Toronto business and franchise lawyer, Sukhi Hansra, of Hansra Law, shares industry insights on how to launch your SaaS start-up.
According to CNBC, Shopify, Canada’s largest publicly traded and most successful SaaS company, raked in a profit of $250 million US dollars in 2020. Financial success stories like Shopify’s founder and CEO Tobia Lütke showcase how lucrative Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are.
The easy accessibility of cloud networks, as well as product and revenue scalability, make SaaS start-ups a viable business option for experienced and budding entrepreneurs looking to venture into the tech space. As with all new businesses, there are pre-launch factors that require strategic consideration.
Here are 5 leading industry insights to help successfully launch your SaaS company.
5 Tips to Successfully Launch Your SaaS
1. Identify and Understand Your Buyer Matrix
A buyer matrix is a customer-centric marketing approach, positioning your service as a solution to customers’ current pain points. Thorough market research provides valuable business acumen to differentiate your product and leverage its unique value to maximize competitive advantage.
Customers inherently purchase products and services because they solve specific problems. A data-driven buyer matrix facilitates a variety of measurable objectives used by businesses to reach their revenue goals. It helps define how your service offers excellent value and provides your customers with a new or better solution to an existing market problem.
2. Beta Test Your Idea with a Minimum Viable Product
All start-ups should be lean and agile to remain cost-effective. The use of minimum viable products (MVPs) guarantees a high ROI backed by hard data evidence. Before you launch your SaaS, it’s advisable to release a basic version for initial testing, troubleshooting and feedback.
Ideally, your test rubric at the MVP stage should asses; functionality, user experience, performance and load testing, compatibility on multiple devices, security and service management.
Developing MVP guarantees what Frank Robinson, the president of SyncDev, one of the world’s leading product development companies, calls “synchronous development.” This ensures your product’s continued improvements still meet the needs of the customers you hope to acquire.
3. Set Up a Scalable Pricing Model
There are several ways to set up pricing for profit growth like per-feature or tiered-pricing models. Regardless of the model, your pricing should continuously evolve in tandem with your growing business. It’s widespread knowledge that higher pricing generates market value perception, while cheaper prices raise suspicions.
Ideal pricing should reflect the maximum amount that the majority of your target audience is willing to pay for the value you offer. Importantly, when you launch your SaaS, your initial price offering should be easy-to-scale, which can be determined from data gathered during market research and beta testing.
4. Develop a Strong Brand
Most SaaS companies fail because they don’t market their unique value propositions effectively. However, you first need to develop your brand before marketing your product. A brand is more than a logo or website. To paraphrase the iconic British advertising tycoon, David Ogilvy, a brand is a complex symbol and lens through which consumers make lifestyle choices.
It is your company’s most valuable asset because it assists your business drive commercial value. A powerful brand has a strong story and encompasses your company’s vision, mission, value and objectives. In an age of Digital Darwinism, you must consider how your brand connects to your customers and how its design has scope to evolve in the future.
5. Measure Your Marketing Strategy With a CRM
Digital marketing is a complex ecosystem with a sole aim achieved through multiple approaches. The number one goal is to qualify leads and obtain conversions. Nowadays, most SaaS businesses adopt a multi-pronged strategy. They implement a range of tactics to market their services online such as targeted email campaigns and pay-per-click advertising.
Online advertising provides a global reach and, consequently, an increase in customer data to analyze. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems offer a convenient way to synthesize and manage customer relationships. CRM software tracks sales management, productivity, potential lead information and automates data allowing businesses to tweak their marketing campaigns in real-time. When you launch your SaaS, you want to ensure you’re using analytics to pivot your marketing material for early customer acquisition effectively.
Conclusion
Strong business acumen and detailed planning go hand-in-hand when creating a new business. Before launching, you should have confirmation backed by data that there is a market willing to pay for your product. To successfully launch your SaaS you need to understand your customers’ pain points, test with an MVP, scale your pricing correctly, develop a distinct brand and have your marketing strategy and data management systems ready from the get-go.
Prosperous businesses possess the agility to keep their numerous moving parts in motion, always integrating market feedback and evolving to remain relevant in competitive markets.
The launch of your SaaS can be the start of a lucrative business journey if planned properly and executed with your customers first in mind. An experienced Business Lawyer with experience in Technology Law can help you launch your SaaS startup and get your business off the ground.
A good first step would be to speak to someone who has been through it, or someone who has helped others purchase and sell businesses – such as a Business Lawyer or Business Broker.
Toronto Business and Technology Lawyer: Helping Innovators Build the Business of Their Dreams
Hansra Law provides the legal and business guidance to take your goals and priorities and show you how to bring them to reality. To discuss your SaaS or other business law issues, contact to schedule a free consultation with Sukhi Hansra at (416) 580-0345.
