For those of you looking to start or working on a bootstrapped SaaS product, I hope you find this post about my experience with it useful to help you on your journey.
Here's an into into what we do which should give you an idea of the scale of the project.
Check it out with a 14 day trial here.
QualityHive is a website feedback tool, expertly crafted by Zestcode to help other development agencies with their QA process and feedback processes from clients. It allows clients to raise feedback in seconds without even leaving their website. In addition to screenshots, we also capture:
- Automatic capturing of Javascript errors
- Screenshot automatically captured
- Pin dropped exactly where the user clicked on the screenshot and the website (for QualityHive users only)
- Device dimensions
- Browser specifications
- Operating system
How it came about
In 2018 I started a web development company based in the UK called Zestcode Digital, we had and are still having a great run with some fantastic well known clients on board to help them deliver extremely high quality websites for a fair cost. We peaked at 8 members of the team in total but recently scaled down to focus on quality of work over quantity of output, but that's a story for another time.
Since launching Zestcode, we had been using what is now a competitor of QualityHive (I'm not going to name drop here though). We found it to be buggy, unreliable and slow all-round so we set ourselves a mission to create a solid alternative that eliviates all the issues with what we were having with the other platform.
Juggling between running a development agency in tandem with a SaaS build
Upon starting designs of the platform, we nievely expected the entire build to take 6 months to complete after design sign-off, we found out the hard way that this was beyond ambitious.
Mixing a new SaaS product into your development agency is almost impossible without solid structure and appropriate timescales on builds. If you're looking to do something similar, please be aware that your expectancy of the build to be done will likely be 2 / 3x longer due to having influxes of work and less overall time to spend on your new product.
QualityHive took the Zestcode team 20 months to get the initial MVP ready which is far longer than hoped but definitely worth the wait. Nothing on the QualityHive build was rushed at any point. Rushing your product will lead to incredibly difficult to work with code in the future if it becomes succesful so definitely avoid skipping ahead of yourself here.
Marketing challenges
Launching a web development agency was timeconsuming but a lot quicker and easier to compete in rather than the SaaS space. I expected launching a SaaS product to be incredibly easy with little spend and a high signup rate. This is an easy assumption to make, especially as your personal excitement for the product grows.
In reality, launching a SaaS product will not be a sudden BOOM and you've got 100's / 1000's of signups. This is a long process which will take months to get your product off the ground.
Be careful with marketing budget and ensure you're testing the water with as many platforms as possible to find your sweet spot. Keep the budgets low for the first 3 months to cater for any improvements you can make to your product to help improve the conversion rate.
Whilst waiting for ads to bring some leads in, make sure you're not forgetting about SEO. Create incredible content on your website following best practice in between running the ad campaigns to keep pushing on. Free traffic is the best traffic!
Summary
Look at your expectations you have set for the product launch and reduce it to a realistic figure of 10% of what you're hoping on launch day.
In terms of cost and budget, take you're expectation and multiply it by 3 to get a rough realistic expectation. If you do not have 3x your expectation you will be at risk of falling short of fully funding your project. If you're lucky, you may have some marketing spend left over to stop it eating into more budget. Thousands of SaaS products fail due to lack of budget so make sure you're constantly lifting budget expectations for all aspects of the product.
If you're running a dev agency or freelance business consectuively, make sure you do not oversell to fund the project as you will run out of free time to work on it. Treat your product as a client, thinking about it as something internal will either make you take it as priority or put it to the back of the queue, scheduling as if it was a normal client ensures you're fair to your new product and your clients.
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