7 lessons from growing SaaS products from 0 - 1 and 00,000's of active users

7 lessons from growing SaaS products from 0 - 1 and 00,000's of active users.

1. Be totally customer obsessed

Know your customers better than anyone.
You’ll radically increase your probability of success.

Who are they? What do they spend their time doing? What are their KPIs? What frustrates them? Who do they interact with? What existing tools do they use?

Even have a few customers on WhatsApp you can quickly test ideas with.

2. Diagnose customer blockers

What’s blocking customers from *adopting* or *paying* for your product?

Ask customers:
Will you rollout our product to your team today? If not, why not?
Will you pay for our product today? If not, why not?
What would make [using / paying] a 'no-brainer' for you?

3. Supercharge GTM teams

Start small - find at least one champion who’s willing to give you their time.
Or ask your head of GTM - who’s the best rep to get in touch with?

Ask them:
What’s the top thing stopping you from 2x’ing your sales / success / support / marketing results today?

Sit in on sales calls.
Join customer success QBRs.
Spend a day with support each month.
You’ll quickly learn where you can grow adoption, revenue and retention.

4. Pull non-product levers

Shipping more features is not the only way to grow your product.

In fact, the root cause of lacking adoption or revenue may have nothing to do with features.

Invest in the e2e customer experience:
Case studies, discovery questions, objection handling, support FAQs, public demo videos, a good website, world-class support.

5. Build an engine with your product team

Set an insanely ambitious vision + goal and get your team excited.

Be clear on your target customer and bring your team to interviews.

Establish clear systems / workflows for where everyone fits in. Unlock autonomy.

Monitor for bottlenecks and optimise your engine weekly.

6. Become a super-unblocker

As a carrier of information, you are typically a blocker.

Establish systems that democratise critical context (e.g. customer insights) and rituals to help teams rapidly learn, act and improve.

Be on the lookout for other blockers...

...team blocked by another dependency? Sort it out.
...moving too slow because of less resources? Prioritise better.

7. Create a learning machine

Most teams just do fortnightly sprint retros.
Half are engaged and the other half are on TikTok.
Then the actions typically go nowhere.

Be specific about what you’re trying to learn.

Have a hypothesis, align your team and test quickly.
Success? Failure?
Doesn’t matter. Test > Learn > Improve.

Get everyone bought into the learning journey.

Hope these help! Anything you’d add?