Slow growth and few customers aren’t bad for SaaS apps, and 3 more lessons

Photo credit: dedivan1923 / 123RF Stock Photo.

After the inception of Basecamp (formerly known as 37signals) and Salesforce, there has been a constant flood of SaaS apps.

In my first post here, I talked about business tips being myths. If you do a Google search on how to market your SaaS apps, you will find tens of thousands of posts like “Do these 10 things to make an eight-figure business.” But it’s really not that simple.

It’s the same as articles titled, “Learn to program in 10 days.” That’s stupid. You can’t learn programming or anything in just 10 days. It’s impossible. You can learn “Hello, world!” or basic code, but you won’t understand programming completely. Peter Norvig wrote a very famous article on this.

The same concept applies to your SaaS business as well: every product/business is unique and every product needs to have a story. You need to understand that B2B products always have a longer conversion cycle. It requires a good amount of time to understand the market as well as customer needs.

Here’s what I really learned about marketing SaaS products by building two of my own (UVdesk and QLO).

What I’m going to share are real experiences, not one-shot advice. However, what worked for me in these situations may not work for your business at all.

Educating your customers/users

If you are creating something, say, a TV, you know that almost every person is aware of what a TV is, so it’s nothing new. Of course, there are changes happening in the space, but for sure everyone is aware of what your product is.

Unlike TVs, my SaaS product, UVdesk is an ecommerce-driven helpdesk system. How would anyone know what the heck that is? Is it a kind of lamp? (Funny isn’t it? Not really!) I won’t go into the details of the app’s nomenclature, but the idea is that your product should have a story. But even then, people may not be aware of how it works.

So, your first job is to educate the user on how your product really works and what kind of pain point it solves. There can be various ways of educating customers. Here are some examples:

• Video explanations: These are quite effective. We have built tons of videos and we’re still creating more.
• User guides: Sounds old, right? Maybe, but it does work. The important factor is the position of the user guide. You need to provide the user guide on demand. It doesn’t need a different repository or anything. Let me share an example: As you can see in the below image, when Mr. Rajesh is going to create a workflow, he can see associated information directly after it.

• Personalized product explanations: But even after so much material has been shared, some users still don’t understand how your product works. That’s why you must have a complete, personalized demo of your product. I know it’s time-consuming, but you need to do it. Here’s a sample demo we created.

Integrations with different platforms

Regular content marketing and sharing

Slow is good, less is awesome