Bootstrapper's Paradise

I share my preferred cost-effective tools for capturing early feedback for your B2B SaaS then what you should do with the feedback and when.

Launch your own profitable B2B SaaS for less than $750 - https://nxtstep.io/b2bsaas

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is want to start doing with the feedback once you start getting it. Now that usage is ramping for your B2B SaaS. So I've incorporated a couple different ways to capture feedback, and if you haven't done this yet, but you haven't active SaaS application with users actively engaging with it, you need to add a few.

That way you can start getting feedback asynchronously from their usage, good, bad, and otherwise, which will inform what you might do with the product next. Two tools that I have incorporated, both of which have been helpful and are relatively low cost or no cost, depending on how much you use them, is Hot Jar and talk Talk as in T A W K talk is a chat tool, so that'll enable folks to engage with any of your support or send you notifications if support is unavailable.

That tool is free and also has a mobile component so you can get notifications, your phone if you're out and about, which is also convenient. And then Hot Jar is an analytics tool which incorporates a bunch of different pieces of feedback, which I all find very helpful. It has screen recordings. It has heat maps.

It also has the ability to capture survey responses as well also. So I've configured both of those for my podcasting tool, and I'm starting to get feedback, starting to get good feedback. Something I've been getting more recently is related to how the tool works and what users might like to see, instead of how it works by default at the moment.

So they're looking for some advanced options. Now, one of the things that I'll caution you with here is, As you're starting to collect feedback, don't necessarily feel the need to incorporate every little feature exactly how it's requested from everyone that's submitted feedback. Instead, I would recommend engaging with them if they've given you the permission to do so, to get a little bit more clarity in how whatever they're requesting, essentially they would like it to work best, and that's number one.

The second important element here is to. Make sure that you are building around the patterns of what's being requested, as in one user may want to take the product in the left direction, and another user may wanna take the product in the right direction. Your objective is to try to find that middle ground between all of the feedback that you're getting, which gives everyone progress, as in it might not be specifically exactly what everyone individually asked for, but.

If you try to build specifically in one direction for one user, you might build the product away from the direction of what some of the other users are requesting. So you want to make sure that you avoid that. Anything that you're adding to your product experience, you want to try to do so, so that the maximum number of your users get additional value out of it.

That's a good way to build a, as I call it, a data-driven product roadmap for the future direction in which you wanna drive your product.

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This episode, Co-Founders of Latte Michael Martin and Timothy Wu talk about their video production software that combines AI and social media, how they grew the Latte platform so quickly, and the future of video editing technology.

Michael Martin built the world's largest student media platform with 10 million subscribers, 4 billion annual video views, and 3 million monthly web visitors. During this time he developed an understanding of community building, marketing, and how consumers think and behave.

Timothy Wu is an ex-cryptocurrency trader, lawyer, and self-taught programmer, with experience working across multiple domains and cognitive modalities.

Timothy and Michael are the Co-Founders of Latte, an online platform that makes short-form video editing effortless with AI. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

• Combing social media and AI.
• Creating an automatic highlight extraction engine for video content.
• How to choose a product's name.
• How ChatGPT affected other AI companies.
• Why startups need to be able to adapt quickly.
• Ways to promote a product pre-launch.
• How to grow a platform.
• The importance of building the right type of customer base.
• The future of video editing technology.

Resources:

• Social Chain
• Latte
• NxtStep
• Podcast Chef

Connecting with Michael Martin:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with Timothy Wu:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
• Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables:

• 11:28 - “The best way to promote podcasts possibly one of them there is to create these short engaging snippets to post on multiple social media accounts so that’s where this current version of Latte came from but we’ve since realized there’s a lot of problem with video itself and there is a lot more to be solved.”
• 19:27 - “They’re not going to post one video, they’re not going to use Latte post one video and then suddenly they’re viral on social they have to do it consistently over a period of weeks and months and years and this is something that’s quite hard for most creators, for the majority of creators who are just doing it for fun and just doing it for a hobby they’re just doing it for a passion and don’t want to turn it into a job and by subscribing to software that they have to pay for it becomes not aligned for why they’re doing it.”
• 21:43 - “The problem we’re solving was personal branding on Twitter and Linkedin and so we thought the best way to market this product was by embodying the product and so every single post we did we created with Latte itself and so we stuck to this and we made hashtag made with Latte and we teased the product before it was launched we started to hint towards things and then when it was out we were posting about it we were creating posts about Latte that were made with Latte.”
• 24:01 - “So creating several videos on TikTok one of them gained thirty thousand views in the space of a week and then this resulted in a spike of seven hundred users in a week which is very exciting but it led to a lot of problems people found out about the product who didn’t have the best intentions and they started essentially manipulating the product they found some vulnerability in our system and basically they were getting unlimited videos for free so we had to act quickly on that we had a very large power bill the following week.”
• 25:12 - “What we’ve realized from our previous founder experience and what’s the proper way to build a company is don’t kid yourself focus on the key metric which is revenue and are people going to pay for it now.”
• 28:07 - “A special property of early stage tech startups is that you’re always rehoning your focus at every step of the way you always receive new information from different stakeholders different parties different customer bases and you just have to try and make the best decision you can in light of imperfect information.”

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Paid ads are great for validating your B2B SaaS value proposition, but the exercise may be expensive if the PPC (pay per click) budget to compete in your industry is expensive.  Let's talk an alternative growth strategy that also works really well and will cost you a lot less.

Free email course on how to launch a profitable B2B SaaS for less than $750 - https://nxtstep.io/b2bsaas

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today, one I want to talk to you about are growth strategies for your B2B SaaS that goes beyond paid advertising. Now, I talk a lot about Google search ads, and I like it for various reasons. Number one, it's quick and easy to determine its cost effectiveness and enables you to relatively easily figure out whether or not your value proposition has strength.

Now, having said that, it may not always be cost effective given. The particular industry or product that you're building. This is why I'm such an advocate for doing that research up front before you build, before you decide where you want to build. As I mentioned in a previous episode, I'm now building a new B2B SaaS or working on one that is very competitive.

The industry that it's in, people are just throwing money at. Ads in order to kind of get traffic in that way. As such, if I went to try to compete with them, they would easily crush me or more realistically kind of just drown me out. So I'm not gonna go head to head there. But what may make more sense are a few other options, and this is where it really is important for you to dive deep into who your customer is, who the buyer is.

Understanding those personas, really understanding their industry, the problems that they experience, how they go about solving them. Because it starts to help you understand how they think, where they go, what they do. And depending on the questions that you may ask them, you can learn even more about that as well.

You can figure out other ways to connect with them as an audience, because at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is get your product in front of them to see whether or not they have value for it. So other options here, if paid advertising isn't where you want to begin. It could include any number of options.

The other two primary ones that I leverage is call email. Still that can work if you do it really well. And SEL search engine optimization. I typically think of SEO as basically the organic version of the paid ads. So in the beginning, your domain doesn't have authority, so you're investing in paid advertisement to try to get.

The right eyeballs on your landing page to see how well it's converting. Now, if the budget there makes sense, Aspen, assuming you wanna spend relatively conservatively, then that as an option will work. However, if it doesn't, something like an investment in SEO will ultimately provide you with essentially free organic traffic if you're able to climb those search rankings.

But getting there isn't free and it can take a while. So it's a kind of a different approach. If you've ever heard the kind of hunting versus farming analogy, I would apply kind of the hunting analogy or the hunting version to the ads option and the farming one to seo. But doing them both, uh, can be really powerful.

Doing either out of the gate can work, it's just they're not necessarily gonna have the same level of effectiveness. One's got a longer tail, and that would be the SEO option. And this is where cold email comes in, because I think this is another good, relatively quick. But, uh, can be a cost effective way to determine whether or not the product that you're working on has, is ultimately gonna be cost effective.

You can leverage a number of different platforms to work up. A sequence of messaging that can be more personalized than most people send. That is a really critical factor in the success of leveraging this as a tactic, because most people are sending largely generic messages, but the more customized yours are, the more specifically are to the needs of your target market, the better you're gonna be able to do in terms of performance, and then ultimately measuring the strength of your value proposition, and you'll likely be able to do that.

Much more cost effectively. That's more than likely what I'm gonna do In this case, I'm gonna leverage one or both of those other strategies for now so that I can get the information that I need without having to burn through a crazy budget in order to try to make ads work. Because the PPC for the industry that I'm targeting now, it's just astronomical.

It's like really expensive. So anyway, I wanted to share with you other growth strategies beyond paid advertising because there's plenty.

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If you've been following along, you know I've been building B2B SaaS tools for podcasting agencies.  I'm now researching other industries which just so happens to include legal.  Based on my research, there is a BIG difference in the keyword research data comparing those two industries.  Let's talk about why this is such important information for you to know BEFORE you consider building.

Launch your own B2B SaaS for less than $750 - https://nxtstep.io/b2bsaas

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is why something like keyword research before you go too deep or at least down the path of potentially building your B2B SaaS is so important. Now, we all need a channel in order to determine whether or not we can drive traffic to our landing pages.

We can convert prospects into paying customers. That's critically important for us to be able to grow successfully our B2B SaaS product and business. Now, one of the ways that I've been leaning into pretty aggressively is keyword research and Google search ads. I've been able to use that to validate whether or not the B2B SaaS concepts that I'm considering pursuing have strong enough value propositions to succeed at scale, and it's worked very well thus far.

Now, the reason why I'm mentioning that the keyword research before you go too far down that road for whatever problem you may wanna solve with the SaaS product. Is so important cuz if that's gonna be one of your primary channels, that's gonna be a really effective way for you to determine how cost effectively you can perform.

Essentially that test, as in how cost effectively does that channel perform, the ability to convert prospects into paying customers and et cetera. Now, the reason why I mentioned this is I'm evaluating bringing another B2B SaaS product to market, and this one would be for the legal industry at the moment.

Now, one huge difference between what I've been working on, which is podcasting tools versus potentially solving a problem in the legal industry is the keyword research, the PPC range for what you might pay for your traffic based on key phrases and words. It's significantly higher for the legal industry than it is for someone who has interest in podcasting.

I'm talking about an a magnitude of a hundred x as in, you know, it might be a couple of dollars per click for something related to podcasting, but it may be over a hundred dollars, sometimes up to $200 per click in the legal industry, which is a pretty dramatic change. So now, whereas the tools in the legal industry oftentimes are more expensive, You know, depending on where you're getting started, if you're trying to validate a concept using Google search ads and expecting to leverage advertisement, at least Google search advertisement, in order to be able to do that, you're gonna have to have a ridiculous amount of budget available in order to generate that traffic.

So that's another reason why I say it's so important to perform this research upfront because it really starts to get. Take shape, uh, at least in terms of what the financial perspective might look like in terms of you trying to build a business that specifically solves whatever problem you're considering.

So perform it either way, whether or not you're planning on using it, because it's good insight into what your economics ultimately might be in order to be able to compete in that industry.

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Once your product is live, you are likely to hear more about other products on the market that are competitive to yours.  Let's talk about when and how to track what they are doing as well that can help you succeed.

Free email course on how to launch a profitable B2B SaaS for less than $750 - https://nxtstep.io/b2bsaas

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how to keep track of the market, in particular, the competitive options that your customers may also be interested in, similar to what it is that you're doing with your B2B SaaS. Now I'm talking about competition, obviously, but. From the perspective of where you should be when you're thinking about this.

My recommendation would be after you've launched your product, after you know you can turn cost, you can turn prospects into paying customers, you know that they're getting value outta the product, you're seeing some consistent usage. Those are all good metrics to make sure that you get past first. Once you've done that, then you're gonna wanna also know more about what the rest of the market looks like.

Because it's not just where you start, it's also where your product may go. How do you make sure that you continue to make it better? Now, you can do that by engaging with your customer base, and that's always primary because they will tell you what they need next or what else could stand to provide them with more value.

And you should be looking for ways to gather that information as frequently as you can via chat or. Email communication or whatever, right? Provide your customers with the ability to provide you with feedback. At the moment, I'm using Hot Jar to collect survey data on different pages throughout the experience.

That is my B2B SaaS application for podcasting. Now, the other element is what else is going on in the market? You need to track that as well. That's the threat of new in the Porter's five Forces model. So if you're keeping track of this as well, And you're just Googling random stuff that might be related to what your prospects and potential customers may also be looking for.

You're going to probably learn more about other options on the market, other products, and there's a lot that can be learned from doing a little bit of homework here as well too. Now, I don't want you to obsess, and I also don't want you to freak out. If it looks like someone else is doing something similar to what you're doing, I found probably a half dozen of these already that started right around the same time I did with my podcast show notes tool.

Now, that is largely a good thing, right? Competition helps us educate the market. It also indicates that there is a market, so all of those are positive signs. Now, When you're doing this homework, I want you to learn a little bit more about a couple of things, right? Who are they selling to? How are they positioning what their product is and what it can do?

What can their product do? What are they priced at? What is the experience like to gain access to the product? And if they've got a free trial, even if it's paid, you may want to take a spin. Take it for a spin yourself to see what you can't learn about how their product experience works, right? There's so much to be learned about this from the perspective of.

Where your product fits into the market, right? And how you may position yourself. Cuz we're always looking for unique angles and areas of opportunity to improve all of those categories that I just mentioned. So do this homework as well. Also see what kind of buzz is being created in different circles, but don't, again, obsess over this.

This isn't something to spend every day on. This is more like a. Every couple weeks things. This might be a once a month thing, once a quarter thing where you dive deep and see like what's going on in the greater landscape. But when someone mentions a name to you, especially as you're circulating the B2B SaaS product, you're building and growing.

And it's somewhat related to what it is you're doing. Someone may be aware of another tool. Keep track of that so that you can keep track of them a little bit over time as well too. And there's other automations that you can set up, like Google alerts if you wanna learn a little bit more, or if their name pops into the news and that can send you email inbox kind of notifications when they potentially change something or launch something new or whatever.

But either way, there's a ton to be learned from here as well too, right? Where are they and what direction are they heading? That can help you define essentially where you want to go as well too.

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When interviewing potential future customers, it's easy for them to get sucked into all kinds of magical capabilities of tools like AI.  It's your job to avoid chasing dreams and instead to stay focused on the top problem worth solving.

Free B2B SaaS Launch Course - https://nxtstep.io/b2b-saas-course/

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is not chasing the supposed magic that AI is, or at least that everyone still thinks that AI is. Now, I'm doing interviews at the moment, still performing a lot of discovery and research to look for new opportunities to build B2B SaaS applications around with my new favorite tool, that being artificial intelligence, at least the tools made available and widely available these days from companies like Open ai.

Now more than ever, we're able to build stuff that is ridiculously capable and very, very quickly. So that presents a lot of opportunity. As such, you may be as excited as I am to just divide and conquer and find all the problems you can and ship as many toll as possible. Now, that sounds great and exciting.

One of the challenges with that is still everyone's perception of what AI is. Now, if you were. Excited about pursuing strategies like that. I don't want to discourage you. What I want to do is I wanna encourage you and in the right way, I want you to, while you're performing your discovery, make sure that you're not falling into the trap of chasing the dream in terms of who you're interviewing.

It's like where you're performing that discovery. Now I'm looking at a number of different industries, and with some of the interviews that I've done just yesterday as I was conducting the interview, I was learning about the problems worth solving and. I had uncovered one and a solid one at that. So largely the interview was complete from my perspective, as in I got what I needed.

I know that there's a painful problem. That's a great option that can be solved by an AI tool that I could build a SaaS application around. The challenge, however, is it's easy to. Continue to go deeper, to continue searching even after you've found a great problem we're solving. And what I mean by that is, as you're interviewing folks, they might just assume that AI can perform magic, which now, don't get me wrong, the tools are very impressive these days, but there's, it's still not magic.

Like there's still logic and routine and all that kind of stuff too, what those tools can do. The problem that I'm getting at is in the interview, The subject that I was researching or performing the discovery with, they continued to come up with quote unquote new ideas for what the toll that I may be building can ultimately do.

And that's the risk. That's what I want you to be conscious of, because in these conversations, people may be coming up with all kinds of ideas. Now, they may be enthusiastic, and I don't want to be discouraging to you or to them, but I wanna make sure that you're focusing on. Again, the problem we're solving and the ideal problem we're solving.

So if you've found a solid one, which I have, move forward with that. First, be careful not to fall into this trap of basically just solving more and more problems all at the same time, or trying to perform some form of magic and produce significantly more features than you really need to in order to get started in these discovery interviews.

It's easy for people to get excited about the capabilities of ai, but. They don't know typically as much as we do about what they can realistically do. And more importantly, they're also typically not as honest with themselves, at least in those moments about what they can realistically handle, as in they may wanna skip all the steps and just automate the whole thing, or think that that's what they want.

But in reality, I've tried to provide products like those, and more often than not, they fail. Why? Because people aren't ready for them. They're not ready to skip all kinds of steps. They're ready for their most painful, most time-consuming step to go away because they've been dealing with that forever. So if you can build your tool around solving that problem, which sounds much more along the criteria that I've set and talk about extensively around problems or solving, that is still the best place to start.

You could continue to. Allow those conversations to move forward and talk about cool ideas and all that kind of stuff, and who knows? Maybe that's future material that can go on your roadmap as in where the product may go from here. But don't skip the best problem we're solving that you've identified, especially if it's relatively straightforward.

That's a great place to start, right? Software cannot be too easy to use, especially if you are working with industries that are not as familiar with some of these concepts like ai.

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While your building and scaling your B2B SaaS, it's always best to communicate these details and updates with your users.  I'll walk you through how I do this strategically and technically plus the value I receive from investing this time.

Free product-market fit email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is telling your B2B SaaS story along the way with your users. Now, that's a different way, essentially to describe email marketing, but what I'm trying to share with you is that you wanna bring your users along for the ride as your B2B SaaS product is evolving, cuz you want to try to establish a relationship with them early and often.

And get feedback from them whenever you can in terms of what it is you're building, or even better, what you should build next, cuz it will further extend what your tool is capable of doing in terms of solving their problem or making their lives easier. That makes your products stickier. That also may help you better understand are there areas of opportunity to capture more value, provide them with more value, which enables you to potentially build new tiers or generate more revenue.

Now, I've done this more recently with my podcasting tool and I've come up with a lot of great ideas. Initially, I started out by solving a problem related to converting the most common input to the most commonly requested output, which was a great place to start. So that enabled me to generate. A flood of traffic, which meant new users, which meant paying customers.

That was the milestone I was trying to achieve first. But now that I have, what I'm looking to do is how do I potentially extend the capabilities of what the tool can already do? How can I take that and how can I provide more value? And I've come up with a number of different other outputs, which would be relatively straightforward changes for me to make on the value proposition side, but I could provide the user base and my target market with potentially a lot more value.

So I'm refining those ideas now, but it all began with interacting with them and sharing the story along the way. Even if they aren't responding to you, it will help you formalize your thought process in terms of what you're sharing with them and where you might go next. So the way that I've set this up technically is when users are converted in Stripe, which is the payment gateway that I'm using to manage those emails are being sent to my email management platform with the moment is MailChimp.

And then that enables me to communicate with my users in terms of any updates that I want to share, new features that have been shipped. Anything else that's going on with the product so I can keep them all in tune. And as well, I'm regularly requesting feedback from the specific messages that I'm sending to them, which I might send once a week, several times a week, maybe one every other week.

Either way, I'm making sure that they're receiving communication along the way, which is helping them understand how the product is evolving and the fact that I want their input to learn more about what else the product can do to make their lives better.

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When you launch a Google search ads campaign that's going to rank for not just your keyword or phrase but options like it as well.  Some of them won't be relevant to your B2B SaaS.  Let's discuss how to further optimize your campaign to solve this problem with something called negative keywords.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is further optimizing your Google search ad campaigns with respect to negative keywords. Now, as I've mentioned before, I like Google search ads for attempting to validate as much as you can about your unique value proposition for your B2B SaaS, especially in the early days.

It is a relatively quick and cost effective way to see whether or not. You can cost effectively convert impressions to clicks to users and to customers. If you're able to do that and you're able to do that in a way that produces a positive return or even enables you to break even maybe on your first or second month's, uh, volume of revenue, then you've got great traction.

And this can be positive momentum that you need in order to continue to grow and scale from here. It also set you up further than down the road to invest in. Content marketing and a whole bunch of other things that we're gonna talk about as well. But for today's episode, I want to talk about negative keywords.

Now, when I say negative keywords, what I mean is. After you set up a search campaign, what that's ultimately gonna do is gonna require you to pick a keyword word or phrase. But you're also gonna rank for other combinations that are similarly related to that keyword word or phrase. But not all of them are gonna be relevant, and this is where negative keywords come into play.

So, for example, for my podcast show notes tool, that's what I wanna rank for. I wanna rank for people looking for. Help creating show notes. What I don't wanna rank for is people are looking for help starting a podcast because it's not what my tool does, it doesn't provide any value for those folks. So B, before I created essentially my negative keyword list in Google search ads, I was.

Ultimately getting traffic to my site, that was not as accurate as it could be. I was, people were finding me, I was getting impressions and sometimes even clicks, but that of which I was paying for related to that traffic in terms of what they were searching for, which isn't relevant to my tool, was something that was zapping my budget.

So it was something that I was paying for, but I was never gonna get. Any results out of that? Definitely more than likely no usage or revenue. Once those people wound up on my site or saw my ad and didn't click on it, uh, saw my site and realized that the tool doesn't do anything for them. That is wasted budget.

So in order to optimize this, what you wanna do is you wanna hammer your negative keywords. And what I mean by that is you want to create a list of negative keywords that you want to continually update as you are going in there and and monitoring your ad campaign in terms of how well it's performing, to make sure that you're not ranking for any keywords that are not relevant to whatever it is your tool does.

Now this is gonna happen automatically, so you need to continually. Monitor to make sure that you're not falling into this trap as well too, because it's going to zap your budget and it's only gonna be sending you bad traffic that you're gonna have to pay for. So make sure you do your research on negative keywords and that you maintain that as you're looking to further optimize your campaign, especially if this is one of your more effective channels, uh, and in the beginning when you're trying to ultimately validate that unique value proposition.

This traffic could be really important because the more you optimize it, the the better it's gonna perform.

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As your B2B SaaS product begins to scale so will the work required to maintain the momentum.  I want to walk you through my through process and a few strategies I use to measure the balance I'm currently managing and where I may need help next to ensure it remains in balance.

Free product-market fit course - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is how to be thinking about growing and scaling your B2B SaaS operation as your product continues to go deeper into product market fit. Now, I talk a lot about the early stage of figuring out the problem that you're going to be solving, how you're going to be solving it, but don't you start to gain some of that traction.

And I've got a product that's in that phase at the moment, you wanna be thinking about how you want to scale that operation from the perspective of. A, what it is that you want to be doing, and B, essentially what it is that you don't. Now, as you continue to grow and scale, there's gonna be more demand on each of the respective areas that it's gonna be required in order to continue to maintain your operation.

And that could be anything from sales, support, marketing, engineering, et cetera, and management, which is probably what you're doing most of the time at the moment. Now, you may have one or more team members already helping you, but if you are trying to figure out. At what point you should be adding more?

Good way to be thinking about that is as you start to feel like you're unable to continue to do more working on the business versus working in the business, then you want to try to reset that balance. So if you're doing a lot more of the busy work, but it isn't as much from a strategic perspective and it's not moving the needle as in it's just maintaining, you're gonna want to get yourself some of that time back.

So, Look for and understand where the bottlenecks are in your internal process. Just like we do when we're looking for problems we're solving with our target market customers, we're trying to figure out where's their critical path, which one is the bottleneck? Repeat the same process for your own operation.

Try to find out which of the steps or the roles that you're playing at the moment is consuming a significant portion of your time. Especially if it's something that you don't necessarily want to do or something that isn't particularly complicated or hard to do, and it's something you could probably get help for sooner rather than later.

And I have a tendency to think about this in three different phases as well. From the bottom up, from anywhere, from admin or administrative work at the first level, operations on the second, and then business development, sales, marketing, those types of things are the third. From the lowest level to the highest level for me historically, has been the opportunity to be able to delegate those rather successfully with less effort.

Now, your mileage may vary of course, but that's typically how I think about it. So some of the stuff on the earlier side that I look to do, uh, it, for example, as my B2B SaaS product starts growing and scaling. Is if the support channel starts to become particularly active and I start to get quite a bit of messages or feedback maybe about bugs, feature requests, whatever is, that starts to become something that I have essentially developed a routine or a process for that I could train someone else up on managing for me, perhaps even part-time in the beginning.

That might be something I look for sooner rather than later to give myself that time back. I wanna make sure that I. Develop the process or the procedure that I want someone to follow to make sure that I'm still maintaining the insight that's coming in from that channel because it's still valuable information, but a number of the steps, or the majority of the time, I don't necessarily need to do myself.

So I'm gonna look for somebody that can help me with that. And then you'll want to continue to repeat this process as you're growing and scaling to make sure that you are maintaining a good balance of that opportunity for you to work in the business versus the opportunity for you to work on the business.

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This episode, Co-Founder of Check Jacob Jolibois talks about building trust with B2B businesses, the importance of properly understanding pricing, and how to price a SaaS B2B product.

Jacob is the co-founder and Chief of Product at Check, an early-stage SaaS company helping home service operators streamline and automate their business.

Jacob brings together the business, technical, and customer objectives to build a product Operators love to use, improving the quality of life for them and their users.

Jacob has spoken on stages around the world from TEDx to Web Summit, the world’s largest tech conference, bringing awareness to the power and impact of design. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

• How to build trust with B2B businesses.
• The benefits of a sales-led approach.
• The best way to communicate with your clients.
• How to price a SaaS B2B product.
• The scaleability of sales teams.
• How to understand pricing.
• The process of creating a successful newsletter.
• The benefits of writing a newsletter. 

Resources:

• Check
• Founding Sales
• ProfitWell
• Arc Browser
• Making Product Sense
• NxtStep
• Podcast Chef

Connecting with Jacob Jolibois:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
• Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables:

• 03:35 - “You’re inserting yourself into the core of their business in a way that is incredibly dangerous if you do it wrong because you can screw up a lot of things in their business and so you have to build trust there and marketing is a slower way to build trust than direct sales, when you build that relationship it changes the game.”
• 05:30 - “You’re not charging enough for the value you provide these people are relying on you to run their business you provide extreme value there charge what you’re worth if you’re not charging what you’re worth it’s going to have a long hard road ahead.”
• 11:10 - “A lot of Founders have the tendency to underprice and the reason is it’s scary to hear no and so you want to make it a no-brainer yes and so you will classically undercharge, what the experts will tell you if you start talking to folks who have been there and gotten the t-shirt is when you raise your prices you're raising the perceived value of your product as well and so oftentimes your conversion rates go up your loyalty goes up your retention it really does craft a different message.”
• 16:33 - “You should be trying something every quarter, if you’re not adjusting pricing or adjusting packages or adjusting the frequency of charging whether it’s per month, per year, quarterly whatever then you’re not experimenting enough because you’ve got to dial it in over time you’re not going to get it right out of the gate.”
• 1:39 - “I started a newsletter called Making Product Sense and I write to about 3000 readers from basically every tech company you can imagine and try to break down learnings from building products and companies from some of the folks who do it best.”

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/