Law Firm of Morgan M. Smith, PLLC’s Post

A Few Strategies for Finding Product-Market Fit (1) Try Low-Ball Pricing Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar may have stumbled upon the freemium model out of sheer necessity. The challenge of selling across all time zones led to Atlassian's self-service availability. This self-service approach required a product that was simple to evaluate, download, and install. Moreover, with no sales force to promote it, the product had to be affordably priced. From Scott's perspective, it secures the mindshare of users unwilling to pay for a competitor’s pricier offering, and provides ample time to convert free users into paying customers. A decade ago, Scott pioneered this strategy by testing a subscription model offering five users for just $5. This experience fundamentally transformed Atlassian's business approach. Today, nearly all Atlassian products come with free trials, often cited as a hallmark of the first product-led growth business. (2) Use Smaller Deals to Prove Scale Before Shippo, an e-commerce shipping platform, earned the trust of 100,000 customers, CEO Laura Behrens Wu encountered a familiar catch-22 for founders: you can't sell without social proof, and you can't gain social proof without making sales. "When we pitched to larger companies, they asked, 'How many packages are you shipping?' Without impressive numbers, they were hesitant to try an unproven API, especially for critical shipping operations," Laura recalls. Instead of new enterprise sales tactics, Laura's team targeted small and mid-sized businesses. Their two-fold strategy involved building a dashboard for purchasing shipping labels without API integrations and selling to startups capable of integrating the API. Focusing on SMBs ultimately enabled Shippo to move upmarket. "We gathered enough customers on the platform over time to successfully pitch larger customers. Eventually, we could demonstrate that we were shipping millions of packages each month," Laura explains. (3) Choosing the Right Pace of Growth Startups can try to navigate a middle path between bootstrapping and traditional venture capital models. Bootstrapped companies, living within their means, must focus on sustainable SaaS KPIs like high gross margins, fast payback on CAC, and healthy customer cohorts. This can be a disadvantage compared to venture-backed startups that have more capital to grow quickly. Despite the prescriptive nature of startup culture regarding SaaS company building, founders have the freedom to choose their product, go-to-market strategy, and growth pace. This allows them to achieve their goals and build shareholder value without taking on excessive risk. Bootstrapped companies have more flexibility, but venture-backed companies can also adjust spending levels to maintain growth. It’s incorrect to say there's no downside to pushing growth limits—but some startups have been able to challenge conventional growth wisdom.

Most SaaS feels overly complex. I studied hundreds of products in GTM tech and noticed 3 big reasons: Reason 1: Early-stage products lack focus When founders start building a product, they usually don’t have total clarity on the problem they’re solving. After hearing the inside story from founders that built multi-billion dollar companies, the vast majority didn’t either. The obvious tell is to look closely at the product's user experience. Is it clear what the product does and are there core workflows to get the job done? Or is it a hodgepodge of a bunch of ideas. The product reflects the founders’ clarity of thought. The starting point is almost always messy, but over time it needs to crystalize. Reason 2: Customers will always ask for more, often in divergent directions We meet with customers regularly to keep a close pulse on their workflow and needs. Feature requests come up every week, and it’s a natural impulse to jump into action and ship it. But every feature added takes away from the core essence of the product. A great designer can help pack in more complexity, but this tradeoff always exists. We wait until we’ve heard the same request at least a few times before seriously considering it. Even then, sometimes we push back on customers and prospects if it doesn't fit into a cohesive product vision. Reason 3: Eventually every company wants to be the “everything app” This is playing out right now in GTM tech. There’s a race for Apollo, Outreach, Zoominfo, Gong, Salesloft, Clari, etc. to bundle and compete for the entire rep workflow. Each has a slightly different initial foothold. And I bet they all have a story about how their foothold serves as the "perfect" beachhead to win the adjacent workflows. As they expand horizontally, the product can get complicated and lose the essence of its core workflow, leaving them exposed to startups with a simpler and better solution. Resisting these pressures isn’t easy. Then again, there’s nothing easy about building an enduring company.

Why is RevOps becoming the first marketing hire at early-stage SaaS startups? Dive into our latest blog to discover how integrating Revenue Operations from the start isn't just about setting up processes—it's about laying a foundation for scalable and sustainable growth. We explore the strategic advantages of RevOps, showcasing successes from industry leaders like Chargebee, Slack, and Dropbox. Learn how this role goes beyond mere coordination to truly drive revenue generation and align all company functions—from marketing to customer support. https://lnkd.in/grfVM26A #SaaS #RevenueOperations #RevOps

Greg's SaaS launch flopped due to one crucial mistake. Here's the simple fix we made that changed everything. Greg had spent months developing a SaaS product. Based on customer interviews, he thought it was a sure hit. But when he launched, there was silence. No sign-ups. No sales. All that time, money, and energy invested into a product that didn’t meet a real market need. Greg asked me for help. After reflecting on this, he finally realized his mistake. He'd been looking for customers to validate assumptions instead of trying to understand their true needs. Which meant he was: - Asking leading questions - Emphasizing positive feedback - Confusing politeness for genuine interest I asked Greg to read 'The Mom Test' by my friend Rob Fitzpatrick to learn the art of customer interviews. We then crafted a game plan outlining: 1. What questions to ask 2. Red flags to watch out for 3. Techniques for probing deeper Most importantly, we strategized how to persuade them NOT to buy this product, e.g., show competitor products. Greg had to restart customer interviews from scratch. But by changing his approach to customer feedback, he was finally able to build a SaaS product he could sell. He's now running a 6-figure SaaS business. Greg's story is a wake-up call for all SaaS founders. It's crucial to validate your product ideas thoroughly and listen to what potential customers are telling you. If you're taking the wrong path, it's better to find out early on before you waste a lot of time and money. Don't be afraid to ask difficult questions from the start. It's the only way to make sure you're creating something your potential customers actually want and need. → What's the most valuable lesson you've learned about conducting effective customer interviews? 🤔 --- Want help growing your SaaS to $10K MRR and beyond? Join an exclusive community of early-stage founders. DM me '10K' to learn more or visit saasclub[dot]io/launch

How do you take on a $250B company like Salesforce? 👀 It starts with just a few folks on their laptops. This is the story of Attio 👇 There's many reasons Salesforce is down 25% from ATH, but challengers like Attio are one of them. Attio's growth journey has lessons for any startup founder or PM looking to take share in a crowded market. (Including strong challengers to the big guy in HubSpot and Pipderive) 1/ Start with a personal problem 🤔 Nicolas Sharp was running BizDev for VC Passion Capital back in the mid-2010s. Things were good, except his CRM. What he encountered was: • Clunky interfaces straight out of 1999 • Integrations to pull your hair out • Countless hidden costs So he set out to build a verticalized CRM for VCs. And he managed to snag Alexander Christie as first engineer. The duo were a power pair, and Fundstack was taking off. 2/ Pivot based on what the market is telling you 🔍 Customers were paying them, but also asking for all sorts of features. Nick & Alex realized: "If we're going to put all of this work into something, knowing it's not the best version of what it could be, what's the point?" So the duo decided to pivot to a full-fledged, not verticalized, CRM solution. But that's not the easiest thing to do... 3/ Be willing to build the product you need to, not the quick solution 📈 Building a full CRM would take a lot of time. They wouldn't be able to follow the Y Combinator religion of shipping fast. Instead, they took a page out of the long incubation period for Notion and Figma. If you count Fundstack, they spent a full 5 years building before going public access in 2022. The strategy worked. The company was able to raise a $23.5M series A from Redpoint in 2023 and snag customers like Coca-Cola and Replit. 4/ Have founders lead product until you have co-founders + 2 product teams 💸 Their product is great but it wasn't built by PMs. Until 4 months ago, they hadn't even hired a PM. Instead, they've pursued a product engineering strategy, where engineers all have mini-PMs inside them. Nevertheless, they really hit all the PLG notes—from activation and expansion to monetization and go-to-market—in true form. And with their design, they've moved themselves into the design-led challenger category, alongside the Notions, Linears, and Dovetails of the world. I hope you enjoyed that! Like/Repost to share with your fellow founders 🤝

Twenty years ago, it was really hard to build software, but it was relatively easy to find open markets with people eager to buy from you. It’s the opposite now. It’s much easier to build software now, but it’s more difficult and expensive to find open markets or niches with ready buyers who clap when you show up. Product is still important, but the SaaS scale-up game is mostly about sales and marketing: your Go-To-Market (GTM). Technical founders who have grown big and valuable companies always say their biggest learning that paid off was learning to market and sell. John Stewart created and sold an engineering services business before starting a Salesforce integration services company that built some early software products. One of their software experiments allowed Salesforce customers to see and interact with their customer data on a map. When customers paid for it and revenue grew, he and his co-founder wound down their services and focused on their mapping product. MapAnything grew quickly to over $2M ARR as a bootstrapped software company, with some revenue-based financing to help test their growth plans. When he proved their small GTM investments paid off, John raised several rounds of venture capital to grow faster by focusing their efforts within the Salesforce ecosystem. MapAnything reached $22 million in ARR in three years before Salesforce acquired the company for $250 million. John stayed on with Salesforce for six months before moving on. As John explains it on the Practical Founders Podcast: “I tell founders most often that you really need to focus on sales and distribution. As the CEO of a startup in the tech space or SaaS, the only thing that really matters is revenue growth. “Technology is technology. Even if you have unique IP right now, it won’t be unique soon enough. “So you need to figure out your go-to-market motion. Revenue cures all ills. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the company as long as revenue is growing. It’s all about revenue growth more than anything.” Three years after selling MapAnything, John and a co-founder launched Fastbreak.ai, a sports schedule optimization platform for professional and amateur sports leagues. They have a great new product, but they are great at marketing and selling too. Check out this interview with John Stewart on the Practical Founders Podcast at https://lnkd.in/gjekXVmM. John shares advice on working with and selling your company to Salesforce. #practicalfounders

Just pulled this gem from the insightful post below: 'Product is still important, but the SaaS scale-up game is mostly about sales and marketing: your Go-To-Market (GTM).' 🎵 It's a crucial reminder that while having a solid product is fundamental, the real game changer is how you bring it to market. 🔔 Getting this right is what separates the best from the rest. Always 🙏 appreciate Greg Head's insights. #SaaS #GoToMarket #MarketingStrategy"

Imagine selling out your SaaS startup before it’s even built. Companies like Slack, Notion, and Airtable have done it. They turned concepts into cash using pre-sales strategies. But here’s the twist—they leveraged AI and NoCode tools to make it happen faster. Let me show you! 1. Create Anticipation Pre-selling is about more than early sales—it’s about building hype. ↳ Use NoCode tools like Webflow to create a sleek landing page with UI/UX samples. ↳ Automate your operating systems using AI-driven tools like Taskade. 2. Offer Exclusive Deals Incentivize early adopters with deals that feel too good to pass up. ↳ Offer discounted annual deals to those who sign up during the pre-sale. ↳ Leverage AI to personalize offers based on user behavior and interests. 3. Communicate Transparently Trust is crucial when selling a product that’s still in development. ↳ Automate regular updates on development progress using NoCode tools like Zapier. ↳ Engage with your "true fans" through personalized emails and social media platforms. Pre-selling with the right strategy and tools can validate your SaaS, secure funding, and create buzz... ➠ All before your product launch. Go secure your first "100 true fans" with discounted annual deals! — If you enjoyed this AI/NoCode content: ♻️ Reshare with others ♻️

From Simple to $5M: 50 SaaS Companies That Proved Small Ideas Win Big... Ever wondered how some of the most successful SaaS companies started with just a simple idea? The following document dives deep into the journeys of these companies, revealing the strategies and decisions that transformed them from small startups into industry leaders. What you`ll discover? Niche Focus: How honing in on a specific problem made these companies unstoppable. Minimal Resources, Maximum Impact: The power of simplicity in SaaS, and why "simple" is the most repeated word on their websites. Success Metrics: Real-world examples like a Gmail plugin earning $5M/year and a Shopify plugin pulling in $400K/year+50 companies Growth Strategies: How leveraging no-code and platform-specific channels gave these companies a competitive edge. Market Insights: Why the demand for micro SaaS businesses is skyrocketing. If you're an entrepreneur or just curious about what makes a SaaS company truly great, this document is a must-read. Type of product, market segment, price range, business model, and above all a very well detailed for all 55 companies... Listed companies include: Gumroad, GMass, Tweet Hunter, Prerender®, Carrd Inspiration, Plausible Analytics, Taplio (my favourite), Rootd Tally CASTANET Gorilla ROI Sniply by UpContent Mailman SuperLemon Upvoty ReferralHero Plasfy SiteGPT Buttondown Leave Me Alone GoFullPage Merch Wizard SaasRock Nureply Instatus Trendlyne.com Wheely Sales and others. Take a look at the stories here: https://lnkd.in/dPriu7gK Would like to download? Comment:   I want stories, I'll DM you a downloadable file.

I spent 100+ hrs analyzing 85 SaaS websites. Their hero sections bring in +$250 billion profit combined! ⤵⤵⤵ 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗱𝗶𝗱 𝗜 𝗱𝗼 𝗶𝘁? Because the hero section is where visitors decide to stay or leave. These SaaS companies nailed it - their hero sections are the key to turning visitors into paying customers. I studied how these hero sections effectively drive conversions and bring in huge profits. 𝗡𝗼𝘄, 𝗜’𝗺 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂: ➜ To give you ideas for your SaaS website ➜ To help you get more signups ➜ To boost your revenue 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗅 Drop a comment or DM me with ‘$250B’ and I’ll send you the link. 𝗣𝗹𝘂𝘀, 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 3 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗜’𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗘. If you found this valuable, hit ♻️ repost—someone in your network might need this!" 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝘀𝗹𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗅 ---------- I make SaaS and startup website conversions jump 12% in 8 weeks, guaranteed with zero guesswork. | Our fintech client did it: $7.3k to $24k+ monthly!