Challenges for SaaS Startups

What Kind of Product do People Want?

The first challenge in starting for SaaS startups are building a product that people want.  Everybody has great ideas but every business needs a product that people want to buy.  That is the first step to get you on the right path.  Second is being able to sell the products in a cost-efficient way.  You have to meet every customer face to face like we at EventBank have to do in China.  So sales create a lot of challenges to any B2B organization.  A lot of people think that they can build an internet product and just show up in my jeans and a t-shirt and go talk to the client.  This is true in the internet space, you can just sit in your office and wear your hoodie, but in the SaaS space, you have to sit in front of the customer and have a conversation and convince them why and how you are going to help them run a better business.

Onboarding Customers

So sales will be the most important part AFTER you have built the product.  The third piece is onboarding customers, which is different for the younger generation in the U.S. People adopt SaaS as well as technology in different ways.  You are basically taking an organization and putting your product inside that organization. So in a way, they are trusting you to run your platform.  Now if it is sales, CRM, marketing, accounting software, people have to know that what you built is not going to skew their numbers so that it is a trustable platform.  Onboarding that process for us in Asia has been one of our bigger challenges especially with some organizations who have had less technology adoption and therefore now are trying to bring their whole organization on board.  So maybe a 30-day onboarding process maybe takes 60-90 days to get that customer fully onboard.

Turn Rates

When we talk about turn rate, the hope is that it is the organization because your customer success team is constantly going and having conversations with the people to make sure everything is going smoothly.  The last thing is just making sure of the longevity of the business.  All the cost structures have to work properly.  As you scale a SaaS business, that cost structure has to be instead of heavy weighted on the R&D side, needs to be heavily weighted basically to the sales side.  Most people who get into the technology business happen to be very smart from a technology perspective.  Therefore they have to be able to bring the people into the business that know how to scale sales and know how to scale customer success.  They also need to know how to scale the other components that make the company successful.

It really is going to be trial by fire, you are going to go and make mistakes along the way but you need to keep going and make sure you learn something from every mistake.