Morning all,
This is going to be the third blog I’m doing some work on – in the same morning!
I didn’t anticipate that happening – but I feel like writing so here we go:
I’m in the process of trying to launch yet another SaaS product and I want to talk about my journey with my launch.
At the moment I’m in the midst of launching Serpwizz and it’s been such an education for me that I figured I’d walk you through my strategy for growth (we’ll see how it plays out in time):
Table of Contents
Determine your level of commitment
So there’s one product I’m working upon at the moment (Resume Cats) that isn’t connected to my actual revenue-generating work with my agency.
Because of this – the success of Pearl Lemon (or vice versa) has no impact upon the potential success of Resume Cats.
For this reason I’m already recognising that my level of commitment to the project is lower than it is for my other projects.
To underline what I mean:
The passive growth of Pearl Lemon as an agency will support the growth of SERPWizz. Vice versa as well – the growth of SERPWIZZ will ultimately support the growth of Pearl Lemon.
The tool is ultimately designed for agencies to take advantage of – but there’ll also be many companies in need of SEO who will discover SERPWIZZ as well.
So with this in mind – the growth of the product will support the agency and vice versa.
Because of this…I have a high level of commitment when it comes to building this tool.
This is critical – and something I never gave due consideration to previous tools I’ve built.
Because this leads to a:
Cross-Pollination Of Effort And Growth
It’s worth diving into this in some more detail –
Currently, I’m working upon (and aggressively so) the growth of Pearl Lemon’s website traffic.
We’re building links, doing PR outreach and writing content on a regular basis. We’re also sending out 100s of cold emails per day.
This is not going to stop anytime soon, and there are structures in place to support this ongoing activity for the foreseeable future.
With this in mind – it stands to reason (especially given we’re an SEO agency) that this time next year we’ll see ideally a 20-50% growth in traffic (hopefully much more).
Consequently – the audience this will drive – can immediately along the way be introduced to SERPWIZZ.
That’s of huge benefit as it’s a very related tool – and we also get agencies regularly looking at us online.
Inversely – the same applies to SERPWIZZ – right now we’re doing a product launch on Pitchground which is what we’re using as an opportunity to get some initial product feedback, work on improving the tool and then continuing to grow it subsequently
So the growth of Serpwizz will also lead to the growth of Pearl Lemon over time.
Get As Far As You Can By Yourself
I wish I’d done this sooner with everything I’d launched –
Building out as much as I could alone.
It’ll only make your value proposition that much stronger and enable you to hire a better team, get better partners and to get a better product.
In my instance, as a non-technical person – this could include the following:
- The company name
- Company logo
- Landing page + 20-50 blogs
- Wireframes for the tool
- Competitor analysis
- Potentially the site design once the wireframes are built
- Turning the design into a clickable prototype
- Getting potential customer feedback
- Making 3-20 pre-sales
- Beginning to build pre-signups
- Putting together some projections, a scope of responsibility
This is what I absolutely recommend as being absolutely critical of producing before you launch any product whatsoever.
It’ll provide you with a huge amount of market validation and insight which will be critical to your success.
Get Ready To Play The Long Game
Growing a business takes time. Growing ANYTHING takes time.
It’s important to give an idea two years from the moment the tool launches to really get a sense of where it can go.
Less than that and it won’t simply have enough time to really start producing results.
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As I’ve grown in experience I’ve realised the truth of this.
Expecting my blog to blow up overnight – wrong
The content I write today is going to serve me in 12-18 months time.
The value is going to be in the backend.
The front-end is all hard work and elbow grease without too much reward – but it does all pay off.
So if you can come into whatever you build with that mindset – you’re much more likely to succeed.
Copy The Already Successful
Whilst no two launches are exactly the same – it definitely pays to look at how the same or similar tools have launched and try and repeat success.
This is where sites such as Product Hunt, Hacker Noon, Betalist, and the multiple other indie type launch sites come into play.
Having a look at what everybody else has done and seeing if doing the same works for you is something we don’t do enough.
Especially if you can identify those who saw viral growth and try and replicate growth in a similar manner.
With each of those platforms I’ve outlined – there are multiple processes online that you can look towards that map out exactly how to run a successful launch on said platform.
So it’ll pay to try and look at each of these launch guides and ultimately try and copy them one by one in a bid to see how well you do.
Become A Media Organization
This might sound silly, but the importance of content over time cannot be underestimated.
So if you’re going to be playing the long game, then look at YouTube and Blog content on a regular basis to help support the growth of the business.
Batch producing this content and then scheduling it out over time is something that ideally you can do and then ‘set and forget’ about it as you watch it potentially grow.
I’m seeing the value of tons of YouTube content produced for the Pearl Lemon brand that’s been recorded over the years – and now we’ve got a system in place to regularly repurpose the Friday training that happens internally.
Establish A Rapid Customer Acquisition Strategy
The fastest way to do this is probably through running ads – so looking at building a funnel to support this growth via building a lead-funnel.
I’m currently watching a lot of Russel Brunson content to try and put something together that could scale.
So the thesis might be that – I offer with (for example) Serpwizz (an SEO Audit tool)
- Email outreach cheat sheets to secure Ridiculously high DA backlinks
- The pre-set killer Ahrefs keyword strategy that most people don’t know about
- The 1 way to get god-level like on-page SEO values for your content
- How to use SERPWIZZ to win clients and win business over 1-phone call
I could stack this ALL with SERPWIZZ paid access and this would be an example of what I could sell in an annual training pack alongside SERPWIZZ itself
OR I could stack this into one of the paid plans.
Something like this, and running ads to it would be alot more effective than running ads to the tool alone – because you aloso want to give people a system for success.
Final Thoughts
These are some of the latest thoughts I’ve on how to launch a successful SaaS product.
It’s important to outline that I’ve not yet achieved this goal – and that I’m working to make my current projects successful – and these are the means I’m using.
So do take the ideas from here that you think make sense and start baking them into your next SaaS product.
Good luck!
