Bootstrapper's Paradise

Early into your B2B SaaS products life you're going to want to ship features based on what you 'feel' would be valuable.  Let's talk about why that's a trap and what to focus that energy on instead.

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

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I'm gonna talk to you about is how to avoid falling into the trap of shipping features based on feelings. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because this is very relevant and timely for me in terms of the product that I've recently shipped, and I'm working on growing.

I've come up with all kinds of ideas that I think users would get value out of. Now, the danger and risk there obviously is it's coming from me, and it's not at that moment coming from users that are engaged with the application that are paying customers, which is where this information realistically should come from.

So I need you to understand. If you're going to continue to make changes to your product without active, without feedback from active users that are paying for access, then you might be steering your product in a suboptimal direction, as in it might be going where you think it should go, but that may not be where your users and ultimately you're paying customers, feel like, get your go.

So there's a balance here that you need to strike effectively. From building and launching your MVP to onboarding a wave of customers, getting an initial round of feedback, and then leveraging that in order to figure out what the future direction of your product should be. So whenever possible, I want you to resist the urge to want to continually make changes.

Especially early on and before you've gotten that initial wave of feedback, it's really important to keep the experience consistent in the beginning so that you give the product and the users enough time to kind of onboard and provide you with that feedback. So if you are kind of getting a little itchy and you want to do more things and make changes, which I completely understand, I'm there myself.

What I would encourage you to do instead is channel that energy into the direction of figuring out how you can engage more with the users that you are hoping to get that feedback from. So if that engagement is low, start thinking through different strategies or communication channels that you can use.

To learn what some of that feedback might be or encourage folks to get, become more active with using your product at the moment. If you do that, that's going to help you ensure that you de-risk the potential future direction that you want to take your product and ensure that you are not steering it in a direction away from what ultimately you're paying customers are actually going to need.

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

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

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

This episode, CEO of Memrise Steve Toy talks about the most important aspects of learning a language, the different ways AI can be used in language learning, and how Memrise differentiates itself from other language learning applications.

Steve Toy is a Senior Leader experienced in driving organizational change and managing high-growth agendas, who has spent his career bringing technology to life, leading digital strategy across multiple channels, transforming ideas that have led to multi-million-dollar businesses, and executing the profitable deployment of new technologies across multiple industries

Steve is currently the CEO of Memrise and has over 25 years of experience as CEO, General Manager, V.P, and board director in publicly traded and private companies with up to 250,000 staff and annual revenues of over $15 Billion. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

• The most important aspects of learning a language.
• How Memrise differentiates itself from other language learning applications.
• Different ways AI can be used to learn a language.
• The key principles to learning a language.
• Why you need a customized approach to learning another language.
• The unique language learning problems AI can solve..
• The impact scale can have on both a company and its users.
• The global trends in language learning.
• Important principles CEOs need to lead a company.

Resources:

• Memrise
• Italki
• NxtStep
• Podcast Chef

Connecting with Steve Toy:

• LinkedIn
• Email
• Twitter

Connecting with the host:

• Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
• Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables:

• 03:27 - “Most people are kind of reluctant to speak when they’re learning a language because they’re worried they’re going to sound like a 5-year-old because they’re going to sound like a 5-year-old. That judgment that fear of judgment is what stops people but when you’re in a country if you want a sandwich if you want a beer if you want a train ticket, you’re going to have to use the language.”
• 15:48 - “Businesses that need to continually improve the English skills of their customer support group can actually have lessons made from the customer support videos that they have in their business and so now the users, their employees, will be learning the words and memorizing the words that they use in their day-to-day life, they will be hearing the words from the videos that talks about their very business, learning the product as well along the way and they can practice with a bot that is trained to be a customer that doesn’t know how to use the product that the company sells, that’s how tightly we can train these products.”
• 19:03 - “A taxi driver in Hungary makes more money when they speak English, a waiter in Caracas makes more money when they speak English.”

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

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

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

Email is an often overlooked element of helping your users make their way through the activation points of onboarding with your B2B SaaS.

Let's talk about how and when you can leverage it to help them (and you) be more successful with your product.

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 why you should not assume that using your product will be intuitive for your users and your customers. Now, of course, when we're designing the experience for how our product is going to solve the top problem or top problems that our customers supposedly have, We are trying our best to make sure we're doing so in a simple and straightforward way to make sure that the experience is rather easy for them to understand in terms of how to get value out of the product.

But that's not always going to be intuitive for your user. It's easy for us to overlook. What might not be obvious for them because we're building it. It's one of those can't see the forest through the trees type problems that we often experience. So if you keep this on the front of, keep this top of mind while you're building and while you're launching and while you're trying to grow your product, then it'll be easier for you to understand that people may be getting stuck at certain points in that.

Now analytics and tools like that can help you to better understand where your users and customers are getting stuck when it comes to your product experience. Your job is to then move them through those various steps and figure out the best way to do so. Now, that might be taking one step and making it into two, or taking two steps and making it into one.

There's different things that you can do in order to help your user. Through the process of onboarding so that they can continually get value out of using your product or that you can measure whether or not they're able to do so. If they can't, then you've got other things to fix. But for now, the focus of what I'm talking about is largely where I'm focusing with one of the products I just launched, and it's understanding these activation points, knowing where the user is at at certain points in the experience and figuring out how to get them beyond.

So that they get to the next step in the process. Now, one of the often overlooked elements here is how important it can be to leverage tools like email to communicate with your user in terms of what they can do in your product. It's like after they have filled out your lead capture, important thing to grab, of course, would be their email, and then keeping them informed along the way as your product is either under development or sharing with them.

Show notes, release notes, things like. In terms of what you are producing in terms of updated functionality or features within your application, as you are building new features, probably the most straightforward part of this experience that most of us are used to, you can share with them, Hey, fyi, we're making improvements.

Here's what we've improved recently. Here's what it is. Here's how it works. Here's an example perhaps of what that looks. And you conclude elements like that as well too, with links into the application and directions to help them understand where they can go to experience and for themselves. Other pieces can be figuring out and helping them learn what functionality is already in the product experience because again, it may not be obvious for them.

So as I do more usability testing with a new product and some early stage users, I get a better understanding in what's obvious for them or not obvious for them versus what was obvious or not obvious for me. So I'm trying to put myself in the perspective of someone new in the product experience whenever I'm doing testing, but that's much becomes more difficult to do as you become more familiar with your own application, especially if you've built it.

So in order to figure this out, you need to do more testing. Again, the analytics tools can help. But educating and training your customers and users along the way should help as well. And all of this is made significantly easier. Again, by keeping your product experience as simple as possible, as you're laser focusing on the top problem and you're looking to design into the product experience the simplest, but the most elegant way to ultimately solve that problem, that's gonna make your life end theirs a lot easier as well too.

So anyway, I wanted to talk to you more about how you can better leverage tools like Email to both educate your users. On how to use your product for something that might be obvious to you but not for them. As well as sharing with them any updates that you're making to the product experience so they can continually learn how to get more out of it and they see you managing it.

And then option optionally requesting feedback from them in terms of how can we make this even better for you? We want to engage with you. Please share and send us that feedback.

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

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

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

After you've launched your SaaS, they key will be to get people to use it so you can measure the strength of your value proposition.

So how do you do that?  Well, a free trial is a great way to convert prospects into users.  Let's talk about how to manage free trials to be able to do this.

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 managing the process of getting people to access your product. Tested out, especially in the beginning through things like free trials, for example, and how in particular to organize that. So most users these days are familiar with being able to access products and try them out, especially on the earlier side, especially if they're going to be low touch micro SaaS type applications.

And most are looking for opportunities to kind of try before they buy, so to speak. So I would say a good rule of thumb is the more low touch your product is, the more likely users want to try to actually experience it before they ultimately pay for it. Now, that's not always the case. That's not a hard and fast rule, it's just a guide.

In this case, the product I'm working on for podcasters is something that I think people are looking for more of an opportunity to try out with a free trial. And the reason why I know that. When I launched version one, I knew I wanted to incorporate something like that, but once version one was out there, it was paid.

Essentially it was pay walled in order to gain access, and I had some people going to it but not converting right away. So that gave me a little bit of an indication. I did a few other things to learn a little bit more, but I wanted to implement a free. Set up regardless. So that's what I've done. Now, when it comes to your free trial and how you manage that, there's a couple different options to consider.

There's, do I just let people gain access to the product seemingly immediately, and then if so, do I take any payment information and or when do I try to convert them? So these are related to those activation points that we've talked about a little bit before as well. Also, you're gonna want to get to know.

Where these are and how to design them so that you can create the optimal effective conversion experience that you're looking for for your B2B SaaS application. So for me, in this case, what I set up is I gave them a couple of days free trial to essentially have un un. Obstructed access to the application so they can use it as much as they'd like for a fixed period of time.

And I didn't ask for any type of payment info. And that should also lower the barrier to getting people into the product, which again, at the moment is my primary objective. I want people using it so that I can measure how much value they're getting out of it. How sticky it is, things like this, and I'm gonna lower the bar as much as I can within reason, in order to get users to that point in the experience so that I can start measuring that now after I've gotten people into the product via that mechanism.

Then it's gonna be a matter of measuring how many people ultimately convert. And depending on where you land, as in, do you capture payment information up front or do you not? When you begin a free trial, if you're considering adding one, the percentages are likely to be different, as in more people, I believe percentage wise, are typically likely to convert if you take payment information up front.

But that also might lead to a lower volume of people using your product. So the barrier to entry is going to be higher. Regardless, I wanted to go into some of these options for you so that you can consider what those might be and what might make the most sense for you. But when you are launching your product, one of the key objectives here that I want you to focus on is we need to get people into that experience so that we can measure how valuable it is for them.

We wanna be able to measure the relative strength of your value proposition so that we know whether or not you're on the right track.

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

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

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

After you launch, chances are you're going to become more aware of competitive products.  This is a good thing because it provides you with an opportunity to know how to respond and make your solution unique.

In this episode I also talk about how AI has changed the game and that more competition will be coming to market faster.  Learn more about what this means for B2B SaaS founders everywhere.

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 you should be approaching responding when you find new competitive options to what it is you are trying to bring to the market as a solution, perhaps in the format of a B2B SaaS. So I've already talked to you about. The fact that I've recently launched a new product, it is essentially for those that are managing podcasts, it helps you create show notes and things like that, and it does it in an automated way.

So one of the things to note is that due to AI and how basically chat G P T and tools like that and how incredible the functionality is relatively, relatively easy to use. The amount of functionality that they can bring relatively quickly. We're seeing a lot of products pop up that can, that are leveraging these AI tools to try to solve certain problems.

So the first thing to note is that anyone out there with a product that especially is starting new, more than likely there's gonna be other people working on that same problem and bringing a version. Of a solution similar to what it is that you're building to market now, faster and more frequently than ever.

So you're gonna be seeing more competition and less time. That's what I'm expecting. I'm expecting the AI tools to be providing those options to entrepreneurs everywhere. Number two, your response to the competition. Essentially should be the same as it should have been before. Number one, it's a good thing if people are bringing products, similar products to market.

It means that there's more than likely a demand for what it is you are trying to solve, meaning that you probably have found a pretty good problem worth solving. So that is a huge hurdle to C to kind of clear number one. The second component is your response essentially should be the same, uh, as it was before, just because there's more products and they're coming to market faster.

Doesn't mean that your approach should change. You need to figure out essentially what those products are doing and how your approach is unique and if it. Isn't unique and you need to figure out how to make it unique. You need to better, you need to be able to understand how to answer the question as best as possible.

When someone asks you, how are you different than X? Or How are you different than Y? So that's what I'm doing now. Now that I'm finding these new competitive products, which is partly what I was expecting as I opened up the tool that I was using to my network and early adopters, then they started giving me feedback.

What about this tool? What about that tool, et cetera. So, They're helping me perform this research and find other options that are either currently being sold to them or other options they're considering and have found themselves. So that's number one. The other element of it too, is that in order to make what you are doing more unique, there's different levers that you can pull in order to do that, right?

You can go deeper into your target market. You can go wider in terms of the functionality that you're offering, right? You need to better understand what it is your target market. And as specialized as that can get needs, and then you need to try to address those needs better than the way the competition ultimately is tempting to today.

The other thing to consider as well is that just because there's other products on the market, typically us as entrepreneurs and B2B SaaS founders are much more aware of those tools out there. Then our target market ultimately is. So if your market is huge, and I'm dabbling in podcasting, which is ridiculously big and growing.

Kind of a lot of those products can, uh, be successful simultaneously. But important to note here is what I would say is that your target market may not be aware of the other products on the market, so whomever you're trying to sell to, they might be relatively new to this game or they may not be aware of the other products on the market.

So, The reason why I mentioned that is because your real competition is their existing solution. And their existing solution might be them. It might be a process, it might be a service, right? It, it's not necessarily another tool. So couple things I want you to take away from this is that the bar has been lowered considerably in terms of what it takes to get a product to market that is more capable and to bring those products to market faster and probably offer them more cost effective as well too.

So competition is gonna rise considerably. I'll see a lot more innovation, a lot more products to market, but your process shouldn't change. Do the homework. Figure out what they do, what they don't do, and figure out which direction you can take your product to make yours unique or ultimately a one of one, or competing in much smaller, uh, competing in a market where you are the obvious choice, essentially.

That's kind of your end result goal. But the other thing to keep in mind is what your target market is ultimately consider. Your competition, and that might not be one of these other products. It might just be a process or some type of steps that they're following.

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

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

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

After you launch, users may or may not convert at certain points in the process.  These are called 'activation points'.  You'll need to learn them as users are navigating the product experience.  Once you learn them, you'll know what other information you'll need to improve the effectiveness at which they convert.

I'll share an example of what I'm doing currently for another product I just launched.

Hotjar - https://www.hotjar.com/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how to better understand your activation points and gather feedback in particularly around the why. I'll explain more, but what I mean by that, in order to figure out how to get your prospects and your users to become paying customers as efficiently as possible now, so I've launched another B2B SaaS application this past week.

There's some things that I probably would've really liked to have upon launching or with the launch, but didn't wanna slow down the launch, and I really wanted to see how effectively what I had built was converting as such. It didn't include like a free trial, which these days is pretty uncommon for a low-touch micro SaaS product.

However, upon launching it, I did get about 10%. Once I, once I launched, I had a, you know, built up an email list from the, from the inbound, uh, lead capture that I had set up. I blasted that list to let them know we launched products available. Here's where you can register for an account and get started.

About 10% of that list immediately went to the site and attempted to create an account. Most of them did not convert to paying customers. So that's what gave me the initial indication that probably not going to, most of them probably will not convert into paying customers without a free trial access to the product.

So I knew I needed to do that, but. I didn't know, you know, for sure I had suspicion, I should say, at least that was the assumption. Uh, from there it was doing what I needed to do to figure out why people potentially weren't making it past that activation point because they were getting to the product, they were registering the user.

Then I was looking for billing information to see if they would to using a ping to basically converting their count to paying right away. So I was really measuring the strength and the intensity of the pain of the problem. My product was intended to solve for them. So anyway, long story short, most people had not converted.

So I, I wanted to do multiple things. Number one, I wanted to figure out what it was gonna take in order to convert them. And number two, I wanted to try to find out why they weren't converting. Maybe that was the reason, maybe it wasn't. My suspicion was that they wanted access to test the product for themselves before they ultimately paid for it, which is again, become more common.

I leverage a tool called HotJar. If you're unfamiliar, you could find more out about [email protected]. It's an analytics tool. I think it's great. It does everything from screen recording to heat maps, to allowing you to inject surveys right into your application and also at certain steps in the process.

And that's what I find to be really valuable is I can create a specific type of survey. In this case, I created a feedback survey. At that activation point where I was expecting to gather some billing information from the users, that's when they were expected to convert. If they would, in order to learn more about why they maybe were or were not converting.

So if they weren't converting, there's a possibility that I could start to collect feedback at that. At that point in the experience for them by including that survey there, and really what you're looking for is the qualitative feedback. Like people can click on buttons for surveys and stuff like that and answer the closed ended questions, but I really wanted the open-ended text and I'm looking to get some now in order to get a better understanding.

Why people at that point aren't converting. Now, either way, I'm implementing a free trial anyway, cuz I also wanna see whether or not that moves the needle here. But I wanted to share with you a couple things. Number one, upon launching, its figuring out where your activation points are, as in what gets your prospect perspective.

Customer end users moved from one stage to the next stage in the process. And you'll map it out in your head essentially in the beginning, but then you're gonna have. Measure the effectiveness of that and figure out if the process may be broken or not. Converting all that effectively at some point in that process.

And then you're gonna wanna focus in on that one just like you would a bottleneck and a process to figure out how to alleviate or eliminate it. So I'm sharing with you also some ideas in terms of how you can gather more information to try to find out why they are or are not converting. Uh, so I use both email with some of the users that I know had attempted.

Access the system as well as Hot Jar, which I think is a really great tool, and I'll include a link to it in the show notes as well.

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

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

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

You've worked so hard to launch and were excited to be the only product on the market, right?

Wrong.  You will find competition all over the place.  More will come and go.  Finding competition is a GOOD thing.  You just need to know how to react to use it to your advantage.

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

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk about is basically the, the time when you ultimately launch your B2B SaaS and all the emotions that you might going through while managing that. So I've launched a B2B SaaS product this week and podcasting, and it, you know, was going well so far. I had a bunch of people that had originally signed up from my landing page that was communicating to my target market, my value proposition.

And confirming supposedly what they would pay once the product became available. So one of the first things I did once we launched V1 was to send a blast email to all them, Hey, heads up, we launched. You can get access to the product. Then I've watched, as people have attempted to onboard themselves, I've understood where the activation points, or I'm getting a better idea for where the activation points are, which essentially.

People moving from one stage to the next isn't a prospect to a paying customer or, uh, you know, an interested party to a user to get a better understanding in which levers I might move in order to move people along in the process and try to convert them into a paying customer. Ideally, a happy paying customer, one that's receiving value.

Long story short, these are always exciting weeks. I enjoy them very much, but there's a lot that goes through your head emotionally, and that's kind of what I wanna talk about because at the same time this week as I launched and as I am sharing my product with my network as well too, which is another great way to get feedback by the way, especially for an early stage product, is someone shared with me feedback on my product after they tried it and used.

And they said it's better than so-and-so product. So this week I learned about another competitive product in the same space that someone in my network was using, and they gave me, they gave me props for mine being better, which is great. But I also found out about a competitor, which I want to talk to you about how you should feel about that as well too.

That is also great. But in the moment it's easy to have a reaction along the lines. Oh no. Like someone beat me to the punch or someone has a head start or someone has a better product, or someone is offering more than I am, right? That's a natural reaction that's gonna happen to you, especially after you've worked hard to build what it is you've built.

Launched your SaaS product and found out there's another one out there that does something similar, if not the same thing. I want to tell you why that's not the end of the world. Number one. Competition is almost always a good thing.  rising tide raises all ships, as they say. It also validates a market. So if you, depending on how, where you are in the innovation curve, as in how innovative your product is, finding out that there are other solutions to solve the problems that you're trying to solve for your target market is a good thing, especially if you know they have traction, because that indicates the, that the opportunity is there and the demand as well.

So that should help you ultimately.  everything you're trying to do. So in the end of the, at the end, at the end of the day, that's definitely a good thing. But I could understand if your reaction is one of surprise, you know, you get a little bit, feel, maybe a little bit intimidated, that's all natural. But when you boil it down to brass tacks, ultimately that's a good thing.

And it also provides an opportunity for you to learn what are they doing? How are they marketing? What, what are they communicating? Who are they marketing themselves? And then you get into a routine and a process of understanding those things and then incorporating them into your process from the perspective of how are we differentiated, right?

How do we make sure that what we're doing is better, faster, cheaper, et cetera. It's the same thing. , as I talk about when we're doing the discovery work that you should do when you find out about competitors, you just need to figure out who your target market is and how you are solving their problems better than any other product out there.

And that should always be what you're striving for. But over time, inevitably you're gonna find other competitive products, some that you may have been aware of, some that you may not have, and new ones are gonna come, and old ones are gonna go. So this change is just gonna happen. Only, the only thing you really need to worry about is to incorporate that into part of your routine of continuously figuring out how to make your product better for your target market.

So anyway, I just wanted to share with you some of the emotional reactions you might go through during launch week, especially as you start to learn more about. What your market looks like, because once you put a product out there and you're getting feedback, especially from friendlies and early adapters, they're gonna be sharing these things with you, and it's gonna be really great insight for you to know, and it can help you learn and make your product that much better.

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

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

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

It's easy to get stuck in the trap of 'perfecting' your product and delaying your launch.

I almost fell into that trap this week with the launch of my new B2B SaaS.  Instead, saner heads prevailed and I launched.

Here's the story and why it's important to understand this concept.

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

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how to get yourself out of your own way so that you can launch, stop obsessing over the little minor details, get your product out there into the hands of users and customers, and start testing it for real. So I mentioned this because I've launched a new SaaS this week, and while there are a billion things that I would love to change already  and before I launched, I resisted the urge to want to do that because at this point I should know better.

You would think then, you know, I still had a place to track all those things. We're using a project management system. Trello got all the things that I think might be worthwhile to change about the product experience, but I didn't let the vast majority of those stop the process of us actually launching.

So the question is, the reason for this is because it's very easy to get caught in this as a trap. This is like the perfectionist trap, as I typically refer to it as in my product experience is never ready. It has to be perfect, has to be tested a billion times, has to throw zero errors, or has the potential to throw zero errors.

Nothing needs to be wrong with this thing By the time that I'm launch  now, I get it. If you've been here, I've been here. And it is still something you always have to do your best to try to keep in check. Having said that, anything that goes beyond what I typically call launching at 75%, like we always ship at 75%, is to try to avoid falling into the strap because you can be stuck here forever, as in perfecting a product is not really a thing that's even theoretically possible in my mind.

So you can continually. Adding features and making tweaks and changing the user experience indefinitely. And that what that's gonna mean is that you never launch your product, you never get feedback, and you're not unable to move past that step. So having done that this week with a recent product that I launched, I'm gonna share with you what happened.

Probably relatively obviously, some things broke, right? But we didn't panic. What did we do? We triaged it, we figured out what wasn't working and we fixed it. That was literally all that happened. But the good news is that we launched and we figured out what was broken, and some of that stuff that was broken past the testing that we had already done, we probably wouldn't have caught it had we not launched the product.

So ultimately we got to where we wanted to go faster because we launched. So I'm always an advocate for launching sooner than you feel comfortable. If you feel comfortable about launching, you're probably launching too late, and I want you to leverage these strategies and keep these things in the back of your mind when you're thinking about launching your product.

Because you can get stuck in these traps. You can get stuck in these loops forever. . Ultimately, all that matters is you're gonna pay attention, you're gonna learn things, and you're gonna figure out it isn't perfect. It's not expected to be, it's never going to be. So try to temper your expectations when it comes to your product experience and realize that for the best of your product and your customers and users, you want to get it in their hands as soon as possible.

because number one, ultimately the goal here is to validate whether or not it's providing with the kind of value that you think that it can, and the longer you wait to do. The greater the risk of failure for your overall entire project. But number two, and potentially more importantly related to this lesson, you're gonna figure out what isn't working and you're gonna fix it because that's exactly what you're planning to do as you're building and managing your product along the way.

So that's a lesson than I want you to take away from this today. I've done it myself. It's an easy trap to fall into, but don't let yourself fall into it. Just think through methodically the fact. You wanna get your product out there and enhance the customers so you can start performing validation and the fact that you're gonna pay attention and the stuff that you find you're gonna fix.

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AI tools are great for building a product that can do more even faster, but the BIGGEST problem in B2B SaaS remains and are actually getting worse.

People are shipping products that don't offer value at a faster pace now because they aren't doing the most important step first - finding problems worth solving.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey everyone, Sean here, and today what I wanna talk to you about is how AI tools are taking one particular problem of designing, building, launching a B2B SaaS product and actually making it worse. So a lot, there's a lot of buzz about what the AI tools are capable of and how remarkable that is, and that's all great.

I think one of the strengths of these AI tools is that it gives us. The ability to do a lot more with a lot less because the tools are so capable themselves. However, it doesn't fix what ultimately, I believe, to be the biggest problem with people who want to design and build a successful B2B SaaS business.

And to me, that's the finding a problem worth solving challenge. Many people are still struggling with that, and the problem with these AI tools is it's easier to move faster and to design a product with even better capabilities, but it's not solving that problem's worth solving challenge for you. So what people are doing, what I'm seeing more of on online communities like Reddit and things like that, that I'm subscribed to, I'm seeing people shipping new product ideas faster, but with worse or just as bad product market.

As they had before. So I'm, what I'm largely seeing is a higher frequency of people rushing potential products to market that don't address a need. They don't address an obvious unmet need. They don't address a problem worth solving. They're just ideas without any validation. So the AI tools are not doing that step for you, and in my opinion, that step is the most important step that people are still continuing.

So just because you can build a product faster doesn't mean that that necessarily is gonna increase your odds of success in my. , if you were gonna invest time into any part of this process. It's the upfront component. It's always the upfront component. Doing that research and discovery to make sure that you're solving a problem that has a real need, and many of these products just don't.

So for folks that are posting on these communities about these products that they've just built, they're getting a lot of feedback along the lines of, I don't understand this. This doesn't really seem to. Kind of value or I don't get it. I don't know what this product does, or there's this other product which is cheaper, fast, or better or free even.

So those things tell me that people are not doing the, just the basics in research before they're rushing these products to market. Because probably the fact that the AI tools are just making that much easier. Build stuff, right? And just because you can build something quickly again doesn't mean that it's going to be valuable.

You really need to focus on this value component in order to kind of have the success that I'm sure you're really looking for. So now, if you're just experimenting and learning the AI tools, I get it. But what I'd really rather you do is I'd rather you continue to search for something with more potential that can address an obvious unmet.

That can provide a solution to a problem worth solving, and then leverage the right tools as you move forward with figuring out how you can bring a better solution to market. Ideally, leveraging something I talk about a lot as well too, which is the 10 x effect. How can you, how can your solution be 10 times better, faster, cheaper?

One or more of those categories, that's going to give you a significant leg up on the competition as well, which will enable you to grow with a little bit more virality. So anyway, I just wanted to get that message out there because I'm seeing a lot of that online. I think it's making a bad problem worse, and I think a lot more people should be focusing on problems or solving than just rushing products to market because they can do so faster now.

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There's been a TON of buzz around AI tools since ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, but what I want to focus on is the wave of innovation this is going to bring as more innovators incorporate AI tools into their B2B SaaS products.

The new gold rush is on, are you going to be able to keep up?

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Episode Transcript
 Okay folks, Sean here, and today what I'm gonna talk to you about is the new Cold Rush, and of course this topic is gonna involve ai, but I promise you it's not only going to focus exclusively on open AI's chat, G P T. What I want you to focus on is the fact that the bar has been raised. And what I mean by that is minimum level of requirements in terms of getting into and building B2B SaaS products has essentially been lowered considerably.

Uh, in terms of being able to build something rather complicated, significantly faster because of these AI tools. And what I mean by the bar has been raised, it's the expectations, the level of competition, and in particular the time to market that these tools are capable of now, based on what these AI components can enable you to do.

So I'm leveraging it to build several products, seemingly at once at the moment. Several of which are essentially related to one another. But the point remains that with the AI tools, we're able to create significant progress in a really short period of time because of its capabilities. So I just read something recently that said that Y Combinator, the current class for Y Combinator, about half or maybe even more than half of the companies that are participating in this cohort are building tools around open ai.

Or AI-based tools like Chat, G P T, which is pretty significant. It's been a while since essentially cohorts like that have been focused around a single piece of technology in order to do what they're doing. So there's been some pretty dramatic changes happening here, and this is all happening very quickly.

I saw another statistic today which said that open AI in, in their chat, G P T tool, essentially is not just one of the.  biggest, like most revolutionary developments, and quite a while, at least the latest generation of these tools. But in terms of how quickly it's growing, it's growing at an exponential rate when compared with previous other leap forwards in progress.

I've been tracking how long it's taken for user for it to get to a certain threshold of active usage, and I saw the statistic recently that.  ChatGPT's tool reached 1 million users in five days, which is just crazy. It's hard for me to fathom that number. The next closest was Instagram more than 10 years ago, and it took two and a half months to do the same thing.

The latest threshold of information that I've seen is related to reaching a hundred million users worldwide. Chat GPT has been able to accomplish that in two. Less than what it took Instagram to get to 1 million users, got to a hundred times more, which is just maddening. Um, this is like crazy numbers.

The next closest in that list was the Apple App Store, and that took two years. So what I really want you to focus on as part of what I'm talking about here is that the new Gold Rush is on. We're gonna see wave after wave of new innovative products come to market as these tools become even more accessible and people are able to accelerate their development.

So if you're not thinking about incorporating these tools into your product at the moment, you really should be, especially if they can help you do more with less, move faster in product development. That's the idea, right? I don't want people to rush into product development. You need to still properly validate that you have a problem worth solving, but when the time comes to be able to do.

Whatever your product and solution needs to offer these Open A, these AI tools are gonna give you a significant ability to have an advantage over not having access to them, because you should be able to enable your tool to be capable of more in significantly less development time, which should also reduce your costs and time to market.

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