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Traction Trumps Everything – How to get traction for your SaaS product

A wise and successful entrepreneur once said, “Traction trumps everything”.

Indeed, traction is the only thing that brings you customers, VCs, and energy to keep going.

iSPIRT in partnership with PuneConnect & SEAP organized a playbook roundtable on “Getting traction for your product startup”. It was focused on peer to peer learning and taking away real feedback, rather than just typical “general gyaan”. The playbook roundtable was moderated by two very successful SaaS product entrepreneurs Niraj Rout of Hiver (earlier known as GrexIt), and Rushabh Mehta of ERPNext. Both are building highly successful SaaS products bringing very different approaches/strategies yet finding great synergy in their thought processes. Hiver is a simple-to-use product for business workflows, fast growing, young, funded and profitable startup whereas ERPNext is a highly complex, very stable, bootstrapped, profitable, world’s second opensource Saas ERP product.

The RT discussion was attended by founders building SaaS products in Innovation, eCommerce, business communication, personal customer loyalty, education, personal finance, recruitment, fashion and technology domain.

SaaS Valley of Death: Rushabh got our attention right away by asking “Do you know SaaS Valley of Death?” Its like your product is complex to use and cheap at price. Its very very difficult to sale. You can be either very simple to use and cheap or you can be highly complicated and pricey. You can’t be cheap and complicated. But ERPNext falls in that category. Rushabh briefly shared his long haul journey of 8 years of building a product out of his own need and making it open source for people to use/modify it. ERPNext gives it at fairly low price to host it and charges additional for product consultancy.

Open-Source strategy: Rushabh realised that if such a complex product has to have innovation, then hiring talent is quite difficult. Instead making it open-source brings immediate advantages such as your users brings innovation, it is easy to hire from the developers community which already knows your product code, less efforts needed to support the product as your community is your biggest support structure. Recently, this trend has started by major tech companies like facebook, google and others by making their api’s open-source for community to play around and bring true innovation. Also interesting to say here that open source is more than a marketing strategy, you have to believe in it to work. Also companies are open sourcing not just APIs but also entire projects (Apple just joined with Swift)

User Onboarding:  It is very easy to get signups, but what happens after signup is the crucial one. The real game begins from sign up onwards. Rushabh at ERPNext created a great user onboarding workflow for various categories of users. At signup, ERPNext asks its user several questions to understand user and his/her needs. Accordingly, it customises the rest of the onboarding flow. This “personalized” flow helps user to connect and understand ERPNext quite easily. There are several videos created for user to educate about product features and uncover true benefits. “Founding/Core team has to take product to a initial revenue level, until then one should not make a mistake of hiring a sales person”, insisted Rushabh. This helps you build and quickly tweak/change onboarding flow as your know your users better. This also helps in positioning and marketing the product better.

Product Market fit:  Niraj of Hiver (GrexIt) shared his journey of conceptualising the product as knowledge management place (for enterprises) to pivoting to tap a SME segment where quick workflow matters. Its all about finding a product-market fit. On a lean methodology which suggests to work with your customers and tune the product, Niraj shared a good observation. If you talk to your customers, they will always suggest small incremental improvements/suggestions, customers can never give you extraordinary (or 10X) innovation. Its your vision that defines what your product could actually do. However it’s essential to understand how users are using the product and what key activities they are doing repeatedly.

Buyer’s mindset:  For a product, you have to understand whether it helps user generate money or save money. Does your product falls into cost center or revenue center, accordingly you have to create your marketing campaigns and positioning.

Simple Growth hacks:  Startups don’t have big pockets to spend on marketing/sales. Simple techniques like Your domain specific keywords, Search Engine Optimization, Influential bloggers write about your product, your customers talking and referring your product are a few simple growth hacks every startup can try. Always get real customer’s/brand’s testimonials and showcase them on key pages.

Critical choices:  In the initial days when you don’t have traction, its an important call whether you want to give it to a few people and learn and tweak the product or you just throw it in the space for thousands to use and let them figure out. Both have their own pros-cons.

Post Lunch session, Niraj and Rushabh encouraged every startup to showcase their product’s landing page and quick onboarding workflow. Duo and other founders provided critical feedback to individual founders with immediate actionable takeaway. It was a great peer-to-peer learning exercise. Below is a summary of what came out of the discussion that generically applies to most SaaS product startups.

Landing page:  Product’s landing page is the most critical real estate. Be innovative and build it wisely with new/current trends. A few examples of well designed landing pages were discussed. Products from 37Signals (Basecamp and KnowYourCompany) were highlighted for their innovative approaches. Like Steve Jobs once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, you need not to always reinvent the wheel, just see the best products in your category and steal (find inspiration)!

A few tips for a well designed landing page –

1) The main image and punchline should be appropriate for user to understand your product quickly. Thats where user decides whether I should scroll down (to know more).

2) Always talk about benefits user will get, nobody cares about features.

3) More than 3-4 scroll is overdone. Have only essential information upfront so that user is not overwhelmed with information overdose.

4) Testimonials from real user/brands works great, people feel more comfortable.

5) Less verbose, more visual is always better.

After Signup (User onboarding):  Engaging with user for first few days and making personalized communication helps build rapport as well as improve stickiness.

1) Build a user friendly Quick tour with an option to quit and restart

2) Let user experience your product as quickly as possible

3) Videos or user guides “How to” are essential and helpful

4) Website and user behavior analytics tools like Google analytics, KissMetrics, Mixpanel provide good data know your users better and make appropriate changes in your product

5) Intercom like products helps you build user behavioral based engagement

6) Provide triggers/incentives to appeal user to perform certain actions. Nir Eyal’s HOOK framework  (Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment) was briefly mentioned to emphasise the point.

7) Your product is a leaky bucket, user may fall off anytime. Identify such holes and fill them up with creative solutions

7) You don’t have to be too generous with free plan. Start asking for money (plan upgrade) for valuable/exclusive features

8) Track analytics daily to know traffic to trial to paid customers journey

9) Always do A/B testing of every change/tweak you make to understand how its working.

10) Understand, there is always a churn. Account for that

11) Always promote long term (annual payment) plans, it gives you better visibility on your revenue. 

As traction book says, “Almost every failed startup has a product, what failed products don’t have are enough customers (traction)” and “Traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines the startup”.

This playbook RT was first of its kind where only real stuff was discussed and critical feedback was provided to every startup on their product traction leaky bucket. All startup founders walked out with several actionable takeaways.

There are great SaaS product startups coming from India. The successful entrepreneurs like Niraj and Rushabh have vigor to share their learnings and help budding entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes and leapfrog their journey. This is a movement to build a product nation, one roundtable at a time.

Guest post by Abhijit Mhetre founder at Canvazify – a structured innovation platform for teams to collect, brainstorm, and act on ideas. Abhijit is passionate about startups and collaborative innovation. Follow Abhijit @abmhetre

Getting Traction for Product Startups #Pune #PuneConnect2015

This PlaybookRT will focus on “Getting traction for Product Startups“.  The PlaybookRT is facilitated by Rushabh Mehta(ERPNext) & Niraj Ranjan Rout(GrexIt/Hiver) and will be done at PuneConnect 2015

A Brief Overview

– Startup phases: All startups go through similar phases. A useful framework can be the chart that is put-up at Y-Combinator showing the different phases.
– Market segments: Product has to wait a long time before it goes from early adopters to mainstream users (Crossing the Chasm)

Demos and Feedback

– Each founder will do a 5 min demo and show their website and share what is their current problem. We will ask them to fill a questionnaire before hand so that we can identify what the problems are like with -> age of the company, market, differentiation, positioning, churn, cost of customer acquisition, etc.
– Everyone contributes based on their experience, gives feedback on the demo and shares what can be done with the website – content ideas, positioning, messaging.
– Share best practices, see what successful companies in the domain have done to overcome this problem.
– Each participant gets 15 mins-20 mins focussed attention and they go back with a concrete set of suggestions.


Conclusion

– Each founder goes back and shares with the focus group after one month, how did they implement the suggestions and what was the feedback.
– The focus group can then meet again or discuss over mail.

Benefits

– You get specific suggestions to the problems you are facing or you will validate / invalidate your current assumptions.

Playbook-RoundTable is one of the most sought after community events of iSPIRT. It’s a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups who are beyond the early stage. RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that Round-Table theme.

Registration and Pricing
If you are keen to attend this RoundTable, do let us know by filling in your details here. We will confirm your seat subject to availability.

All RoundTables are conducted pro-bono. They only payment you have to make is to provide your undivided attention and active involvement in the process. Playbook-RoundTables are a dialogue and there’s no monologue. None.

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Jump Start Your SaaS Business by Selling to US Market: Learn the Nuts and Bolts from Whodunnit

jumpstart-guid-1Are you a first time SaaS entrepreneur targeting the US market? Learn it from the masters through the Jump Start Guide to Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS put together by Krish Subramaniam (Chargebee), Niraj Ranjan Rout (GrexIt), Sahil Parikh (Brightpod), and Suresh Sambandam (KiSSFLOW). Aaron Ross launched the guide during the first SaaSx event in Chennai put together by iSPIRT, attended by more than 100 SaaS entrepreneurs.

The following are the take-aways. Use the guide to understand in-depth and develop your strategy to hit $100 million in sales. All the very best!

Marketing

  • There are four different strategies employed by Indian entrepreneurs for customer acquisition: Learn from Wingify, KiSSFLOW, GrexIt, Freshdesk.
  • Free trials don’t work for higher sales value. And prices are not listed publicly by most companies.
  • What is the right pricing? There is no one sutra to it. But get it right before you push your sales pitch. Learn strategies from the hackers who did it before.
  • Have a team in place to handle marketing efforts with clear segmentation of the team: marketing/product/sales. Have clear-cut roles as they often blur.
  • Understand the 10 recommended activities before you start marketing.
  • Focus on building the trust of the customer visiting your product website for the first time. To make it attractive, for example, think of a “Benefits” page instead of listing “Features.”
  • Learn how to build content around long tail keywords for effective SEO.
  • Marketing based on content generation (content marketing) has many dimensions to it. Use all of them for maximum benefits.
  • Social channels ensure better outreach. Make your presence felt on social pages.
  • Retarget your customers who just dropped by your website.
  • You can innovatively market using your product itself.
  • Get a marketing team in place.
  • There are some sales channels you must ignore before starting the SaaS company.

Selling

  • Learn what catching, coaching, and closing mean.
  • Winning the first few customers is the founder’s job.
  • Learn what tools to use for customer development.
  • Develop an effective funnel.
  • Facilitate self-selection and build engagement with the customers.
  • Collect key information during the engagement process.
  • Post-trial offers work for closing the customer.
  • Learn the customer closure techniques to use.
  • Structure your sales team clearly.
  • Doing a great customer service after sales is essential to retaining the customers. Learn the tips.

Download the guide here{link}.

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Redefining Email Collaboration: The Grexit story!

Innovation comes from myriad sources – in this case Niraj and his team has come up with an innovative product to tackle the common organizational challenges of email overload (often leading to lowered productivity) and lack of easy cross-functional collaboration tools. In this article, we speak to Niraj, Co-Founder of Grexit about his background, motivation to start-up, and his experience and learnings from his startup journey.

grexit-home

PN: Brief Introduction of Co-founders, their background

Niraj – B.Tech in electronics from IIT Kharagpur, 2002 batch, initially worked with Mentor Graphics writing compilers in C/C++ till 2007. Then he started his first venture mobicules.com – which ended up being a 30 people services firm building apps for customers mostly in the US. In early 2011, Niraj moved on to start GrexIt.

Nitesh – B.Tech in CSE from IIT Kharagpur, 2007 batch was first employee to join Niraj’s last venture mobicules.com right out of college. Nitesh started GrexIt together with Niraj as a co-founder in early 2011.

PN: Niraj recalls about his motivation to address the challenges in workplace-collaboration 

“Collaborating effectively with the team and with customers was a problem that we had faced right from our days running our previous venture. While we had used a lot of collaboration tools, getting everyone to adopt to tools was a challenge. The communication was all on email, and we thought what if we can build a system that lets team stay in email and still work efficiently without any confusion.”

That led to the first iteration of GrexIt. It was tool that would let users save email conversations into a shared email repository. It was a great way to store information about projects, customers, job applicants etc. in a central place.

PN: One of the essentials while starting up is having a strong founding team – the one rightly aligned with addressing the problem in hand. Niraj shares his thoughts on his founding-team and initial days of the product. 

Nitesh and I had worked together for 3.5 years when we decided to use GrexIt, and we felt we could work very well. So putting together the founding team was not a problem at all. We also joined the Morpheus accelerator, and we got a lot of friendly advice from the people at Morpheus. We just focused on building a high quality product that worked flawlessly. We were hardly thinking of anything else.

We raised a round of investment from Citrix Startup Accelerator and Vijay Shekhar Sharma in late 2011. That helped us go faster on the product. In mid 2012, with a deeper understanding of the market, we pivoted to our current product, started charging for it, and started getting customers.

PN: In the software product startups, technology is the quintessential central-brain in the startup. Niraj speaks on the importance of tech and the critical-role it plays in his startup.

Tech is the lifeblood of our business. Our 6 people team, including founders, is all tech oriented. Our product helps businesses run on a day to day basis, because it helps them manage projects, customer support etc., and so it is very critical for them. Having a strong tech team is important to ensure that the product keeps working and scaling well.

We have been able to attract a very good team, mostly because we have the kind of work that would excite good programmers, and because we have received very good international coverage. We also make sure that we have a work environment that gives talented people the opportunity to do their best. We have no fixed timings, you can work from anywhere you want, and we don’t have a leave policy which means we don’t restrict the number of leaves you take. We have learnt that putting faith in your employees creates reciprocal goodwill too.

As I mentioned earlier, our product version 1 which we released in 2011 was a system that would let users move email conversations into a shared repository. We started getting paying customers for this in mid 2012, but then we figured out that instead of letting users create knowledge bases, we need to build something that will help them completely solve business problems like customer support and project management.

That led us to our current set of functionality, and when released that in 2012, we started getting new users for this rapidly. That was a strong signal for us to pivot to the new functionality. 

PN: Neeraj speaks on marketing the product, getting initial customers and on-boarding them with the product:

We started getting initial customers through Google organic search and from the Google Apps marketplace. As it turned out, what we had built had a very good fit with a certain segment of users who were looking for collaborative solutions on top of Gmail. They could discover us easily through search, and started signing up for trials.

We worked hard on engaging them through email and our chat support. User feedback helped us a lot in fine-tuning and improving our product. By the start of 2013, we had a very strong product, mostly because we got excellent feedback, and worked on executing it fast.

PN: Scaling up – “Don’t add programmers – add servers“

We have a saying at GrexIt – “Don’t add programmers – add servers”.

We have been able to support the growth in customers base by scaling and enhancing the product without increasing our team size much. We recently launched another product – Mailflo.io – based on our learnings from GrexIt, and we still have enough bandwidth to maintain and enhance two products.

Going forward, we plan to keep our dev team extremely lean, and hire mostly in sales and marketing profile.

PN: Niraj speaks on current challenges and how the team is successfully tackling those challenges.

In first year – getting users to sign up, engaging them, getting feedback, and iterating fast enough. And – being able to deal with the frustration when not enough users were coming in and we were feeling as if we were in a vacuum.

Now – Scaling the customer base. Hiring a high quality marketing team that can do world class inbound marketing.  We also provide free trials (through our online page) so that customers can try out the product once before making the purchase

PN: Niraj shares his view on one thing about his startup which he wished, should had been done differently in past

In 2011, we spent a good amount of time trying to sell to very large organisations locally, ran into a lot of roadblocks, and lost a lot of time. If I were to do it again, I’d focus from day one on selling to SMEs globally, and not to large organisations locally. The dynamics of SAAS are very suited to selling to SMEs globally, and every SAAS company should work on cracking this piece of the market first, IMHO.

PN: Neeraj shares his views on ecosystem in India and the changes he looks forward to. 

Since we started, the ecosystem has evolved a lot. There are lots of SAAS/cloud startups around trying to sell globally. That’s heartening. Its also great to see a lot of seed/angel rounds happening.