Growth Plan for your SaaS

As a part of the Vmaker Funnelling Up series, I recently hosted Udit Goenka on a LinkedIn live session where we discussed possibly the hot topic one can discuss in the month of January - How to Grow your SaaS in 2022 - the steps to reach your first 100 paying customers.

Udit is a well-known name among the SaaS community. Having worked in multiple SaaS companies before, he founded Pitchground back in 2018 which is a platform to launch lifetime deals for SaaS products.

Udit has worked with thousands of brands over the last 3 years and has helped brands achieve millions in revenue over the same period.

So, it couldn’t get more exciting to hear from himself about the growth plans he would practice and preach in 2022.

Marketing Trends that change year on year

Marketing at its core does not carry the habit of changing year on year or set a trend. It is the technology that changes around it, which in turn sparks a bunch of new activities that can be carried out for better marketing returns.

2022 is going to be about AI tools. It is important to know your product, the solution you offer, and your audience. This is more important than anything else, even more, significant than your pricing.

Why Growth Marketing Models are preferred by Startups

There is the traditional marketing method that follows content and SEO. You invest every month and you continue the activity for months and it starts yielding a return.

The other side of marketing is where you focus on short period experiments and results. This is similar to swing trading in many ways - where you come in, find an opportunity, swing it.

Growth marketing should have a strong understanding of marketing trends, Data mapping, understanding the results, and ending the experiment when the results are saturated.

You need both types of marketing to help a company over the long run.

How to choose a Growth model that works for you

It is chosen based on the budget and the kind of resources you have in your team. From my experience, it is not advisable to have one person handle more than one channel at a time.

This is where a T-shaped skill set comes into play, someone who understands how another channel operates and focuses on one channel hands-on delivering results adjacent to the other channels.

We have seen companies try and fail in the quest to hit every channel and miss the same. Most second-time founders realize this mistake including me.

It might seem everything works great, but in the end, you will realize it is not the case. Build one channel, strengthen it and let it grow insane. Once it reaches its saturation point, start focusing on the news channel.

I would recommend the habit of choosing to start one new channel each quarter.

Key metrics that define growth in 0-1 stage

The metrics that define a company’s growth in the early stages can vary between companies based on their product, market, and vision.

If your company has an enterprise solution focusing only on high ticket clients then the number of customers on your list doesn’t have to be in the 100s. Rather you can hit your yearly goals with just 10 to 20 customers.

Understand what you are doing, why you are doing the same, and take a call on the KPIs based on your resource, product, and user criteria.

Founders Brand on Company’s growth

I was obsessed with the company’s brand and it was everything for me in the initial days. But off late I discovered that whenever I spoke about my learning and experience people could relate to it and that in turn reflected on my company brand as well.

This was one of the reasons why I started focusing more on my brand and it helped me build business and connections via the same.

How to Plan-Growth Activities in the long term

Growth activities have to evolve regularly and this demands a person who can be highly creative.

Saying that not every activity is short-lived. Some of them even in the growth phase take their time for execution. A good example is the YouTuber outreach we have been doing and it might take us another year to complete the experiment.

Meanwhile, we are also measuring the success of the same and are open to pivoting to other activities if this hits a lull.

Someone from the team who has a solid understanding of the product, your user, and marketing is the right person to paint vividly creative ideas to carry out new growth experiments.

Growth Plan for 2022

I have personally made a lot of mistakes in my previous stints and they have taught me a lot. A few learning I can share here are

• Hire Slow
• Build slow
• Build your community
• Focus on Product-Market fit
• Find a Beta test group and validate
• Automate things wherever possible but have a 20% manual approach
• Build relationships
• Pre-market your idea (even before building your product)

I did a few of these for my upcoming new launch in 2022 and right now these activities have given us 1000s of early subscribers and we don’t even have a website at this time.

Rounding off,

Like any other Vmaker Series content, this conversation was filled with key takeaways. I tried my best to highlight some of the points from our discussion.

I highly recommend you to watch the full video to get the full serving.

If you think I have missed some key pointers, do let me know and if you have a person I should be hosting next let me know here.