Top 10 Mistakes That Saas Owners Must Avoid Right Now.

Saas which we know with the term “Software as a service” is more of a solution than a product. These are software that are built to solve problems of business or individual and generate revenue out of it.

So, there are three things that attract people to become saas owners. Either they want to solve a problem of business or want to start a new revenue model into your wealth stream or both of the above.

In this entire process, some of them build best of the best saas while some of them end up buring money.

In this blog, I am going to point out 10 mistakes that a saas owner does commonly which must be avoided.

Saas owners mistakes| An overview

As we are here to learn these mistakes and prevent them, so lets have a look at them one by one.

1. Poor market research.
2. Fails to identify pain points.
3. No product roadmap.
4. Poor Product building.
5. No testing.
6. Less focus on marketing.
7. Poor marketing strategy.
8. No dedicated Sales team.
9. Poor product explainers and demo.
10. Software upgrading.

These are some of the common mistakes which SAAS owners makes and end up failing in their SAAS ventures. Let us understand them in detail.

1. Poor market research.

This is the mistake that saas owner does before jumping into their niche of saas. Whenever you plan to get into a SAAS business, you must do a strong marketing research.

What should your marketing research include?

1. What is the trend of your software niche.

This you can do using the tools like google trend. For example, If I wish to start an HR Saas, I will check different features that I can offer in HR software and start scaling the product with the feature that has high demand. See the screenshot below.

In the above trend graph I see that HR Software has a declining demand since 2004 till 2020 but other features like time tracker and applicant tracking software demands are increasing and show rising trend.

So, what I will do as an HR Saas owner, I would build an ATS, or a time tracker and slowely scale my SAAS businesses to other niche in the HR domain.

This would be a good start for saas owner in this niche.

So, you need to check with trend before jumping into the business.

2. Check the market competition.

This is very important because ultimately you need to market out your solution to the market. If your market is overcrowded with the tough market leader then you may need to burn a lot of cash and money. If your marketing budget is a week, in that case, you will end up failing as you won’t grow profitable in less time. For some saas owners, this can be frustrating.

To check the market competiton, you can use resources like,

• PPC bidding cost in google ads.
• The domain authority of competitors in your niche.
• The Facebook library will tell you the money burned by your saas niche competitors.
• Use brand monitoring tools to identify the kind of mentions, your competitors are getting online. This will tell you the brand power estimation to make your sass successful.

These are some small technique which will give you a glimpse of how tough is your saas niche.

These small measures will help your decide a saas niche which you can choose to build your saas.

What if you find the right saas niche and now you and your development team is ready to start a profitable product develeopment? Do you think the saas owner will still fail? Yes He/she can fail again.

Let’s see more mistakes that can be avoided to become a failure.

2. Fail To identify pain points.

What is saas? In the beginning of this blog, I talked that saas offers a solution to problem. These problems are actual pain points that needs to be solved with the help of a saas.

Let’s take an example.

In the recent pandemic situation where the entire workforce was forced to work remotely, we badly needed tools to manage a remote team. This bought zoom as the winning product for a lot of business. It solved the problem of remote meetings.

Now, a lot of company jumped in with the same offerings in their saas.

Productivity monitoring tools like Hubstaff saw maximum growth as they were helping the business owners to monitor the work of their remote team by monitoring their live activity while working from home.

All these saases grew massive. They understood the pain points and offered a similar solution by marketing their product to such a business.

How to identify the pain points of your saas niche?

To identify the paint point we can take help of various resources like.

1. Google’s “People ask for” in the SERP will tell you what people are finding an answer around your saas keywords.
2. You can use forums to identify people’s problems and queries.
3. Move to Q&A websites like “Quora” that will help you to find pain points around your saas niche.
4. Conduct surveys and take feedback from your potential customers using survey tools like proprofs, survey ninja, survey monkey, etc.
5. Use websites like answerthepublic which will tell you all questions being asked by people in your niche. It will help you identify those pain points.

These small steps will bring a massive change in your approach towards starting a successful saas business.

3. No product roadmap.

It is a blunder. If your saas development is not backed by a roadmap and planning, your software versions will see a lot of failures, poor customer retention, bad churn rate, and a lot of more challenges.

Formulating a good roadmap will help you and your team aligned to a growth path and the solution offered by your saas will be more relating to the pain points in your niche.

Your development team will also be motivated to archiving goals as they will be updated with what they are doing and where they are going.

Use project management methodologies that can be more agile and transparent. This will help you build a better roadmap.

You can use tools like Trello or slack to manage and coordinate with your team if you are working remotely.

Avoiding this mistake will see a better reach towards a successful saas development.

4. Poor Product building.

Now we know that our saas is a trending niche and we have also identified the product pain points. Still, there is a possibility that your saas business can fail.

Your product is the essence of your business. If you don’t build a saas that is easy to use without getting into much of the documentation and watching tutorial videos then you are all set come out with a successful saas product.

Your SAAS product should have following traits to be successful.

1. Good UI/UX with easy navigation among all saas dashboards.
2. Good knowledge base documentations.
3. The FAQ is available at an approachable corner of your website, helpdesk, or inside the software.
4. Good video tutorials on how to use your saas.
5. Easy to get features should be there.
6. Good privacy control needs to be assured.
7. Certified from a trusted organization is an added bonus.

If you keep these basic things as an essential formality in your saas their you are one ladder up towards a successful saas business.

5. No testing and surveys

Blunder! Blunder! Blunder!

You built your saas and didn’t test with the beta tester team, you are bound to build bugs. If you launch your saas with such flaws, you will destroy your image in the industry with your saas name.

This will pop up with more negative reviews and negative marketing leading to business loss.

Also, if you are not taking feedback from your current customers who are using your tool, you may end up losing them. Taking feedback and improving on flaws will help you build a better solution for the businesses with your saas.

Use platforms like Usertesting, which will help you start beta testing from qualified testers and identify the software flaws that can cause poor retention. Identifying them and eliminating will surely give you better user stability while using your saas.

6. Less focus on marketing.

You must have heard this a lot, apple iPhones are not phones, they are emotion. People don’t buy a phone in the case of the iPhone, they buy the brand. This is happening not only because of the product but the way, steve jobs started it as a brand, it has embarked a space in people’s hearts.

You are marketing for your saas not only to reach to your target audience but also to build a brand. This needs good marketing tools like semrush, ahref good tools to improve your marketing executions.

Building a brand is very important. If you think you will only do content marketing or run ads and come on top searches which shall give you little customers every month and eventually you can grow then it’s a wrong mindset.

You need to keep a 360-degree approach to marketing your saas. Let me make it very clear to you. You are a saas owner, your product is a web app or an app or anything that is mostly dependent on the cloud. In this case, you need to keep your marketing more online then online mode.

If you can take marketing seriously and strategically, you can do wonders. Failure chances will be reduced to a lower number.

7. Poor marketing strategy.

In the above point, we talked about how less focus on marketing can have an adverse effect, but what if you have a poor marketing strategy?

It will hit you hard. You will burn cash with no conversion.

What is a good marketing strategy for starting a saas?

I can give you a brief overview to start a good marketing strategy of saas with the following points.

1. Your landing page should behave like a sales point with an answer to pain points.
2. Your saas website should be SEO friendly with a good silo structure.
3. You must start by focusing on content marketing.
4. Listing your saas on a software listing website is a must.
5. Getting your saas reviewed on the software listing website will boost your visibility.
6. Create more video content to market your product.
7. Use an email marketing strategy to capture the lead and promote products through email marketing.
8. Generate sales leads with lead generation PPC if you have ppc budget.
9. Always focus on remarketing anyhow if you wish to build brand.
10. Do more collaborative marketing.
11. Get in touch with your niche influencers and blogger and get mentions and shootouts.
12. Stay in touch with your customers with proper CRM management systems,

These are some few basic points to keep in mind when you start with your saas marketing.

8. No dedicated Sales team.

A lot, lot, lot of saas owners don’t understand this. There is a difference between sales and marketing. Both have different approaches to taking saas to a greater height.

If you don’t understand this then welcome to the board of failed saas owners.

How to improve on this and avoid this failure?

1. Get a telecaller for calling all hot, warm, and cold leads generated out of marketing efforts.
2. Have a proper CRM tool like Salesforce or HubSpot to manage and predict your sales for saas. This will help you reach your monthly goals in ordination with the marketing team.
3. Use followup tools with email integration to stay in touch with your warm and hot leads. This will boost your conversions.
4. Arrange a free consultation and product demo done by the sales team.

These 4 basic care will help you to avoid failure in saas business.

9. Poor product explainers and demo.

Let’s take a note now.

1. You have done good product-market research and confident about your saas niche.
2. The pain points are in your bucket list and you are ready to solve them with your saas.
3. Using an agile roadmap, you have built a smart saas.
4. Your marketing strategies are working well and high-quality leads are being generated.
5. Your sales team are in regular touch with your hot, warm and cold leads with all possible tools.

BUT! BUT!! BUT!!!!

Your sales team got paused, as your customers are asking for demo or product video so that they can understand the tool at their own convenient time and place.

You don’t have that or they are in poor conditions. You will lose your lead. They will dump you and find other tools with better explainers.

So, even after so many hardships, if you’re onboarding is not easy with tutorials and explainer videos, you may see a few footfalls going away from your software dashboards.

10. Software upgrading.

By now, you must be thinking that you are a successful owner with customers onboarded and they are paying you well.

But, how can you forget your competitors? They are always ready to snatch away your dreams.

Its time to get into the loop here. What loop?

Go back to mistake one. Identify market potential now. What’s trending, Question yourself. Do you need to upgrade with more features or improve current features?

Repeat the questioning till 9th mistake again.

This will make you rock solid and make you a more strong playing in your saas niche.

Also Read: Top 10 Dropshipping saas software for dropshipping business

Conclusion

Now I can definitely welcome you to the successful saas owner list. If you have avoided all the above mistakes then your current saas is a sure shot success.

For saas owners who are failing. I would advise them to work on the above-mentioned mistakes. You must have done at least one of the above and broke the loop that I talked about before

If you are ready to overcome failure and bring the best saas in the market, follow it, and welcome yourself to the success ladder.

Wishing good luck to all saas owners.