according to you to track when evaluating the success of different GTM channels? Interesting. So this question, the answer to this question has to be taken not necessarily in consideration

the scope of the possibilities which I am going to talk about, it has to be taken in the consideration of how much measurement do you want to do. So, there are two extremes. So, one is that you cannot improve something that you do not measure and then the second extreme is that it can also cause you analysis paralysis. So, you are just analyzing. Yeah. Because you can have different channels and

platforms to measure performance of those channels and then even in those metrics you can have different cohorts and these cohorts could be a combination of different geographies, different industries, different size of organizations or what have you. So, you typically want to, the way to go after measuring metrics is instead of measuring everything and not knowing what you are looking for.

is primarily to go after measuring metrics with an assumption that you want to prove whether it is right or wrong. So, you typically want to start off with an assumption, an assumption an example, good example of an assumption could be, I think there some background noise for someone. are you guys getting that or? Yeah, I am also getting it.

Okay. Yeah, I touched on it. Perfect. So, I was basically saying that a good way to go about it is to go in with an assumption and an example assumption could be something like, I think my ideal customers are 50 to 200 people, financial services companies in Singapore or in Southeast Asia.

and then you want to look at your numbers and then come to a conclusion whether your assumption was correct or not. Another assumption that like another example of an assumption is that if I run these particular set of ads with these copies and similar landing pages, the benefit of saving them time is performing better than the benefit of saving them money. And so you want

go in with the assumptions and then you want to look at numbers whether they prove whether something is correct or not, instead of going in with the approach that okay I have all the numbers, now what is the insight that I should get out of it. Having said that, here are a couple of ways to look at it. So the first set of metrics that you want to measure is if your budget of performance marketing is $5 ,000 or higher, then you want to measure performance

different campaigns against themselves and different channels that are giving you what ROI are they giving you. A good setup from a performance marketing standpoint is you use Google ad campaigns as demand generation, Meta, Twitter and LinkedIn as just retargeting and then you use Google and when I say Google, mean Google Bing and Performance Max campaigns.

These you use as demand generation. And then on the SEO side, you want to measure organic visitors, amount of time spent on your platform or website. And you want to look at people who are entering not through the homepage, but people who are entering through your SEO pages or blog pages, right? So the pages that are meant to attract you, attract the customers. And so that sort of becomes your top of the funnel, which is your website visitors and they could have come through

performance campaigns are organic, whatever the case may be. And then you want to continue to measure website visitor to signups. Typically for a small ticket size, website visitor to signup is 7 to 8 percent, if you are getting the right people onto your website. And then from signup to paid customers, right? So typically for a small tickets size, signup to paid customers is anywhere between 5 to 6 percent. So as an example, if I have 1000 people weekly visiting my website,

I should have about 80 people or 90 people signing up and out of those 80 or 90 people who are signing up, I should have 7 or 8 customer conversions who should buy on an average of whatever licenses that you typically expect your customers to buy. And then until that happens, you sort of want to start to optimize from the bottom of the funnel. So, you want to optimize, you want to start by optimizing your pricing, upgrade, downgrade

And then you want to start by optimizing your onboarding activation time to value. And then you want to optimize your sign up journey, like how do they sign up, and then website, and then your campaign. So you never start to optimize from top of the funnel. You fix the leaky part of the funnel first, and then you sort of work your way towards the top of your funnel. And please do not try to run.

like another advice is don't try to run multiple experiments at once. You will not know what worked and what didn't work. So, one experiment at a time, be very clear as to what the goal is and then figure out the outcome. Yeah. So, yes, in conversion, right, if you want to convert our free signups to the paid customer, right. So, in this, we can say in pricing, there are different strategies that like the we have, we can say one product have free trial.

for lifetime, right? Or some product have free plans, free plan for lifetime. Some have free trial of their pro plan, free trial of their pro plan for some X days, right? Or some of where they don't give any plan, you have to pay for to experience the pro features, right? So what do you think? In which way we can consider this is the best, not best, can say, how we have to go by one by

to decide which strategy, which plan is best for us. Great question. And so let me ask you a counter question. So the counter question is what car should I buy? There's no right answer to this, right? it depends on... Not right answer, but we can say that like the initial stage, can say I can buy some car which around $25 ,000,

then after if I earn something, then after I will buy $50 ,000. In this way I can operate. So what's the initiative, whether it is a free plan or pro plan with some this type. Correct. So I'll give you some variables and then there are approaches to think about it, but there's no right answer. So the way to go about it is like it's an experiment that you have designed to figure out whether it works or it doesn't work. So primarily,

the way to go about it is that you start with a... so you should never give anything free forever and then there are like really more experienced entrepreneurs than I who have free forever plans. HubSpot has a free forever plan, Clickup has a free forever plan, both of them are billion -dollar revenue organizations but in my limited experience what I've seen is that if you offer something for free people don't value that and so

visit you a couple of times and then they just move on to something else. The attention spans are significantly lesser. HubSpot and ClickUp can afford to do that because of the size and scale of their operations. the volume of the monthly traffic that they have, that's, I mean, we'd be lucky if we'd get that every year or whatever. So that's one factor that we should also consider. So don't give anything away for free. What you typically want to start

is a 14 day trial with pro features. If the conversion doesn't happen on the 13th day, you send out an email saying we've extended your trial by seven more days and then moving them to a lower plan, which you don't care about and then taking away those pro level features, locking away all the data that might have been generated on those pro level features. So basically, the idea is to give them the

of what it could be and then you take that away. So it is the experience of sort of driving, you going on for a test drive in a new car and then like taking the keys away that hey do you want this. So like a fairly similar exercise to that. That tends to work out best. Another thing from a pricing standpoint is instead

like thinking about pricing from the standpoint of the features, you typically want to think about pricing from standpoint of the use cases. So as an example, you want to have pricing for small. So an example is, and which is something that most SaaS companies follow, is that you want to have pricing for small business, medium businesses, enterprises. Or you want to have pricing for use cases where different levels of people are required.

So you have one pricing where only, so as an example, SEMrush is a great example. There is a pricing that if you are, if you are a brand yourself and if you are the SEO person, you go for the smaller plan. If you are a brand yourself, but do an SEO at a larger scale, you buy two, three people license, which is the second plan. And if I'm an agency, which does SEO for other people, then I have a very different use case. And then I go, so for that I go on some other plan itself.

So don't think of pricing as just bundling of features, think of pricing that works for a particular use case. So the conversation in the mind of the person who looking at the pricing should be okay, I am this type of business and so this plan works for you. So that's a good way to sort of go.

Adding to that, Yash, let's say as a continuation to the question that I was asking, is that how do you arrive at that number? It sound like a little amateur question, but the thing is for someone who's starting the business, how does one arrive at the pricing number of what price? Let's say the idea is to do an everyday task application that someone is trying to create.

How does someone arrive at, you know, we know that the individual plans are going to exist according to the user who is going to use it. But what number to arrive, I'm pretty sure, you know, someone would look at what the competitors are doing and analyze that. But how does one analyze their own competitor and even cross verify that is this the right number that I should go over or how does one do this? So, great question.

Like the simplest way to, so typically there are two, if you move outside of the SaaS world, there are two ways of arriving at pricing. One is cost based pricing, second is value based pricing. Broadly there are these two stuff. Cost based pricing is what it costs to you plus some margin. Value based pricing is how much value am I offering to you and I will take a smaller percentage of that. So, that is how stock brokers work on value based pricing.

That's how you buy your pen which is fairly similar to cost based pricing. So both of them however fail when it comes to SaaS because it's extremely difficult to figure out how much does it cost you to build a SaaS product because you could have hundred customers and you could have a thousand customers and between both of them the cost doesn't vary significantly. It is not proportionate. And then from a value based standpoint different types of customers will get different amounts of value.

from the product and so you do know which value to sort of benchmark. So both of these models fail and that is why pricing in SaaS has been one of the great questions that people still try to figure out. The best way that I have seen work is where people is where I would recommend you to look at your competitors price it 10 to 15 percent lower than that as your first price. So you want to

the first purchase decision as simple and easy as possible. So the competitor that you have, which is your direct competitor, and you may have like a, like you may be building a platform that's a combination of a couple of different tools and platforms. If that's the case, then you identify one competitor that's the closest to you, right? Or you look at the competitor that you are, most of the people have been moving away from and coming to you from that, right? So you price about 10 to 15 % lower than your competitor. And then what you try to

is you try to change your pricing every six months or a year and you increase the pricing by 15 to 20 percent every six months or a year unless your conversion rate takes a hit. As soon as your conversion rate takes a hit, you know that pricing is the objection. And so at this point of time, I should stop increasing my price and then you just increase the price at inflation level every two years.

So every two years you typically increase your price by anywhere between 6 to 9 percent and then that is pretty much it. Another thing that I also strongly recommend is that if you are building a SaaS product, so as a SaaS product typically in B2B you can basically help people save time, save money or help them make money. So if you are in the business of saving time, what you also want to do is you want to identify who is within your platform that helps them save

then bundle all of them as add -ons. And this is a great thing that you can use on both Hubsan as well as Pickup. And you will see that all the automation, which is designed to save the customer's time, are bundled on a larger tier. Similarly in Pickup, AI, which is designed to help you save time, lighting, or customizing, whatever the click. It's also bundled as a separate

And this is something that you will see almost in every SaaS company. Where if they are designed to help you save time, then they will more often than not bundle all of them. And so it also helps a SaaS company figure out how their customers thinks about their time and the fact that whether we are able to save their time genuinely or is it just like a value note added in the ERD diagram. And I think this is going as a great

conversation but we are at the 33 minute mark. Unless we have any concluding notes, I think we'll have to end the call, we have to go back to work. And Harsh, I would recommend you go to sleep, please. We've working about 6 o 'clock for this live. But I think this is a good chat. Thank you for the questions.

Thank you so much for the interesting insights. It's been a pleasure. Awesome. I think that you are already bored listening to all of these because this is not the first time that I shared this with all of you. But for all the people who tuned in, thank you for joining in. We will see you again next week on Wednesday, 6 a Harsh, you're still in the US next Wednesday, yes? Yes, right. So almost similar time. We will see you again next Wednesday. Thank you again for joining

Until next time. OK. Thank you. Bye.

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