#saasmarketer started in April 2019 to educate and inspire the next generation of SaaS growth leaders.
They have since scaled to a passionate community of over 2,000 #saasmarketer and could be soon releasing a SaaS product.
How?
This posts explains…
We cover the full range of SaaS growth case studies here…
From Salesforce ($1bn MRR) and their insanely good brand to Plutio’s ($10k MRR) ability to build an insanely tight community.
And now we’re going even earlier, to discuss a SaaS product that is not even available to the public.
This is the short story of how #saasmarketer may be bringing out a SaaS product.
What happened?
To grow an email newsletter sustainably you need to cultivate two subscriber sources:
To develop an SEO presence you need to structure your content on the internet such that it is easily crawl-able by Google and readable by humans.
(Which is why we are constructing this blog)
To cultivate measurable word of mouth… you need a referral system.
We built some custom code to connect the forms on our WordPress site, an “Ambassadors” sub domain and our email provider: Email Octopus.
This allows us to track the amount of referrals a subscriber drives, and give rewards based on activity.
Since launching the referral system, a number of people have reached out to enquire which tool we are using…
This is the most important part of the story ^^
As what does that suggest?
That there is a need or that people have a similar problem.
We have not spent 6 months building something that we think people want. We built something that we needed and people have come to us expressing an interest.
Why do you think this is a good idea?
After engaging with a couple of the people that expressed an interest in the referral system, we learnt that there are other players in the market, but they provide a whole host of other features that a single email newsletter business would not need or want to pay for.
Remember this diagram?
There are potentially customers in the market for email referral SaaS that are currently over-served by competitors.
So far validation of this theory has been given by just a couple of email newsletters, to proceed further customer development will be performed.
How will you find customers?
Here’s the masterstroke…
The software we have built currently only connects WordPress and Email Octopus.
Small market?
Perfect…
How effective is our home page going to be with the headline: “Email Referral System Connecting Email Octopus & WordPress” to the right person?
Very.
And once the 600 sites had either been pitched or had become customers, we would move onto the next email provider integration.
EO’s WordPress plugin listing tells me there are over 600 active installs:
My developer tells me it isn’t possible to scrape a list of domains using the EO plugin (if you have a method please reply to this email!), so last month I sent EO this email proposing a partnership:
And am waiting on a response…
What did we learn?
Find a problem and then solve with a product, not the other way around. And when you do… try to find a partner to help you with acquisition.