How to launch a profitable B2B SaaS or less than $750 – https://nxtstep.io/b2bsaas
Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and in this episode what I want to talk to you about is what to do if you ultimately find out that whatever your primary channel is, let’s say it’s driving traffic via ads, doesn’t end up being as effective as you wanted it to be for various reasons. But in this episode specifically, I’m gonna talk about budget.
If you find out what you were going to do with ads ends up being significantly less cost effective because ads are. Maybe for example, way too expensive, what to do instead. So the first thing to note is that I don’t want you to force that, as in, if you’ve built SaaS applications before, like I have, oftentimes there can be keyword opportunities that might be a dollar per click, for example, which I think is entirely reasonable and can work really well at low budgets in order to do effective testing.
But in certain industries, the paper click could be. Dozens of dollars per click. It could even be hundreds of dollars per click. Some of them get ridiculously expensive, A lot of big companies, mostly making a lot of money, but that drive the ad budget up to these astronomical levels, which means that.
It’s really not great at that point for early stage testing. You don’t wanna pour that much budget into just a landing page in order to try to determine whether or not your product that’s being advertised on your page has a strong value proposition. So the question then is what to do instead? Well, number one is I don’t want you to force it, right, as in just ramp up budget, because I think that’s just not cost effective.
The second is, I want you to remember that we’re working backwards from. The end result that we’re trying to achieve, and that’s to validate your value proposition. So in order to do that, all we really need to do is have a programmatic, systematic way, or at least a way, it doesn’t even have to be either of those two to gain access to enough target market users in order to determine the viability and the potential that your product has.
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So what are some other ways that we can do that? Well, some of them can be more manual, others can be more automated. I have a tendency to prefer the automated options, but not exclusively. I balance oftentimes with a few of those other strategies as well as in myself personally. I’ve done everything from leveraging my own network and folks that I can meet locally or even in person, all the way to and through something like a code email outreach or an outreach on LinkedIn.
So now this is gonna depend on your target market, as in where are they, where are they paying attention, how can you gain access to them? All of those options. And for each of them, you can leverage different automation strategies to make this process a little bit easier to manage. But remember also in the earlier stage, we’re trying to get what I consider to be quote, like a wave of prospects or customers to really test the value proposition of your product.
So you don’t need a. An unlimited number of prospects as part of this phase. What you really need is you need enough. You need a decent subset of customers in order to determine how much viability your product ultimately has. So don’t worry about gaining access to an unlimited number of prospects at this point.
As such, any of those strategies can work effectively as well, and you can substitute those in for what might have been your primary strategy before, which is my personal favorite in trying to drive traffic with ads. Now, if that doesn’t end up being cost effective, like some of these use cases I just mentioned.
Then instead, you can leverage some of these other strategies to essentially do the same thing. But in the end, what we’re ultimately going to do is once we verify and validate all these things, we want to establish your brand. We want to establish your domain, and we wanna try to drive as much organic traffic as possible.
And that’s where SEO comes into the mix. And I’ll talk more about that in another episode, perhaps tomorrow. But as far as for now, what I really want you to walk away with this from is, It doesn’t have to be paid ads, as in if the early homework you’re doing is showing that that’s not as cost effective as you’re expecting it to be, then I want you to consider switching up your strategy to achieve the same thing as opposed to just continually pouring good money after bed or wasting too much in the beginning of testing your product.