What are your biggest learnings about building a SaaS product?

In order to maintain a strong retention, you need to evolve the product as your customers' needs change. What works today may not work in year 2, 3, or 4. For instance, what we launched on Product Hunt today is completely different than what we launched 5 years ago.

Talk to your early users constantly. You should be on a first-name basis with them.

Subscribers count doesn't matter. I built a list of ~5000 subscribers who wanted to get early access on https://automatio.co, for a pre-launch. Since I didn't engage those subscribers for years, most of them even forgot what they subscribed for. If you are building an audience first, it's important to keep them in the loop, by posting updates or something valuable and relevant to them. Otherwise, people will forget why they even subscribed for, and mark you as SPAM or just unsubscribe.

Based on my Saas experience (FlowMapp, 230k users, x2.5 YoY): — Don't be afraid to ask people directly to test your product. — Design will be even more important in 2022. — Hire smart, start HR branding as you can. — Talk to users every day. — Start social & communications asap, even before launch. — Follow Product-Led Growth strategy. — Freemium is a must. — Onboarding is your infinite point of growth. — Do not use paid traffic channels at the start. They lead to the wrong place. — Organic and WoM are the best channels of effort. — Don't be greedy. Your launch priority is retention, not revenue. — Support is very very very important. Fast one is game changer. — Find mentors and advisors. — Do inhouse-only product marketing. — No worries, bugs are normal :) — Update, analyze, update. — Develop a A/B testing system from the beginning ("flag-function"). — Look for partners, find out their expertise. I hope it's helpful for makers.

I learned quite a few things through my journey of building a SaaS product (some of them the hard way). I’ll list them down below in no particular order: Focus on customer experience- Your SaaS product might not be the best in the market or may not offer everything that the competitor is. But focusing on elevating the customer experience is the most important thing. Your software cannot be just ‘good enough’ during launch because the customers will have to pay the price. Make sure your customers get things done instantly without any hiccups when they use your product. Start testing immediately- One of my negligence was that I waited for my product to pass the prototyping stage before I released it for public testing. It ended up costing me significant time and money to go back and correct the mistakes that I never knew existed in the first place. Therefore, always start testing in the initial stages and make sure you are correcting all the mistakes as you go. Map out your expansion plan- Once your product hits the market, it does not indicate the end of the process. If you want to make your product even bigger, research and explore the potential markets that your product could work in. Once you’ve done that, capture one market and move to another. Keep dominating as you go. Customer feedback is the key- One of the most underrated learnings from my journey was the importance of customer feedback. Make sure you collect customer feedback and insights at every stage of the development and when the product is launched to understand things that can be done better. You can even automate this process by using online feedback tools like qualaroo ( https://qualaroo.com/ ) that you can embed on your SaaS products, and it will collect feedback for you and present reports after analysis. Don’t let the momentum die- Once your product is launched, don’t just sit back and relax. Always keep on adding features and collect feedback to know where customers are facing problems. Work actively towards resolving those grievances and keep polishing your product. Apart from that, there’s not much that you need to worry about. I’d say just focus on getting the basics right, and you’ll surely get there. Rest assured, I’ve shared some of my best tips, so I’m hoping you do well. Good luck with your product.

Be open to feedback and that doesn't mean wait for feedback. Go find it! It is more important than early traction for a scalable SaaS product!

It feels overwhelming trying to make any progress as a part-time solo founder, - reaching out for customer interviews - defining the roadmap - building the product - QA/Security testing the product - managing the infrastructure - testing the product with customers - researching new opportunities - doing documentation - marketing - support While trying to have a personal life.

Build an MVP, launch fast, get feedback from real users, validate and improve. That's what I wish I would have done with my first 2 startups. Did it better the 3rd time around with KatLinks 🚀

- Build in public from the very beginning - Run many experiments early on - Build with a no-code tool to allow for fast iterations The best resource I discovered recently on running experiments is the one on Minimum Variable Tests by @gagan_biyani . Wish I had read it sooner! https://review.firstround.com/th...

-Just launch!! Ship and try to monetize very early: it will help you know what your customers are actually ready to pay for and avoid a month of development for nothing -Talk to customers a lot: for Whaly, we've put a slack with our users and they ping us directly for feedback or issues -If you have a big enough niche target audience, start doing marketing especially content as it will help you rank in SEO and build your inbound: we did it a bit late and are just starting now

Building a community is absolutely essential for any SAAS currently !!! We at Vadootv have built a community of 3000+ users with which we regularly engage on Facebook and the results have been super awesome. We got 430+ reviews on G2 and 350+ reviews on Capterra because of community Word of mouth publicity via community is the biggest growth hack

- Build your first version as fast as you can - focus only on the top 3 features - Talk to your users/potentials customers. Do it MORE! - Don't be afraid to through your MVP away to try a new version - Be as open as possible (use Twitter to build in public)

what I learned by building SaaS business as a non-developer: 1. Don't code everything yourself, use no-code tools as much as possible. Only a small percentage of products go from the development phase to real businesses. Prepare to fail a lot. No-code tools will shorten that failure loop. 2. Validate, validate and validate your ideas. Don't just choose to take the world from the start. First, validate your ideas by building simple MVPs and test them out. 3. Analysis paralysis. Don't just listen to every podcast or read every book. Just start building right away and you will learn by doing. 4. Create personal OKR's. (Objectives and key results). 5. Don't overwork, life-work balance. 6. Use sites such as [indiehackers.com](http://indiehackers.com), [producthunt.com](http://producthunt.com), or dev.to for inspiration or marketing, validation ideas. 8. Do a product hunt launch correctly. I failed once, it's not that simple. Need some time to prepare.

build something fast and start trying to sell it. because only after you start attempting to sell will you discover what people actually want.

My companies have developed great Saas Products. I have seen them working hard on them. They have always focused on User-Friendly systems, new-gen technologies, new updations, and new features as per clients' business, testing thoroughly because nobody likes bugs, reaching clients asap with any query,etc.

Once value proposition is clear, build a proper onboarding flow to gather as much data as you can on customers needs. Ask for pro email at the end. If there's a real market fit with value proposition, they'll let their email.

Creating just a highly technical product won't work until it is easy to use.

Start building, don't wait for perfection. Decide what you want to build and start, then offer it to your users and get feedback. Let the users drive the features. You never stop building a SaaS, you are always adding to it more features.

Saying no to features is the hardest thing. There are always so many good ideas going around but no time to do it all and you do not want to otherwise, you will end up with a confusing mess of a product that does a little for everyone but does solve the problem entirely for anyone.

Here are some of the points from my Notes app where I record what I learn almost everyday building a SaaS product (https://hellonext.co/): - Sit down and write down where you want to take your product. - Break the vision down into multiple milestones and start with the first one that would be the core value (feature) of your product. - Next up, put up a landing page highlighting that core value, and also tell the users the features that are coming up as well. - Post about your product everywhere possible to put yourself in front of your potential customers. - Decide whether to build in public or by yourself. It is not a social requirement to build everything in public. It's okay. - Ask for help from people you know. PH community is an amazing place. - Do not automate your marketing and support in the early stages. Talk to your users. Know them by the name. Get to a point where they can even call you on your number if they need help. - Don't focus on your competitors much. Keep yourself updated about them, but never try to play catch-up. Do what's right for your product. - Do not take pressure to your head just because someone else is making more money than you do right now. It's okay. There is a growth trajectory. Things will go your way someday. You just have to put your heads-down and put in the work. - Try not to watch productivity videos. They add pressure. They make you feel like you're a loser, and you end up working like someone else, not like the way you naturally do. Ultimately, I'm right here (https://twitter.com/imkarthikk) if you need to talk. Let's build great product for us, our family, and our future.