Bootstrapper's Paradise

I've recently optimized my search ad campaigns to hopefully drive more conversions for my B2B SaaS application.  I want to walk you through what I changed and why including some tips based on what I've learned if you intend to leverage search ads to drive traffic for your B2B SaaS.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is further optimizing your channels in terms of where you're getting the leads for your B2B SaaS. Now, in this case, for me, this is through search ads, so I am primarily getting the traffic for people that I'm trying to drive into my B2B SaaS from Google search ads.

Now, when I was beginning, and I always encourage this, I was moving pretty fast, so I set up a campaign. Essentially as quickly as I could, cuz I was doing a number of things simultaneously, like putting up the landing page, potentially working on the prototype, measuring how effectively I was converting people.

I was doing a lot. So cuz I was moving quickly, I just set up essentially the basics for the early campaign in order to run my early stage experiment to get a better idea in terms of how many prospects I was ultimately gonna be able to convert. Now. After I ran that experiment and I got the data back, which said how many folks I was ultimately able to convert and then sign off on essentially the early stage economic viability of the B2B SaaS that I was talking about building.

Then I had the information I needed in order to move forward with the build. So the build is done, the product is live. Now I'm trying to focus on converting people. Using the products to paint for the product. So that is the spot that I'm at at the moment with what I'm building. Now, in order to do that, I've already talked a little bit about further optimizing whatever channel you are using in order to ultimately get to and through this stage, which again, for me is via search ads now, because I had just set that up via the basics in the.

I, it was definitely not optimized, so I've recently gone back in there to dive in. I've been monitoring it, but I haven't done a deep dive. I recently did a deep dive and I learned quite a bit. As in number one, I'm expecting to kind of hit the throttle on trying to get as much activity from that channel as possible.

Number two, the channel is definitely not optimized because as I was looking at the details, what I saw was very different Click through rates. Depending upon what was being shown, where it was being shown, when it was being shown a number of different variables. So I wanna explain to you what a few of those were for me and the changes that I'm making based on the results that I've observed now, because I just kind of did things quick and dirty in the beginning.

Through Google it ultimately set it up with our quote unquote like smart campaign, which I would definitely encourage you to avoid because it is severely limiting in terms of what it is you can control, and that's the problem I was running into. I went in there and I was trying to make customizations to optimize my campaign and I really couldn't because it was started with that so-called smart campaign, which is I think essentially just meant.

Folks to get through the process as quick as possible. I'm trying to automate stuff for you, but it limits you in terms of what you can do. So you're very limited in terms of the modifications you can make, and that's the problem I was running into. So ultimately I replaced this campaign, but when I was evaluating the performance of it, I noticed a couple things.

Number one, Where they were displaying the ads, they were displaying them in a bunch of different locations. One of those was Google display ads, which is not what I wanted. Uh, that is like, I think blogs and stuff like that, if people place ads around there, so like you may have seen like a banner ad or something like that.

That's not what I'm looking for. So actually quite a bit of my budget was going to that. I simply, My budget going to search ads when people are searching with Google search engine and they're seeing the results, I want them to see mine at the top. So I wanted to modify that in that I wanted to remove the display ad component.

Another thing that I noticed was that a significant amount of my ad budget was going towards mobile applications, or mobile devices, I should say, as in when people were searching via Google, but they were doing so from their mobile. My application, though it is responsive, it's not really designed for someone to be using it via mobile phone.

All right? We're talking about, you know, a podcasting assistant, so to speak. You're moving files around, you're doing editings, that type of stuff. Most people are not doing heavy editing like that from their phone. They're doing it from their desktop. And this was even more obvious when I looked at the clickthrough rate and the conversions from desktop versus mobile, despite the fact that quite a bit of my budget was going through, uh, mobile platform.

Going to mobile platforms. The majority, the highest clickthrough rate was from desktops, which is essentially what I was expecting it to be. So long story short there too, I also removed the budget going towards mobile devices. I don't want to go through mobile devices, so no display ads, no mobile devices.

I wanted it to go just through Google search, and I wanted to just be displayed for folks that are browsing via desktop. So with just those two changes, I'm expecting to see some improvements, and I'll keep you posted of course, but I wanted to share with. What the process of further optimizing looks like and share with you some tips if you're gonna be using search or ads or anything like that in terms of trying to generate traffic in that too.

You know, unless you want to do, like I did a quick and dirty very early campaign, probably avoid setting it up via Smart Campaign through Google and instead give yourself access to some of those more advanced tools, cuz that'll help you with when you're ready to do further customizations.

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When you're deciding what to build for your next B2B SaaS application, you can decide whether or not you want to solve a problem that you experience.

I want to talk about why this can be a HUGE advantage. 

PS.  I'm doing this now.

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 one of my favorite patterns when you're building a potential B2B SaaS application and that's looking to solve your own problem. Now, I'll talk about that in a minute, but first I wanna share with you some context around why I am such a big fan of this pattern, and it's because it's a easier solution to one of the biggest challenges facing folks trying to build successful SaaS products or companies, and.

Many oftentimes try to build a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Now, I talk a lot about identifying problems worth solving, and the research work that I do is largely focused on being able to differentiate between just a problem that really won't be able to turn into a successful business or SaaS product and what I consider to be a problem we're solving that should now, the advantage of this strategy.

In building a solution to your own problem is you are your own target market, which is great insider information into how your customer thinks. I know it's a use case or an N of one, but that's better than a lot of founders often have that choose to solve problems in industries or for people that in which they are not the target market.

So this can be a considerable advantage and it can also help you gain access to more people. Within that target market. That is if you are also inside that target market, most of the time you probably know other folks like you, which makes it probably easier or at least closer to your current network to gain access to more of those folks, to better understand the context around how they want their problem to be solved, making it a bit easier for you to get the information you need to determine ultimately what to build and what the product should be.

Now, the other advantage to leveraging the strategy is, You're, you may be talking about turning it into a SaaS application, but once the product itself is available, if it does in fact, solve a problem of yours, It's immediately going to be providing you with value, as in you're gonna start to get a return right away.

It's not necessarily gonna be dependent upon your ability to sell this product super effectively in order for it to turn into something that's valuable for you. Cause you're using it to solve your own problem. It's gonna produce value for you immediately. That's what's happening in the instance where I'm building this podcasting application because I also have a podcasting agency.

What I'm choosing to do in the micro SAS businesses that I want to build is I'm first looking internally to the potential bottlenecks I have in my own processes for running that business. Saying, this is the biggest one, this is the most expensive one. This is the most, this one intrus is the most risk, or it has less of, uh, backup, consideration or redundancy involved.

As such, if I choose to automate that, I'm gonna get all that value back, and I'm already receiving that because my product is now available. Now I'm selling it externally as well too, to others that also may need it, and that's going to just increase the potential return that I get on it. But I'm getting value right away so the product isn't sitting there.

Then potentially not earning if I'm not ultimately making paid conversions. So I want you to consider this as an option when you're thinking, especially when you're thinking about building potentially your first SaaS application. Are there problems you need solved? Because number one, you know you can get value out of it right away once their product is available.

But number two, and probably more importantly, it's gonna give you greater context for the problem to be solved and. How people within that target market are probably thinking in terms of how they want it to be solved.

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Building your B2B SaaS in isolation can be not only harder, but more boring.  It's fun and helpful to build with others.  Let's talk about why I'd recommend you join a group of peers that are doing the same so you can help each other while you build.

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

Email me if you'd like to join an online community while you build - [email protected]

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I wanna talk to you about is why you should find yourself kind of a peer advisor or mentor group to help you while you're building your B2B SaaS application. Now, I've worked with advisors, coaches, mentors, everything, pretty much all of the above at some point in my career to this.

But what I think has worked best by far and is something that I'm actively doing now while I'm building my latest B2B SaaS application is having a group of peers that are kind of at different, we're, we're technically, we have applications or businesses that are in different phases. Most of us have more than one.

That has really helped from the perspective of having folks to talk things out with, and we meet either virtually or in person to cover essentially anything that we are prioritizing and get each other's perspective on, which has been great. I would highly recommend that if you are in this process of building a B2B SaaS application, regardless of the.

And outside of what you might have as a coach or an executive coach even, I would recommend you find yourself a group, a peer group, or a group of kind of folks that are either slightly before where you are, slightly after, where you are progress wise, or just right where you are. Because in this world, there's not, you know, in today's world where we're always connected, it's easier to find online communities, which is great, but I would look to find one.

Has folks trying to do the same type of things that you were doing. Reason being is because you're both probably trying to solve certain challenges that are relatively similar, and you can kind of workshop those together and help each other. That has been really helpful because you may be already very well used to this.

In this world, while you're building something like this, you're often kind of expected to just figure it out, and especially if you are the one that's the founder or the operator, there isn't always a huge support group for you to kind of go to in order to get help from just kind of always falls on you.

Which if you've developed those skills, that's really important and you're gonna need that in order to continue to be successful. But it is also really helpful to learn from. And there isn't always a great opportunity to do that if you don't build it yourself. So I found a group of individuals that I've kind of just networked with over time and in my geographical area we all share similar interests.

We call come from somewhat of a similar background. You know, we took slightly different paths to get to where we are now, but we're all kind of trying to do the same thing and that's build successful B2B SaaS. You know, typically micro SaaS type businesses. And we meet usually monthly, at least once every other month, and we kind of just cover updates with each other.

And I call it sometimes kind of like roasting what each other's working on. And that is actually quite helpful because it could be difficult to get additional perspectives on what it is that you're doing. So it could be hard to talk about these things with like a spouse or a friend. You know, they might not completely understand the world.

They, they may not even understand what SaaS is so try to find others that are doing something similar and see if you can't, you know, develop relationships with them or help each other, uh, as you're making progress through this as well too. I've gotten so much value out of doing this this time around as opposed to when I was building these things essentially in isolation that I'm thinking about starting kind of an online community about this as well too.

So for any listeners out there that would have an interest, Joining something like that to try to replicate that experience while you're building, which could be like online coaching. We could help each other, I can help you, those types of things. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have an interest in that.

My email is [email protected] to let me know.

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If ads are driving traffic to your B2B SaaS, you'll eventually want to make sure you are optimizing that channel to produce better results.

Let's talk about the basics to get you started here using the example from my latest product.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how to optimize for more conversions to your potentially relatively new B2B SaaS application. So after you've developed a channel for the early stage launch of your B2B SaaS application, You're gonna want to be measuring how effectively you're converting visitors into prospects, free trial users, paying customers, et cetera, and you're probably gonna be wanting to boost those conversions as much as possible.

Now, for me, when I'm starting out, especially evaluating an early stage B2B SaaS product that I've recently launched, what I'm looking for is how effectively I'm able to turn those visitors into paying customers. I ultimately want to be able to create what is my funnel, and then measure what. Ultimately success in converting from one stage to another actually looks like.

So from a visitor to a free trial user to a paying customer, for example. And if I know that, you know, a hundred goes to 10, goes to one or whatever, then I can work backwards from how many I want of the paying customers to know how many visitors I want, for example, and then anything, any dials that control the traffic that I need to send to ultimately convert into the first category.

If I know what my percentages are in terms of my conversion rate for the other categories, I should be able to work my way back towards that outcome that I'm looking for to hit ultimately that number that's going to mean the revenue number I want to hit or whatever. So what I'm trying to share with you here is that you want to build this through the channels that you've found to be the most effective.

And on the earlier. When the domain is new or the product is new, I am typically leaning pretty heavily on ads, typically Google search ads, but it really depends on your product. What matters more than anything is where are your users? Where's the persona that you've built this product for that has the specific problem that your product solves hanging out.

If that's Facebook, then go there. If that's LinkedIn, then go there. Wherever they're hanging out, that's where you want to get in front of them. And then, Any way that you can drive more traffic. And again, what I use pretty heavily, at least in the earlier, earlier days of launching a new B2B SaaS product, is on advertisements.

In order to generate the kind of traffic you want to measure the effectiveness of essentially your funnel and the conversion rate from getting from one category to the next. And then after you've determined not to be effective, as in, you know, Getting people to and through that funnel, as in you're able to get people from prospects to free trial, to users, to customers.

That's just what the stages are in my case, but yours may be slightly different, but regardless, I know I can get people to become paying customers for my product. Now I can work backwards from how many paying customers I want and I can. Turn the dial all the way up to a hundred if I want, for whatever I've been able to do for that channel thus far.

As in, for me, what that looks like is increasing the budget significantly for the ad campaigns that I may be running until I know where the diminishing return line is. As in where do I max out, where do I, where can I not show it anymore, or where will it not move the needle in terms of getting more prospects or visitors to the site to consider creating an account, for example.

That's the center, kind of like the first stage in optimization is you can move the relatively straightforward needles like that, like budget, and then you can get into really optimizing. I'm gonna talk more about that in the future episode as well too. And that's where you optimize around the keywords.

Make sure that if you're using ads that you're only displaying for the keywords that are relevant to what your product ultimately does. I'll talk more about that as well too, so you can continue to optimize your budget and your spend at this point if you're investing dollars into getting people into and on your platform.

So start thinking about that after you've launched your product for the channels that are able to send essentially those visitors or prospects to your product. And then from there, we're gonna do your future episodes where I'm gonna talk you more through how to continually optimize to make sure you're getting a better return on investment.

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After launch, I see many entrepreneurs want to go much wider with what they product can do.  They always want to add more features that have yet to be requested by their early customers.  This can be a huge mistake.

Instead of going wide, let's talk about what it looks like to go deep instead which can give you a leg up on your competition.

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

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is why when you're looking to extend the capabilities of your B2B SaaS that you shouldn't go wide. You should go deep. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. So sometimes when you've got an early traction with your B2B SaaS, it's easy to think through and continually add to your backlog or your roadmap.

And extend what your product is capable of. Now, when a lot of people are doing this, especially in the beginning, they're thinking about how can I go far and wide with what my product can do? As in if it can do X, maybe it should also do Y and also Z. And I want to explain to you that I feel that that's a trap.

I've been there before. And the more that you go wide, the more you have a higher probability of building your product in a direction away from what your customer actually. Instead, my recommendation is that you go deep and that you become the best version of whatever it was you were originally setting out to solve for your customer.

So that top problem continue to be better and better at that. And if you continue to chase that, assuming that you've latched onto one of the top problems from the start, then it's gonna be almost impossible to. Which is gonna give you significant defensibility because your solution is gonna continue to be better and better.

Let me share with you with another example that may be relevant in another industry. So if you think through in terms of healthcare and receiving service there, you might need the help of a doctor or a particular surgeon at some point. If you have some kind of healthcare issue. Now, a lot of people have problem with their knees, so I'll focus there like over time, knees degrade, right?

So eventually people need to go see a specialist that works on knees, for example. Now, let's say instead you were choosing between multiple providers and they all had the ability to work on knees, but there was another one that also learned how to work on hands and necks and phases and all this other stuff.

They had specialties in all of these area. Which one would you be more likely to focus on? The one that focuses on a bunch of different areas, or the one that focuses on just the one that you need. So if you think about that from that concept, the specialist is always typically hiring demand because that's all that they do.

They focus all day every day solving that specific problem. And that happens to be the problem that you have. This concept we see all the time in software. People have a tendency to try to go far and wide with what their product can do. That can convolute the user experience, that can add potential solutions to problems that your users or customers may not have or may not be on their radar.

And if you are adding those things to your experience for which the users that you already had were pleased with what the original set of features were, then you're going to continue to make that experience worse because it doesn't provide value for them. So you really need to make. That whatever it is that you're adding to your product experience ultimately adds value for them.

And I've seen the concept and the strategy of going deeper into being the best solution for the specific problem that you originally set out to solve for that target market to be a much more successful strategy at doing that in the long run. Then instead, going wide and trying to solve multiple problems or extend functionality that way.

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I've been getting more questions around what my lead capture process looks like on the early version of my landing page.

In this episode, I go into more detail about what's on my landing page and how I structure my process for capturing leads.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is a response to some questions I've been getting in terms of how I structure set up my landing page, and in particular, what my lead capture ultimately looks like. So the questions were around validating SaaS ideas or concepts, and I understand this to mean.

Something that we may or may not want to build, right? We've got an idea for a potential product or business we want to create, and we want to get a better understanding in validating that as best we can before we ultimately build it, which fits right into my wheelhouse for a process that I've built and the one that I'm using over and over again to test various SaaS business ideas of my own.

Now, ultimately what I do is I get clear about my variable. And the most important ones there are my icp, my IDO customer profile, and my uvp. My unique value proposition, as in how am I specifically gonna solve a specific problem for a specific persona? And I want that all to be communicated on a landing page.

So I've got different sections on the landing page and I could share various ones with you. If you're looking for some examples like that, that are, are mine that I've created to test these ideas, and they go in. Phases as well also. So I'll have multiple versions of them as I'm making progress along the way.

But on the earlier side of things, when I'm testing out a potential idea or SA concept, I'll be communicating the problem I'll be looking to solve and how we're looking to solve that for that target market persona. On that page, we'll also include various options around pricing if I wanna offer more than one potential.

Or I'm gonna do some testing in terms of what is the level of price sensitivity here to what it is I'm talking about offering, and ultimately, what prospects may be willing to pay. Then I try to have one call to action on the first version of the landing page throughout the entire page. And most of that is related to something along the lines of a button that says, sign up or gain access, or something.

Something like that. All the call to action buttons, for the most part on the first version of a landing page, are branded that way. Then when they click on it, where they go is typically to fill out a lead capture form, and that's pretty much it. My preferred system for how to manage that. Via Typeform. I love type forms, interface and experience and extensibility for their product.

That's what I use. And then in that form, which is what some of the questions were about as well, I capture something along the lines of contact information. At a minimum I grab email. That's the pretty much minimum requirement. I might grab a name as well. Also, then I'll ask potentially some additional questions along the lines.

If I'm advertising multiple tiers and testing price sensitivity, I'll ask them which tier they're interested in, and then I'll also maybe have one or two open-ended questions related to something along the lines of, what's the most valuable feature for you, or, which specific problem do you need solved?

Anything that might give me greater qualitative insight into the response that I'm getting as well. Also, which starts me to help me get into the mind of the persona that's signing up for the product so that I can better underst. How the current product can help solve their problems and what some of those future problems may be as well.

So that's how my process works from, uh, very early on when I want to validate a potential idea or concept that I have for a SaaS business, I create a landing page and it communicates the unique value proposition to the ideal customer profile. Then, All the call to actions are specifically to a lead capture form, and in that lead capture form, I, I ask several questions in order to get some feedback from them to test their level of interest in what it is that I'm building, price sensitivity, and any anything else that I think I can learn.

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Historically you may have received feedback about your idea that goes something like this - 'that's not a product, that's probably just a feature'.  This is often given as feedback to mean you aren't ready to create your product yet because maybe it doesn't do enough.

I want to challenge this narrative and share examples of how some product companies have been wildly successful build entire products around a single feature or idea.

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

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here today. What I wanna talk to you about is the whole concept of feedback previously where people might say that your idea isn't a product, it's more likely a feature. Now, traditionally, this has been shared in the context of something somewhat negative or maybe feedback to the extent of you, just you're not quite there yet in terms of ready to move forward in building a product.

You don't almost have enough substance or value to offer someone in order to turn it into a product experience that people are going to pay for. I want to challenge that narrative, and I wanna challenge that because of the rise of this concept and the success of other products like it that I'm referring to as micro SaaS or touch, and in my world, particularly B2B SaaS products or applications, because in the studying that I've.

The more complicated your software product is, the harder it is to do just about everything. Build it, sell it, market it, gain traction, find product, market fit, whatever, right? All of those things are significantly more difficult, and I believe become exponentially more difficult, the more complicated your software product becomes.

Now, can that product do more? Yes. More often than not, that's the case. However, do most of your users want that product to do? That answer is a little bit harder to kind of figure out, and it takes a lot longer in order to determine. So long story short, here, what I'm trying to communicate is that if you've got an idea that could potentially be a successful quote unquote feature, or somebody who's less familiar with the low-touch product world is giving you feedback to the extent of that's not a product, it's a feature.

I want to tell you that I think that's potentially a good thing as. Products that are created around largely a feature create potential opportunities to be highly successful low-touch products, and I'll give you an example, if you've ever used a calendar booker before, those are all pretty good examples of low-touch products.

As in you and I want to meet, and we don't want to do the round robin via email in order to figure out what works for each of us. So instead, I create a link to my Cal. Enabling you to see the visibility in terms of when I'm available, and then you can compare that with when you're available. So in self-service format, you can put a meeting essentially on my calendar that works for both of us.

That's it. That's where that product stops, and that's what low touch products are all about. So if you had an idea for something like that, people might have given you feedback on that in the lines. That's just a feature that can't be a product oven in itself, but if you had built something like Calendly specifically that it is, that is what they do, and you would've been wildly successful.

So don't let that discourage you. And in fact, I believe features rather than an entire product is actually a potentially good differentiator for even what a micro SAS or a low-touch but successful product ultimately is.

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Is that new idea of yours better served as a feature in your current product or a new product altogether?

Let's discuss the pros and cons here and allow me to recommend an approach for figuring this out.

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

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is how to determine whether or not that next feature idea of yours should actually be a product of its own. Now, I've been talking about this in regards to what I'm considering to be micro sass, and it's also referred to as low-touch products.

Those are SaaS applications that don't require a lot of intervention from you in order to get your users onboarded to the platform to start receiving. In fact, in most cases, applications like these that I'm typically working on in a B2B area, selling business to business, they can be the full experience.

Your user can get the full experience without much training or intervention whatsoever on your behalf. Now, because of that, And because the more complicated those applications get, I have a tendency to wanna keep the experience as simple as possible, to make sure that it's as easy as possible for your users and customers to understand and know what to do, and then to be able to get value out of it themselves.

You know, onboard themselves, handle all of the steps and components themselves without getting lost. And the more complicated your product is, the harder it is to be to do that. Now when you're entertaining whether or not perhaps a new request or a new idea probably coming from you is, uh, something to extend based on the capability of your current.

Application or whether or not that should be a product of its own. And that's kind of where I'm at at the moment. I've got my podcasting B2B SaaS application in a good spot at the moment, feature wise, until I get a new wave of feedback. But I've got ways to potentially extend that capability and I can add that on to the current product, or I could turn that into a new product of its own.

And what I'm gonna tell you is that the best way to determine that, as in what's got the best. Opportunity to generate the most value for you is to better understand what the difference may look like in regard to your ICP and your target market. So your ideal customer profile and your target market.

How much do they overlap? Between what your product is currently capable of and what you might be considering adding to that product experience. And if there isn't enough overlap there, as in if they don't overlap almost one to one, then you're probably looking at an opportunity to turn your new idea into a new application of its own.

Now, I understand you're gonna need to replicate much of what you already have, but that should be. More cost effective than the first time around because you should be able to borrow quite a bit and then just switch out the internals in order to create this new experience, if you will. But if the overlap doesn't, isn't one-to-one, I would look at potentially turning that into a different product.

With AI tools and things like that, we can move a lot faster. These days in terms of what our products are capable of. But I wouldn't look to convolute the current product experience you have until you get a wave of feedback to understand whether or not that's the direction they want to go.

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After you launch your B2B SaaS, you should start attracting new customers.  An important exercise to complete is to monitor who is actually signing up for your product.  Is it who you expected it to be or is there something different about these customers?

Let's talk about how to validate your assumptions based on who is actually signing up.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is validating your assumptions after you've launched your product. Now, when I've talked about building landing pages and who they're for and how, and what to communicate on them, there's a number of variables that we have to ultimately determine and then move forward with into that testing phase.

So two of them that are really important to get a better understanding of are what I refer to as your ICP. Your ideal client or customer profile and your UVP, your unique value proposition. Now, those are designed early on, likely from any of the discovery work that you've done in order to get a better understanding in what your target market needs.

However, they're still assumptions. So after you've launched and people are becoming onboarded to your platform, what I'm ultimately recommending that you do is more homework in terms. Who you are attracting to your B2B SaaS because there could be a difference between ultimately what we've designed and then what ends up actually playing out in practice.

So you have your essentially validations and what you want to do, you know, is validate those assumption. So you have the validations that you need to complete, and then what you're gonna find out is those are either close to how you design them or they may be a little bit further apart either way. What I want you to look for are the patterns.

As you start to find these patterns, you can start to update your assumptions, but with more accurate data that you're actually taking from practice. So as your product is out there, people are finding it, people are using it. The things that in addition to ultimately validating your value proposition, which is what your product does and the problems that it solves, that's part of what we need to validate.

I also want you to validate who you have determined ultimately is part of your target market. Are you attracting who you thought you would be attracting? Does your ideal customer profile need to be updated? If so, make sure to update that as the pattern becomes more clear or make modifications to it. If you need to attract someone slightly differently, updating that is gonna be important because it's gonna affect everything else that you're gonna be doing from here, as in how you're finding them, who you're attracting, and ultimately how you're going to attract them.

So understanding how that's changing when your product is out there in the wild. Is going to be important for future success from here. So I wanted to mention that after your launch, you want to get a better understanding of what are the assumptions that you've made and that now that you have real data, go back and reevaluate those assumptions and get a better understanding for, are those being validated based on how you design them or are they different?

And then ultimately make updates and changes to your strategy from there.

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After you've launched your product, you're going to want to gather as much feedback as you can before you scale.

The first set of users could be friendlies (people in your network) or strangers (people who you don't really know) and perhaps both.

What's the best strategy here and why?

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is who you should be getting the initial set of feedback from, and what should that first wave of customers for your B2B SaaS product that you may have recently launched actually look like. Are we talking about friendlies or are we talking about strangers, or are we talking about some form of a mix?

Now, from my perspective, after you've launched your B2B SaaS product, And I'm assuming you've done some testing and if you've been following along with what I've been recommending you would have in order to get some type of an idea what the level of interest is in terms of your ICP or your ideal customer profiles, level of interest in your UVP or your unique value proposition, as well as.

Their motivation to pay for access to your product. Now, if you've done that once you are ultimately launching your product and then sharing with with those that have signed up, you've got essentially an initial set of folks that you can email because hopefully you've captured their email addresses.

And you can measure how many of them ultimately trying to access the product, how many of them convert into paying customers, and all of that is excellent testing. But without skipping steps here, my opinion, the most important first kind of big milestone to accomplish after you've launched your product is to.

Get a quote unquote wave of customers into the product experience and then be able to measure what their active usage looks like, what type of feedback you can receive from them. Has your product ultimately been able to solve their problem? That's really what we're trying to VA to verify and to validate as part of this phase.

If we can do that, we'll know that we can significantly de-risk the future potential success. Of this project because we'll have better understood how well we've achieved product market fit so far. So now from my perspective, I think there's good and bad with both of the cohorts that I mentioned in terms of friendlies, which I would, I usually refer to as people in your network or folks that know what you're working on or folks that may be able to use what it is you've.

And then strangers, people who you don't have a preexisting relationship with. The advantage of the friendlies is that it can be a little bit easier to try to get feedback, but the problem with the friendlies is oftentimes that might be you have to take that with a pretty heavy grain of salt unless you are really forcing them to give you direct feedback.

Now that's something that I've worked very hard at refining over the years, but that can be really hard to do, as in oftentimes that you know, people that fall into that category for you, they might be telling you what they think you want to hear as opposed to what you need to hear. So long story short, there is good, but you have to caveat that group.

Now, the strangers on the other, They're harder to get direct access to, but they're also more than likely to give you brutally honest feedback, which is what arguably matters most. At this point. You need people to tell you whether or not your baby is ugly, and sometimes your friends will not tell you that, uh, because if it is ugly or you do have problems with it, then.

That feedback can help you make that better, so that's important too. Long story short here, my best recommendation is a mixture of the two because I think you can learn something new from each and potentially something unique from each. As in, if you can't get one thing from one group, you might be able to get it from the other.

So I. I like to try to see if I can't get a wave of each as in share with my network, what it is I've built and produced, provide some access to it, see if I can get some feedback, and then email blast or you know, start messaging and developing a relationship with the folks that have previously signed up, which most of which should probably be strangers in terms of a level of interest in what it is that you've built.

That way you can measure activity across both of these cohorts to see what you can learn about evaluating how much value your product is providing for the folks that have expressed interest in it.

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