Wrong. You will find competition all over the place. More will come and go. Finding competition is a GOOD thing. You just need to know how to react to use it to your advantage.
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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk about is basically the, the time when you ultimately launch your B2B SaaS and all the emotions that you might going through while managing that. So I’ve launched a B2B SaaS product this week and podcasting, and it, you know, was going well so far. I had a bunch of people that had originally signed up from my landing page that was communicating to my target market, my value proposition.
And confirming supposedly what they would pay once the product became available. So one of the first things I did once we launched V1 was to send a blast email to all them, Hey, heads up, we launched. You can get access to the product. Then I’ve watched, as people have attempted to onboard themselves, I’ve understood where the activation points, or I’m getting a better idea for where the activation points are, which essentially.
People moving from one stage to the next isn’t a prospect to a paying customer or, uh, you know, an interested party to a user to get a better understanding in which levers I might move in order to move people along in the process and try to convert them into a paying customer. Ideally, a happy paying customer, one that’s receiving value.
Long story short, these are always exciting weeks. I enjoy them very much, but there’s a lot that goes through your head emotionally, and that’s kind of what I wanna talk about because at the same time this week as I launched and as I am sharing my product with my network as well too, which is another great way to get feedback by the way, especially for an early stage product, is someone shared with me feedback on my product after they tried it and used.
And they said it’s better than so-and-so product. So this week I learned about another competitive product in the same space that someone in my network was using, and they gave me, they gave me props for mine being better, which is great. But I also found out about a competitor, which I want to talk to you about how you should feel about that as well too.
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That is also great. But in the moment it’s easy to have a reaction along the lines. Oh no. Like someone beat me to the punch or someone has a head start or someone has a better product, or someone is offering more than I am, right? That’s a natural reaction that’s gonna happen to you, especially after you’ve worked hard to build what it is you’ve built.
Launched your SaaS product and found out there’s another one out there that does something similar, if not the same thing. I want to tell you why that’s not the end of the world. Number one. Competition is almost always a good thing. rising tide raises all ships, as they say. It also validates a market. So if you, depending on how, where you are in the innovation curve, as in how innovative your product is, finding out that there are other solutions to solve the problems that you’re trying to solve for your target market is a good thing, especially if you know they have traction, because that indicates the, that the opportunity is there and the demand as well.
So that should help you ultimately. everything you’re trying to do. So in the end of the, at the end, at the end of the day, that’s definitely a good thing. But I could understand if your reaction is one of surprise, you know, you get a little bit, feel, maybe a little bit intimidated, that’s all natural. But when you boil it down to brass tacks, ultimately that’s a good thing.
And it also provides an opportunity for you to learn what are they doing? How are they marketing? What, what are they communicating? Who are they marketing themselves? And then you get into a routine and a process of understanding those things and then incorporating them into your process from the perspective of how are we differentiated, right?
How do we make sure that what we’re doing is better, faster, cheaper, et cetera. It’s the same thing. , as I talk about when we’re doing the discovery work that you should do when you find out about competitors, you just need to figure out who your target market is and how you are solving their problems better than any other product out there.
And that should always be what you’re striving for. But over time, inevitably you’re gonna find other competitive products, some that you may have been aware of, some that you may not have, and new ones are gonna come, and old ones are gonna go. So this change is just gonna happen. Only, the only thing you really need to worry about is to incorporate that into part of your routine of continuously figuring out how to make your product better for your target market.
So anyway, I just wanted to share with you some of the emotional reactions you might go through during launch week, especially as you start to learn more about. What your market looks like, because once you put a product out there and you’re getting feedback, especially from friendlies and early adapters, they’re gonna be sharing these things with you, and it’s gonna be really great insight for you to know, and it can help you learn and make your product that much better.