#44 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

Welcome 233 Tech Founders and Marketers to the 44th edition of Write your SaaS Growth Newsletter:

In this edition, we discuss:

• Competitor Analysis: Ignoring what competition is doing

• Content Marketing: 4-Step Process to Write Persuasively for SaaS copy

• Customer Research: 3 Steps to Scale your SaaS  

• Customer Lifetime Value: The real truth about SaaS Retention

• Product Market Fit: 5 Simple Questions to take you to PMF

Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Phil says “The biggest mistake new SaaS founders make is overcomplicating the value your product delivers. Say exactly what it solves for customers and how. The simpler you communicate this, the easier it is to buy.”

How focused are you on your marketing communications for your Tech product? It’s a deal breaker really.

Competitor Analysis

Mac says he hit $60k MRR by ignoring the competition by having a unique positioning and offer. Here are his thoughts on why you should too:

Mac built a LinkedIn outreach automation tool–differed from the competition. He knew there were plenty out there, and was told his was priced higher than pretty much all of them. Yet, he made $60k MRR without wanting to know about his competitors.

Competitor analysis is good if you:

• Plan to develop the roadmap of the product

• Find unique positioning for your offering

• Analyze messaging, target audience, feature set

• Understand competitive advantage through pricing, or community

Although competitive research can give you valuable insights, Mac says you are tempted - consciously or not - to want to be more similar to what we see, not more unique.

He continues saying to focus on your main objective - creating a valuable offering. It comes down to two things:

• Solving a valuable problem

• Getting your solution in front of people with said problem.

Even if a solution exists, there are likely plenty of people who don’t know about it. So you still get in front of them. Alternatively, in the case of people who have found a solution, you can provide a better one.

As long as y keep this in mind, it really doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing. In fact, I’d argue that by NOT paying attention to your competition, you’re more likely to create something unique with its own personality and positioning.

What are your thoughts on competitor research? Has it consciously helped you or has it sub-consciously affected you? Let us know in the comments.

Oh! and, you can subscribe to The SaaS Bootstrapper, where Mac breaks down how he bootstrapped a SaaS to 7-figures and shares how he's doing it again, in hopes to help you do the same.

Content marketing

You can always pick up lessons from folks who have grown with their industry. Once such folk is Taylor Simmonds who has grown his ghostwriting and content marketing agency to >500k MRR.

Bikenn shares his 4-step process to write highly persuasive content that you can apply to your SaaS:

1. Ideate quickly: Write down whatever comes to your mind. And do not think about editing. Doing so will be counter productive as it requires switching between the left and right brain. Do not care whether these ideas are good You just need to empty the faucet. Get it out!

2. Concise your ideas: Cut out anything that’s rumbling or fluffy. For example…90% of the time you can cut out the word “that” Also “ing” words because they turn to have less punch. Focus has more punch compared to focusing. Restructure your sentences to simplify the words.

3. Edit: Edit your writing to simplify and once it’s simplified... Read it out loud for flow and ask yourself? Is it stylistic for what I’m writing for? Is it nice to read or is it choppy? Does it actually flow nice? Am I okay with it?

4. Add Flair: This is where you add imagery. Changing something from being abstract to being obvious to understand. For example: > The man ran quickly. > The man dashed outside. It’s easier to imagine the second It also feels different as it evokes emotion.Flare always comes at the end because It’s usually difficult to make something emotional If it’s not: • clear • simple and • flowing well.

He adds to this saying you can:

• Deconstruct to learn different pieces.

• Reconstruct to create something unique.

Read a lot of great writing and ask yourself... - Why is this good? - What patterns are they using? - How are they ending their sentences? Once you find a pattern that works...model it!

Related: How to create viral content for your SaaS?

Customer Research

Marketing your SaaS is difficult. It’s not going to be like exiting with a 10M in 6 months. And Denis understands this. He shares how to:

• Understand your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

• Show how you solve their pain

• Identify your prime acquisition channel

Understand your ICP: Think as if you're a professional copywriter. The thing that makes them pro is that they research their audience in every detail. This allows them to write better copy than competitors, and also convert more to the products they talk about.

Ask them questions:

1. What are they struggling with in their business?

2. What is holding them back from success?

3. How can your solution save their time & make them more money?

This makes it that much easier to: Understand their pain points, Market toward their pain, Profit off their pain. When there is pain, there is a solution.

Solve Pain Points: You know your ICP's pain, and you know your SaaS is the solution... Now you need to show your strategy to fix that pain. The way that has worked best for me is, writing insightful content on the solution to their pain.

This showed I know what they're going through, increased my reach, and made it easier to convert with them. There are so many other ways to get your solution out there besides that though. Find the one best for you and scale it to the moon. Now you just need to close your prospects.

Identify Acquisition Channel: Now that you know who you're writing for, you need to know the best channels to approach your prospects on. Where are they active? What do they use daily?

There are so many platforms they could be on: Twitter > Instagram > LinkedIn > Email and the list goes on. Knowing which they appeal to the most will make your marketing that much easier.

Let's say you know which channel to reach them on... That's not enough. Figure out:

• How you can leverage this channel efficiently?

• How much outreach do you send?

• How many times do you post a day?

• What boosts your reach the most?

Which step out of the three are you struggling with the most? Let us know in the comments and we can help each other.

Related: How to acquire your early-stage SaaS customers

Customer Lifetime Value

What makes a SaaS model attractive? It is the recurring business that comes. Month after month. Acquiring a customer is important, but retaining them is even more important.

That’s when the Lifetime Value of a Customer becomes useful. Only CFO says a lot of tech companies deceive themselves on what the actual life of a customer is in order to make the SaaS math work. Here are some of his insights:

• A company spends a lot of money today to acquire a customer with the expectation that they will stay a customer for many years and the incremental cost of serving that customer is relatively minimal.

• The ratio most people talk about is at least a $3 lifetime value for every $1 of acquisition cost (i.e. LTV/CAC of 3+). Because most SaaS companies spend more that $1 to acquire $1 of revenue….the model only works if customers stick around.

• The common method for calculating how long the average customer will continue to renew is 1 / churn rate. Example: If a company has an annual churn rate of 10% then you might conclude that the customer life is 10 years (1 / 0.1). At a high-level, churn rate is the percentage of your customers that terminate their service over a given period.

• The biggest issue is people thinking that churn is linear. Unless a company has adequate churn history they don’t know if there will be large stair steps of churn.

• Churn must be reviewed on a cohort basis to really understand customer life. Someone may have assumed in the prior example a customer life of almost 7 years when in reality it may only have been 4 years. That makes a big difference to customer lifetime value.

• The next 10 years will be very different from the last 10 years. SaaS tools have exploded and the rate of innovation (ChatGPT) has significantly increased. Retaining customers is a lot easier when there is less competition and the technology landscape isn’t shifting quickly

• Lesson: Don’t assume historical benchmarks and churn rates are representative of the future. And be careful how you calculate churn rates. There are lots of different ways and many can be misleading. Make sure to do cohort analysis an have sufficient churn history.

Some solid advice on how to truly understand the churn of your product. You can read his detailed article here. It’s a wonderful read.

Product Market Fit

Phil says you can answer these 5 questions to build a 7-figure SaaS business:

1. Who's the customer?

2. What's their biggest problem?

3. What are their current solutions?

4. How would you solve the problem?

5. Why choose you over a competitor?

This teaches you how your product fits the market.

Does your SaaS have answers to these questions?

How can I help you further?

• Are you providing any marketing services to SaaS and tech companies? We’re vetting marketing experts to help SaaS companies hire specific marketers. You can apply here.

• Let me help you build a marketing channel strategy for your Tech Product. Book a session.

Thanks for reading! SaaSwrites is a humble attempt to help SaaS founders and marketers grow their SaaS.

See you next Saturday.

Ricky,

SaaSwrites