For startups and saas companies, its important to know how much they need to know how to grow their company when they are around 10k+MRR a month. We have compiled the top 50 advice on how to build your saas business here.
Credit to Aaron Krall
Pawel Brzeminski Don’t build the product too quickly. Focus on understanding the problem your customers have and the workflows in the software that enable them to solve that problem.
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Yuval Haimov It’s the other way around: build your product quickly. Get tons of feedbacks and adjust it to be suitable to your target audience.
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Pawel Brzeminski That holds true too but if you build and launch TOO quickly in a hap hazard way as I see some do, you’ll get less useful feedback or even outright useless feedback. You want to learn and get useful feedback so you want to understand the customer problem/workflows first.
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Stephen Pratley Both.
Fast to MVP, or even some sort of tangible mock-up, then longer on feedback.…See More
Tom Blue 1) Raise your prices, 2) Product Product Product 3) Solve a problem for a niche then expand.
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Menachem Pritzker Yes, this. Double your prices people. If you half your customers you come out ahead, and you probably won’t lose anyone you wouldn’t have lost anyways
Murry Ivanoff what Tom Blue said, plus – set targets and achieve them. don’t be too crazy. don’t be too shy.
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Thomas Evans Treat the SaaS as a proper business from Day One. Don’t undervalue your time or the time that your solution can save for another business.
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Matt Callen 1. Know your numbers so you know exactly how much you can spend to acquire a customer (CAC).
2. Listen to your customers and adjust the product accordingly. Never get stuck thinking that what you created is the end all, be all. Adjust and adapt to your customers.
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Carlos Eduardo Moura This article from Jason Lemkin is very good: https://www.saastr.com/10-saas-new-year-resolutions-for-you/
My advice: go to SaaStr!
SAASTR.COM
10 SaaS New Year Resolutions For You. A Pick List. – SaaStr
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Ian Naylor Start Content Marketing asap, establish yourself as an expert in topics around your product, that your customers care about
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Raj Nadar once you have identified an Ideal Customer Profile, start outbound outreach, also experiment to identify new classes of ICPs or even new feature ideas
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Lior Ohayon Start tracking and reporting on metrics on day one. Adoption of new features and financials. You don’t want this to be messy later on or play catch up
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Kaspars Upmanis Pick a few key customers & work closely on them, with weekly checkup calls. Build features for them. I was there 12 months ago, now doubled that. SaaS is slow.
Kaspars Upmanis Pick experiments & only 1 by 1. 1) Test paid ads 2) Test inbound sales people 3) Test outbound sales. Then stick to what works.
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Hank Kronick I would say ignore Lior and Ian comments 
🙂 I’m a believer that the only thing that matters in the beginning is building a product that solves someone’s problem. There are multiple ways to skin a cat but personally I would not waste my time blogging or investing heavily in metrics until I had a product hitting real revenue ($10k mrr sounds about right).
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Ian Naylor Yup I agree, developing the product and seeking market fit is 101 of your SaaS start-up. HOWEVER C/M is a long term game, you need to start this early. In a competitive marketplace it will take 12 months+ to own your influencer space, so you’ve got to think of this as a parallel task.
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Hank Kronick Ian do you write your content or have you hired someone? It is one of my least favorite activities and we need to improve in this area
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Ian Naylor Hank Kronick Yes when we started C/M we sought out writers who already had distribution, so we could share content between our own blog and guest posts, leveraging existing networks etc
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Omer Molad Ian Naylor content marketing is one channel and it’s only suited to some audiences. If your customer is the owner of beauty salons or car dealerships they’re not reading blogs on Medium.
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Sterling Jackson I think that having the right metrics can potentially help provide data for taking some of the guesswork about development decisions. Kinda in the same boat about blogging (at least from the perspective of using it as a marketing tool.)
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Ian Naylor Omer Molad Not sure about that, our business is targeting the exact ppl you just mentioned. Using C/M we’ve d to eclipse 70k p/m in ad spend
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Omer Molad Ian Naylor Interesting. What’s your business? What kind of content marketing are you doing and how are you distributing it?
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Ian Naylor https://appinstitute.com/ DIY app builder for SMB’s – most content is focused on digitisation of small businesses
APPINSTITUTE.COM
App Builder – Make an App for iOS & Android | DIY App Maker
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Lior Ohayon aw thanks lol. I think I’m speaking from experience – it was a simple tip bc now we are playing super catchup and spending a ton of time and money putting things into one system and reporting. It would have been so simple if we just started on one billing and reporting system
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Miles Burke Agreed on content. We started blogging 2.5 years ago and now average 3,000 uniques a day – our GA reflect a long slow growth curve, so start early.
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Hank Kronick Miles Burke curious how many trial signups you get from content traffic?
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Miles Burke Hank Kronick not enough – less than 0.5%, however those who sign up to our mailing list tend to then sign up for a free trial later. It’s a focus of mine this year to work on increasing this (have been slack in this for ages).
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Hank Kronick Miles Burke well even if you are getting 10-20 sign ups a day from this traffic, it seems worth it!
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Miles Burke Hank Kronick definitely worth it 
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Ben Adler I was able to reach some top influencers by blogging. It can be a great way to get your foot in in door!
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Etienne Juneau Fully agree!
Aladin ElHedri Well, I would say it depends on your pricing strategy and who you are targeting. If you have a high pricing strategy, getting leads, and moreover converting them into clients can be tough. In this case, you should focus on solving a problem until 10k MRR because you would be able to reach that goal with fewer clients than with a low pricing strategy. So you should focus on that and even onboard and convert your first clients through one-to-one relationships. Then use these first clients to leverage. If you have a low pricing strategy, I agree with Ian and Lior. You need to set up some tools and metrics that deal with activation and nurturing first, and then to create content. Value-added content. As Ian says, it takes months to get some ROI from your content strategy, but one good article keeps bringing new clients for years. So it’s good to start it early. You can also mix that with FB ads and Google Adwords to get your first users, get feedback about your product and fix what needs to be fixed. Whatever your pricing strategy is, connect to groups where your potential clients are, listen and discuss a non-spammy way (solve things for them and you’ll be rewarded).
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Marcus Räder Aim higher. Much higher. Pay attention to the positive problems, because they are worse than the negative problems that tend to work themselves out.
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Marcus Räder replied · 2 Replies
Yam Regev Easy: Put away any automation tool/platform/methodology and communicate with your users in a 1on1, manual way.
It’ll not only decrease your PMF time, but will also create
1. Growth
2. Brand advocacy
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Devashish Datt Mamgain – don’t rely only on growth hacks, it may not always work.
– do things that don’t scale talking, chatting, emailing customers personally
– read ‘SaaS sales for Startup Founders’ by Steli
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Erik Nicolai Many products seem super simple from your perspective. But for new customers, especially early stage SaaS. it might be not so sinple.
So while increasing your MRR, my advice would be to create a customer onboarding package.
Let’s say it’s twice half a day onboarding to fully leverage your saas.
First the setup plus training and review after a month about further improvement.. Sell this for e.g. $995.
So you get super valuable feedback from your customers while you get paid for it.
It won’t directly increase MRR, but it will provide cash to grow your MRR further and improve your product / service. All the stuff you create for these onboardings are super useful in the future for training video’s.
See it as a gym with paid personal training. The only thing you have the do is showing the results from the personal trainer!
When it works and you dont need the upfront caah, keep doing it as a premium service. And yes, that will further increase MRR 
. Customers like to get soiled, so why dont ask money for the value.
Hope it’s helpful and /or feel free to make suggestions to further improve the concept.
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Travis Renn Only add features to your app that add 
to your bottom line.
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Efi Mavridou I love this group! 
This post is full of valuable advice, thank you all. 
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David Feng 1) Learn to filter out noise and be honest about what’s working and what’s not working. Cut out things that don’t work because they waste time and resources. This applies to teams, product, sales, marketing, etc.
2) Learn to absorb more information and feedback from customers. Successful founders can read between the lines effectively and consolidate multiple directions into unified goals and a singular vision. Learning to say no is also an acquired skill.
3) Don’t just find and add great relationships, invest time in growing them. Nothing can substitute the human touch. This applies to prospects, customers, and partners.
4) First impressions matter. Make sure your product speaks to a specific group of people effectively as early as possible.
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Juraj Zamborský Find the very first crazy lovers of your product and let them speak to the world about your product as much as they can 
🙂 community, community and community, that’s all you need to start 
🙂
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Turgay Birand Charge more. Then, charge even more. You and your product are most ly worth more than you think you are.
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Nick Horob Build an audience
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Loukman Nacik Automate
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Adrian T Dayton Take dead aim on the rich kids. Get them in your sights, and take them out. (can anybody name the movie?)
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Adrian T Dayton No, but seriously my biggest piece of advice is to listen to the SaaStr podcast. Free podcast with tons of amazing advice for growing your business.
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David Abrams 1) Dial in on your customer persona. Be very specific and do the research. Don’t skip this step! It should also help you understand where your customers are, the doorkeepers, pain points etc… This means getting on calls, or meeting people in person.
2) Make sure your MVP (and you did build an MVP, right 
?) has the core of what that customer persona needs. No not features, but that one or two items they are looking for that solves their pain. Don’t build a big bloated product of what you think they want.
3) Do things that won’t scale to sell early. Demos, personal outbound, events, phone calls, live webinars, and live trainings. Anything that can get you feedback loops and put you in selling opportunities. You need to learn, digest, and understand the feedback from the market.
4) Assess the feedback, make product updates/features notes, tweak marketing language, and sales pitches. Repeat as you grow!
5) Make sure you are only hiring great people. Even if you don’t have the funds early, find ways to bring a-player talent across the board. Get good at selling people on your vision. This will make or break you as you grow!
Hope that helps!
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Kartik Mundhra I have a Tool:- Whatfix.com It is a customer onboarding tool. I just want to ask what type of partners will be more appropriate:- SI/VAR or ISV or OEM? Can you also tell name of some partners who deals with such kind of technology?
WHATFIX.COM
Whatfix – Performance Support Platform
Devin Zander Onboard with content marketing
Indoctrinate them to the idea with your product being the only possible or simplest solution
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Michael Wagstaff Talk to your customers. In-person if you can, or at least on the phone. Get to know them and let them see and hear your work ethic, your vision, and your personality. You early adopters will be the ones that spread the word about your platform – for better or worse!
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Stewart Townsend 1) Customer Service – are you on it, do you have a community of happy customers ? Are they being cared and nurtured with upsell and love? 2) Data – is your data correct ? have you verified it ? Have you spoken to customers personally to understand why they churned ? Are you close to the data to see whats working and whats not ? 3) Sales – are you inbound / outbound / direct sales ? Have you looked at channel ? Whats your CAC for each source ? Double down on the source that closes quickest and brings highest $MRR deals.
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Jay Gibb If I had to go back and do it again, I’d make sure to build a culture where everyone at every position in the company was required to produce content as a byproduct of their day-to-day work.
When you’re a small team, everything you’re doing is interesting to your target customer. You’re solving the problems that they will have to solve themselves if they don’t buy your service. So talk and write about it, in detail, all the time.
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Turgay Birand Fire those 1000 $5 / mo customers who create 96% of the antagonizing support tickets and focus on the 5 $1000 / mo customers who treat you with respect and know your value. If you’re at the beginning, try to play for the latter audience from the get go who understands value and is happy to pay you for it.
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Harry Kanistik Build a Painkiller not a Vitamin
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Patrick Healy This thread is a trove of great advice. So happy to be a part of this group. I’ll add that I’ve got a new SaaS platform and I’m soaking all of this up.
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Vetter McVetter Be aware that it will take longer than you think.
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Ivan Mojsilovic replied · 2 Replies
Arun Pattnaik This thread is 
. I’m halfway through building my first SaaS & can’t thank you enough for starting this Aaron Krall.
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Dean Chiotis Step 1: Idea > Step 2: Sell > Step 3: Build
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Landon BennettLandon and 223 others joined SaaS Growth Hacks within the last two weeks. Give them a warm welcome into your community! Don’t rely on feedback until a user has actually used your product. We got sidetracked in the beginning by focusing on feedback before we had shipped anything to anyone. Nothing matters until you ship something and ask someone to pay for it. Prior to that, you have to take feedback with a grain of salt.
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Aaron KrallAaron Krall and 1 other the membership, moderators, settings, and posts for SaaS Growth Hacks. fantastic advice
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Jean-Philippe Boily Before getting even $1, generally not very relevant.
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Aaron KrallAaron Krall and 1 other the membership, moderators, settings, and posts for SaaS Growth Hacks. I think what Landon Bennett is referring too is adding a bunch of features and changes to the product based on what non-customers are asking for. Even before you make $1, you should be listening to your customers about what they’re pains are and build a product around their pain.
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Jean-Philippe Boily Aaron Krall yup. Agree. I wrote fast without all the nuances that this requires. 
Otherwise you would not build a business but just a product based on your vision, which might be wrong.
