In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Niclas Lilja, CEO of Yoonium, joins host Phil Alves to discuss a wide range of topics, from keeping your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) simple to early growth strategies and scaling outwards from a narrow customer profile.

Niclas Lilja is the Founder and CEO of Younium, an automation subscription management SaaS. He has over seventeen years of experience in product development, management, and marketing.

Guest at a Glance:

Name: Niclas Lilja

What he Does: Niclas Lilja is the Founder and CEO of Younium. He has led production and marketing teams in his previous roles. Younium is a six-year-old startup founded in Stockholm, Sweden. 

• 
  Niclas Lilja on LinkedIn
• Younium on LinkedIn
• Niclas’s Book Recommendation Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap While Others Don’t by Jim Collins

Topics we cover:

• 
  Birthing a Saas
• Keeping a Tight Control on MVP Scope
• Early Growth Strategies
• Catering to a Niche and Scaling Outwards

Highlights:

The Birth of an Idea and Validating it

Niclas shares how the idea of automating subscription management stems from one of his tasks in a previous role where, among other things, he was responsible for managing the subscription portfolio of the company. It was a tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating manual process. The desire to automate subscription management was the birth of his startup idea. Niclas shared his idea with his peers in other companies and discovered that the desire was universal.

“Using your peers in other companies as a sounding board is the initial first-hand research”.  

Keep Your MVP Light on Design and Engineering

When designing the MVP, keep a tunnel vision of your first three customers' needs; don’t think of serving 10,000 customers. Above all, you need to make sure that the product works. The way to do this is to keep a tight rein on design and engineering complexities and focus on the product's core solution. 

“We went for a basic and pragmatic first version; we went with something we knew while avoiding new things initially”.

Early Growth Strategies

Niclas started promoting the initial version at B2B industry meetups. The approach helped get in front of potential clients and build a contact network. It was also valuable for getting feedback in real-time. Attending meetups ran parallel to hard cold-calling to identify new leads. 

“In the beginning, you don’t need 100 meetings. You only need to catch a few relevant prospects in a friendly environment”.  

Go Vertical Before Branching out Horizontally

Niclas feels it was smart to identify a target niche in the B2B space and develop a product for it. He followed the same logic in his GTM strategy. The product evolved with vertical growth in the niche before broadening the scope of the ideal customer profile. The ensuing growth was more stable without the constant effort of trying to be everything to everyone.

“If we hadn’t been hard about a granular definition of our ICP, we might not have been here today”.