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E134: How to Start Thinking About Scaling Your B2B SaaS Operation

by Sean Boyce

As your B2B SaaS product begins to scale so will the work required to maintain the momentum.  I want to walk you through my through process and a few strategies I use to measure the balance I’m currently managing and where I may need help next to ensure it remains in balance.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is how to be thinking about growing and scaling your B2B SaaS operation as your product continues to go deeper into product market fit. Now, I talk a lot about the early stage of figuring out the problem that you’re going to be solving, how you’re going to be solving it, but don’t you start to gain some of that traction.

And I’ve got a product that’s in that phase at the moment, you wanna be thinking about how you want to scale that operation from the perspective of. A, what it is that you want to be doing, and B, essentially what it is that you don’t. Now, as you continue to grow and scale, there’s gonna be more demand on each of the respective areas that it’s gonna be required in order to continue to maintain your operation.

And that could be anything from sales, support, marketing, engineering, et cetera, and management, which is probably what you’re doing most of the time at the moment. Now, you may have one or more team members already helping you, but if you are trying to figure out. At what point you should be adding more?

Good way to be thinking about that is as you start to feel like you’re unable to continue to do more working on the business versus working in the business, then you want to try to reset that balance. So if you’re doing a lot more of the busy work, but it isn’t as much from a strategic perspective and it’s not moving the needle as in it’s just maintaining, you’re gonna want to get yourself some of that time back.

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So, Look for and understand where the bottlenecks are in your internal process. Just like we do when we’re looking for problems we’re solving with our target market customers, we’re trying to figure out where’s their critical path, which one is the bottleneck? Repeat the same process for your own operation.

Try to find out which of the steps or the roles that you’re playing at the moment is consuming a significant portion of your time. Especially if it’s something that you don’t necessarily want to do or something that isn’t particularly complicated or hard to do, and it’s something you could probably get help for sooner rather than later.

And I have a tendency to think about this in three different phases as well. From the bottom up, from anywhere, from admin or administrative work at the first level, operations on the second, and then business development, sales, marketing, those types of things are the third. From the lowest level to the highest level for me historically, has been the opportunity to be able to delegate those rather successfully with less effort.

Now, your mileage may vary of course, but that’s typically how I think about it. So some of the stuff on the earlier side that I look to do, uh, it, for example, as my B2B SaaS product starts growing and scaling. Is if the support channel starts to become particularly active and I start to get quite a bit of messages or feedback maybe about bugs, feature requests, whatever is, that starts to become something that I have essentially developed a routine or a process for that I could train someone else up on managing for me, perhaps even part-time in the beginning.

That might be something I look for sooner rather than later to give myself that time back. I wanna make sure that I. Develop the process or the procedure that I want someone to follow to make sure that I’m still maintaining the insight that’s coming in from that channel because it’s still valuable information, but a number of the steps, or the majority of the time, I don’t necessarily need to do myself.

So I’m gonna look for somebody that can help me with that. And then you’ll want to continue to repeat this process as you’re growing and scaling to make sure that you are maintaining a good balance of that opportunity for you to work in the business versus the opportunity for you to work on the business.