How to launch a profitable B2B SaaS business for less than $750 – https://nxtstep.io/b2bsaas
Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and in this episode I want to talk about the beta concept, and I’m doing air quotes since you can’t see me now. People talk about having beta version of their product using beta testers and users for their product. Bunch of different concepts, and I wanna talk to you about. What I think works here and what I think doesn’t work.
Number one, I don’t love the concept of a quote beta version of your product, especially if you haven’t launched it. A lot of people talk about that in the very early stages. They try to find a handful of folks to test it with. I, I say skip, although that that just adds, in my opinion, unnecessary time to the process.
Just launch your product to whomever’s, willing to use it. And those can become your, your first wave of users, beta users, if you wanna refer to them as such. But anybody can sign up. I think that saves time and gets you feedback a lot faster. I think the whole process is more effective if you approach it in that way.
Now, what I think does make sense is after you have a wave of users and you have verified again that you can turn prospects into users and then users into paying customers, once you’ve validated the fact that you have essentially a funnel or a process for that, That’s a big checkbox. Once you’ve done that, you want to engage with them a bit deeper.
And potentially a subset of them to engage a bit deeper, to learn more about the direction in which your product should go. What problems should your product be solving beyond what it does currently? That way you can continue to make it better so folks are continually getting more value out of it, and that return on investment for you should look like an extended LTV or lifetime value, as in how long your users and customers are paying for access to your product because of set investment.
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Now, I think this is where it makes sense to entertain this as a process, but again, not before you launch your product, after you launch your product. So flip that around. But once you have and you verifi verify the fact that you’re able to process through those phases successfully to a certain percentage and keep track of your baseline there, then what you could do is start engaging with folks that have expressed interest beyond the typical user.
They’re reaching out to your support channels. They’re asking questions. Maybe they have ideas they’ve shared with you. Those folks are perfect for creating essentially a subset of users to get a better understanding in is the actual persona, as in the people that are using and paying for your product, same as you had initially designed it and built all of your positioning around great testing to be done there.
Beyond that, look for additional ways that you can engage with them to better understand. Okay. You know, what has your experience been like with a product? How are you getting value out of it? You can even capture some social proof or some quotes to share on your website, to encourage others to sign up.
But beyond that, you can work with them to learn more about, okay, what’s next? Like, what do you, what else do you want this to do? How else could it be better? So I’m getting that feedback now from my podcast product, and I’m getting a ton of positive feedback. So folks are reaching out, they’re engaging with me, I’m asking them these follow up questions, and I’m getting so much helpful information.
Back through the channel and I, I’m getting that because I just straight up released my product. So I released my product. People are paying for it, people are using it, and they’re sending me ideas in terms of how to make it better. This is something I’ve talked about quite a bit, uh, in theory. I’m using it now, obviously in practice with this example so that you can see how it works as well too, and it’s also something that I want you to do.
So if you’re thinking about how to leverage beta concepts for your product, this is where I think it will be great to start and where I think you’ll get the most value.