And we should be live. Let's see whether we are. We just wait a couple of seconds for a few people to... we have our first, first we were... lots of people today. Awesome. So we're live. Perfect. We know that we're live on LinkedIn as well as YouTube. And let's start. Hello and welcome to Momentum Office Arts. My name is Yash and I'm joined by my co-founder.
Jai and Koushik to discuss topic of the week, launching a SaaS product from scratch. Our goal with these sessions 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 engage with us by asking questions and sharing your thoughts. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from each other and give you insights that can help drive your SaaS initiatives forward. Let's get started. Jai, Koushik, what's up? How are we doing today?
Preparing calls. Just kidding. Ready for calls. And this is also a call, if you think about it. Yeah. It does feel like a call. And there's no dearth of it. And so today, are going to be talking about launching a SaaS from scratch, which is where we want to understand from Jai a little bit as to if I have a SaaS product, or if I've just made a
you know, very, very early version of a SaaS product. How do I actually go ahead and make it available in the market in a way that it is meaningful, helps me drive the most amount of ROI? So that's primarily what we try and understand, So let's get started. I have built an MVP. It's taken me six months. I thought it would have been ready in the first three months.
But for whatever reason, it always takes longer than expected. so it did this thing as well. But six months and MVP I have, how do I launch my product in the market? How do I sort of go about it? Right. So, you know, before answering that, Yash, I would like to tell about, since you already mentioned that it always gets longer, right? So I would like to add one point. So there are multiple ways to launch it. A typical way to launch
basically, or the steps to launch is that you initially have an idea, you go into, you just first initially have market validation, try to have some research and ask your friends and family. And then you try to build an MVP, but then it's just an initial version of product. Saying it as an MVP again in itself is confusing to lot of people because the definition of MVP is different for people, right? So even as a founder,
You may think that this is an MVB, but then when you launch it, you get a lot of feedback. And then again, you define and try to reiterate. So talking about the ways to launch it, the first way could be where an idea is that you are doing a market validation in form of research and you are coding it. Then you are bringing it to certain set of users. And then again, you are again trying to build some feature so that based on the feedback that you received, and then you try to actually launch it.
Then your thought process that, I have done most of my part in coding and now I'm only going to do a complete launch where I'm going to hire more people in my growth and marketing. I'll put all my efforts. I'll do a product launch, maybe AppSumo launch or any other platforms where you're going to get a great boost. then typically we think that once a launch and then it's going to get to a great skyrocket. But this as good as it seems that, your focus is going to be on tech.
of research for the index and then on growth side. But this doesn't work that well, right? Even if you are going for a launch, if you are going to launch it, you might initially see that certain market pieces are going to give you a good amount of exposure. But then it's just kind of a spike. And then again, it comes back to where it was or even I mean, it doesn't grow well, because there are certain set of communities who are just ready to try the new products, give that feedback, not ready to pay even more to that and
That's it. In this process, what happens to answer your question, what happens is founder always feels like, hey, this set of users are telling me that I need to build this particular feature so that I'll be able to do it even better. What happens is you have invested a lot in that particular launch. All your marketing and initial growth efforts are aligned into that after building a product. But now, again, because you are receiving this feedback, you keep on trying to, know,
thinking that, let me build one more feature and then give an actual launch because the initial set of users are constantly telling you about the new features. So that is where the challenge comes in. So that is just the linear way. will always lead one to in most of the cases, it will always lead them to, know, typically having one get into one more feature trap. So that is one thing.
The second thing or the second way where you know a launch could happen could be a multi-layered way or you can say a multi-threaded model where you are not literally just building the product from at first but you are also developing the community around it. lot of founders will listen to say that you know have a community first and then build it or certain people say that no just build an MVP first and then take it to the market and then keep on iterating but then ultimately
What it tries to tell us is that there needs to be two different lines which should run in parallel. The first is around building the product, and then the second would be around building the community and all the growth efforts that we have. What it essentially, there are further steps which I would like to clarify in other questions, but typically both needs to run in parallel. And at whatever stage we are, it's all about doing micro launches and re-iterating this process so that
we get even better in this. yeah. Interesting. think this is a mistake that we also made previously at ClientJoy, where everyone on the team was building the product. And so even the sales guys and the people that we had in our marketing team, well as the first engineers and the UI UX designers and the product managers and the CTO and the co-founders, everyone was
so focused on the product and building the product and we were testing it out and so on and so forth until the first version of the product went out in the market and we realized that we were perfecting something that nobody actually cares about because we'd not built a base, we put the product like we click the button, the big red sort of, you know, go live button and then nothing happened. No one came and signed up. We shared on our social media and stuff like that.
Some few people who were good friends or good colleagues or good connections came in and signed up out of pity. Some people signed up out of sympathy to check out what we've been building. But yeah, so we didn't really have good GTN strategy. And I think that sort of set us back by six months while we were building MVP. Because had we been building our go-to market while we were building the product as well, then that could have accelerated everything.
everything that happened in the journey of ClientJoy by six months at least. So, Koushik, are your thoughts? sorry Jay, you were saying something? Yeah, I want to add to that, like a lot of good companies who come up with really good ideas just because of them wanting to launch in a linear model that you know, they want to have a massive launch that you know, they think that okay, after this launch, my life will get sorted. They make the same mistakes time and again and as you mentioned about the six months increment in overall timeline of the big launch that
we were planning. What happens is lot of funds get utilized in just building the product which founders themselves are not actually sure whether they will be able to provide actual value to their main users or not. yeah, that's the problem. For sure. I was going to add saying that I think there is this thing, right? Like you should start selling before you build. So the idea. What happens in the process is that you would interact
more about what you want to build. You will try to identify the cohort of users that you wanted in, and you would have more discussions with them. And that would give you more information about what is the right demo that you need for your MVP version, and where to stop literally and go ahead. As a continuation to what I just said, a question is that what go-to strategies would you recommend to gain?
better traction in the early stages that is with respect to how do I go about getting my first hundred users or even first ten paid users so how do I go about that? And before you answer that question Jaya, I think Koushik is going to agree with all the recommendations that you give in the live stream primarily because every person that you motivate to do marketing and sales while the product is being built is every less person
who will give people like Koushik feedback on their designs. So the less people Kaoushik will have to deal with, because he'll be busy building the GTM challenge. But go ahead, Chhanyak, you're saying. So Koushik, to answer your question on how to get your first 100 customers, let me take you through a complete journey, which one of the great SaaS influencers, would say, and who is also a SaaS founder called, his name is?
Simon Hoburg who owns three SaaS companies and he's running them all bootstrap, right? So he has cracked his own code and he has shared it as well. I would like to just share a few things as well as from other learnings that I have with you. So the first step which one should do, let's say there is nothing out there. Let's say you want to launch a SaaS product, but let's say I'm taking away all your LinkedIn followers, all your community.
your access from each and everything that you have built so far right now. And if you want to start your SaaS product, so what should be the steps? These whole steps I'll take you through will also include on how to get your first 100 customers. So the first step would be for you to find out that what's a problem found of it. So whether you yourself are actually able to step inside the shoes of the, you know.
people that you are trying to help with. It's all about problem and the solution that you are planning to give. So first of all, it should be whether are you yourself an ICP or not? Or have you been through that journey or not? Because the more you rely, the more your chances of your being an ICP, you will be able to understand the actual pain and you, it will also give you the actual passion to solve it and the more clarity and you won't be naive with respect to any, you know, feedback that you receive from the users. You will be able to actually be.
be able to feel that. So that is one. So one would be you can just note down it as you know, are you eating the dog food or not? So eating your own dog food is something which should be there. The second would be about the passion. How much passionate you are about solving the problem. Most of people don't know So I'm not going to stretch this point. the only reason why you need to be passionate is about because the whole journey is too much tedious, lots of ups and downs. And in that case, you need to be passionate enough to, you know, continue the journey because
you never know when that actual spike will come through. So that is the second point. The third thing would be more about just so let's say when first two things are done, the third thing you might want to think on is what is the unfair advantage that you have. So if you are actually looking to build a SaaS product just even as a hobby, I would recommend these things. Take pen and paper. Just think on what problems you actually have faced and you would like to build a solution upon.
from that just try to remove the ones which you are not much passionate about. So only select from them further select only the ones you're passionate about and then maybe after that think on what you know unfair advantage you might have. So all of us have somewhat or other advantages over certain things. It doesn't necessarily need to be a skill. It could be a contact as well. So you know someone who also knows someone and then maybe you can utilize that. you know filter your ideas based on that and the final idea that you get.
Now the next step is most critical and very interesting that is you just need to go into public forums, social media where people having similar challenges to that particular area are just sharing out their problems. So it could be the social media posts, could be Quora, could be LinkedIn or it could be any other forums as well. So what you'll do from there is you'll just keep on listening to what they are stating and try to answer based on your understanding.
You may need to research it and then answer them, which is okay. But you might want to just answer them. What happens is once you start doing this process, it typically allows you to get into some amount of thought leadership where you also would think like, hey, let me just, you know, put a blog into this particular area and let me just try to answer that. Same way, might want to want to do an Instagram carousel or LinkedIn, wherever your target group is, you might want to try and use that particular piece of content in different channels. It could be a
If you like to make videos, you might want to do YouTube, then make shorts out of it. And same goes with LinkedIn. Or if you just want to just write it down, then do it on LinkedIn, Koran, again, the same channel. So try to do it in multiple channels. That's my point. Once you do this for a certain amount of days, weeks or months, you will be able to have an idea on which channel you are getting the more traction. You still haven't built your product, right? You are just doing the thought leadership.
And this actually aligns with the multi-layered part that we discussed earlier. So what you are doing over here is all about just trying to speak with users, trying to find solution for them. And while doing this process, you're also educating yourself with set of challenges they are actually facing. What happens after a certain point of time is you get an actual advantage on the actual challenges which potential users might be feeling. Now you have your actual idea.
that comes up that you know, hey, these are the challenges. This gives you a fair idea on what you need to build. From this standpoint, you will already have an advantage compared to the ones who are doing the linear model where they are going to have validation after building a product. You are at your zero day of building a product and you already have lots of challenges known by you and now you be able to build it even better. So yeah, that's how you do it. Now, when you do this, what happens is since you already have
made your followers over LinkedIn or any other social media. Once you're building this to get your initial hundred customers or rather I would say more than that, you could literally offer them an early product or just say that, I'm going to build this. I just want to raise money for this. I'll give you a lifetime access for first hundred users and something like that. That can in itself give you an initial revenue that you could utilize in building your product.
This is just one of the ideas which you could implement, this can also be one of the ways. And I am not telling about doing lifetime deals. It's just about you getting paid for your product before even the launch is there, because you are a thought leader, and people would believe in what you are doing. And then there are other ways to expand this further. But yeah, that's how you can do it.
Got it, yeah. Interesting. So here's a good question, right? So this works out well for SaaS products that are inbound and have largely small customers, like small scale customers, which is where your ticket size is probably $5 to $200 a month per seat or something to that effect. But if I'm building something that is for enterprises,
that requires a certain amount of product maturity before anyone can use it, essentially. Is there a difference between doing GTM for these two, depending on what I'm building? Yeah, definitely. as you pointed it out, this is completely more for low-ticket, inbound SaaS products. But when you talk about building solutions for enterprise, typically, it should be
with respect to first, so you would want to build an enterprise solution maybe because you already have an idea that these are the challenges being faced, right? So the people who have given you the challenges, maybe you have been into that journey for a decade or so, or you know someone who has been into that journey and they are sharing you the thoughts. what person might want to do initially before even starting the product launches? First, understand what are the nuances of actual business challenges that they are facing and
Along with that, have more people on boarded as board of advisors from similar domain. That would give them two main things. One is the actual insights on how the product needs to be built upon. And the second thing would be the network which they would have. So this would also allow them to have initial, that could be one of the enterprise companies that would be ready for investing in the solution. And then they could take it forward from there.
So Jay, with respect to that, let's say now the fact that I got my set of users, then comes the issue of with respect to metrics. What essential metrics do I go about? We have discussed this quite a lot previously. But if you have to tell me a quick few metrics that one needs to focus on at a very early stage once they got that initial traction. that would be really helpful. Yeah, sure.
See, typically, again, to address about low ticket and bounds as the initial metrics that you might want to track is first about how many. So let's say you have built an MVP version of it. You also have your website ready and you have your MVP ready. If your goal currently is to make sure that you have maximum set of users. So before the launch, you might want to have maximum users use your product so that you get the right feedback and you are, know.
trying to solve the problem and coming to a right solution. But along with that, you're also getting more feedback to get it better. So initially, it's all about how many people are adapting to the product. And then the second step would be how many acquisition is happening. So to talk about the whole journey that the main metrics and the whole journey that needs to be there, first would be how many people are landing to your website.
Once you have that idea, number of unique website visitors, from there you might want to take another important metric would be how many of them are converting into trial users, that is from website visitors to sign up. And from sign up, you might want to understand on how many of them are actually using the product and not dropping from there. So it will be all about activation numbers and the people who are activated from how many from them they are actually getting into paid customers.
These are the key metrics. I mean, there lot of metrics to track upon. But at initial level, these are the main metrics that you want to have an idea upon. And once you have set it as per industry benchmarks, there are obviously different industry benchmarks based on different categories of sales products. But still, you can have an idea on that. And once you have that figured out, you might want to grow your product and your growth engine accordingly from there.
One of the answers that you give earlier in this session, you mentioned a few platforms. However, think there's merit in sort of just creating a list. We'll add that and append that under the description or the comment on whether whoever is watching this on LinkedIn and YouTube. But if you could name a couple of platforms and at what stage should we list or launch onto those platforms? I think that will be
that will be helpful if I'm building the product for the first time. So, see, one of the main platforms that mostly says companies use is AppSumo for sure. The goal that I was trying to say is that do not consider any of the launch in these marketplaces or the platforms as the main launch, rather consider having micro launches. So for instance,
AppSumo, initially once they have an MVP version ready and they just want to validate more with respect to whether the users are actually getting value from it and whether they ready to pay even more from there. They might want to go into AppSumo, launch into AppSumo. It gives them great traction. Many founders also do it for just increasing their runway because
They know that giving a launch will give me certain amount of revenue and a good amount of feedback to build it even better. But they don't consider AppSumo as their GTM. They just do it for getting the initial revenue so that they can have more time in building the right product. And so they can also get the right set of feedback because it's a great it's actually a community rather than a marketplace where a lot of people are always keen on trying new products and they give good amount of
time and effort. They will not give you a good amount of money, but they are always ready to give you good amount of time and give you great value with respect to what you could build and how their journey has been inside using your product. that is one. The Productant Launch is the second one. since you're not, mean, main launch, there's nothing like main launch. It's multiple launches and that's how one should ideally do it.
They can have multiple versions launched on Product Hunt along with that. What we did even with client, right? That we are also launching our there. So once a product is at a little mature stage, what what other thing comes into picture is multiple channels through which, you know, users will be acquired. One of these would be lead magnets. So you can just build a great lead magnet and you can launch the same on Product Hunt as well, not just the main product.
How it helps you is again, keeping getting up the hype and getting more people and more users coming through that particular lead magnet and from that lead magnet ultimately it will come to your product. these are the ways that can be utilized. Yeah.
I think one point that you mentioned previously was about taking more inputs feedback from the community as well as building a community while you're building it, which reminds me to this point where we are seeing a lot of people trying to build it public, where they're trying to build the product in the community itself and trying to, you know, in the process. So they're not
They're not telling it, they're building it within the community and the community is like seeing how it's getting built day by day on a regular interval period. So what do think about this? Yeah, I mean, it's a great idea to do build in public, especially if you are following a process where you are being a thought leader first, trying to build a community out of it and then eventually build a product once you have good amount of idea about what actual challenges people are facing.
Having that will give great advantage. Now you are going to build a product, but then again, you're building it in public. What does that mean is you are sharing each and every metrics that you do, what your product is doing upon and what challenges you are facing. And you are openly telling that, hey, I am facing this challenge. Maybe I need validation amongst these. These many people react to this particular post with these many. Or let's say you just run a poll upon that.
It's a great way to get feedback early upon before, you know, actually building a feature and then failing on that. So, building public has its own great advantages. One might wonder whether building public would also allow other people to build, you know, similar competitor product and, you know, take an advantage. But one needs to understand that if you actually have been into content creation in any aspect, right, whatever it does work. But if you actually have been into creating content on how
solution can come to that particular problem. You already are having great advantage. The other people might be following you and just copying your product, but then ultimately they will eventually need you at certain point to take that product ahead because they don't have the whole picture of the problem solution part. So it's actually a great idea to move ahead. And before we move to next question, one more small point is
Many times what many founders do is they just try to put content on product side of things that how their product is going to actually help it. But even before building the product when you are doing content creation do not talk about a product that will actually solve these things but rather talk about the solution part of it. So maybe you might want to build a mailing list set of you know people who
could be interested in getting solution to a particular problem that they are facing. And then just try to have built a newsletter around them or try to just keep in contact with them, create a Facebook community or LinkedIn group or anything as such and or Slack community, for instance. And then just have a conversation with them, try to understand what they are doing. When you're only talking about solution and not a product itself, people are keen to listen to you because
they know that you are just someone who is an expert in trying to help. From there, if you start your product building journey, and especially building public product journey, that would be a great thing to move ahead with. And so this has been great in terms of understanding what do you do pre-launch. Build a community, build a following, become a thought leader, be present where your customers are. Talk to us through.
What are the first 100 days once the product is up and running? So once the self-serve sign up is on, once all of those things are on, talk to us through what are the first 100 days that look like once it actually starts happening, once you see some people coming in. What are the priorities that you would have at that point? It will be like pulling two levers, right? Once everything is up and running, it will be more about
you'll be taking their feedback, trying to understand how their experiences and just see if they are needing anything else and then, you know, something, ship that code and again, close more deals. So shipping the code and closing the deals will be the two levers you'll be pulling upon time and again, but it's very different than what we discussed earlier, right? So these things will run in parallel. So first 100 days would be about, again,
on weekly tracking of metrics so that they're falling in the right place. If something is offset, the focus for the next month could go into solving that particular area. mean, month is subjective. It could be more time as well, but the focus would be that. based on that, things will proceed ahead. So that would be the main goal for founder on making sure that everything is well-balanced. But this would include tracking the metrics, fixing wherever the gap is, maybe customer acquisition or maybe conversion site.
Initial days may not be related to retention which would mostly focus upon acquisition side and conversion side. But yes, these were the main things and obviously building up the roadmap so that once you are trying to acquire certain set of users now what should be the next step to have you know build make it even wider. So that's where the goal would
Awesome. I think that brings us to the end of the conversation today. It's been interesting. Any comments from you, Koushik? Nothing. Jay, you think is there any question that we were supposed, I mean, you think we missed out on? I guess this was a good conversation. We just wanted to share certain points because
We listened to a of, I mean, we talked to a lot of founders and we see similar challenges coming up, right? When we track their Google analytics, we try to understand that there is a spike and then again, it got down and comes to nothing again. When we try to see the reason behind it, it's again a launch at a marketplace where they thought that it's an MVP version and they launched it and thinking that this was a great start and all that. They have similar challenges with respect to burning a lot of money and building the product.
and not launching it. And all of these problems have kept on coming since last one and a half years. So wanted to address these points on building communities through podcasts or any other content that works well. And obviously, if you don't know which works well for you, we have an SOP setup where we help you in just one month on identifying what would be your right ICP, what should be the right channels you want to move ahead with. And we also help you in executing.
case you don't have your own group team. yep. This is so good to see both founders. Now we have two founders who are plugging in a call to action to reach out to momentum. that's great, right? So nothing better than that. But I hope this conversation has been of value for all of you. I will again take a few seconds and ask you to
subscribe or follow wherever you are whether it is LinkedIn or YouTube. Do consider subscribing. You will not regret it unless you're allergic to value. if you're allergic to value, don't subscribe. Please don't hit subscribe button. Please don't comment or follow. It will start appearing on your feed. But if you love to get some value once every week, we...
get together every Thursday to talk about something that will help move your digital initiatives forward. It's been a pleasure having this conversation. This is Jay, Yash, and Koushik. We'll see you again next week. Until next time, bye-bye. Bye. Thank you.
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