Top Tips to Scaling Your SaaS Startup Successfully
Software as a service or SaaS is the most promising business model today. If you are running a SaaS startup company, there is no denying that you must have put immense effort into creating this right from building a prototype to launching products and onboarding the customers.
However, you need to be careful while scaling up the business because there are chances that you can end up with premature scaling or scaling exponentially. Both can jeopardize your SaaS Startups. Also, failing to scale up means you can be easily outperformed by your competitors. Therefore, it is necessary that your business scales up at the right time and follows a strategically designed plan.
Here are a few tips that could help you to scale your SaaS startup successfully.
Tips to Scale Your SaaS startup
- Market analysis: Market analysis is an important phase of scaling as it enables you to know the customers’ expectations from the product. It gives clarity on what features to include and prioritizes the scaling activities. Further, it helps to get an extra edge over the competitors by comparing and implementing features that they don’t have.
- Define your funding options: Acquiring more customers means spending more money. To scale up your SaaS business, you need to invest in sales and marketing activities, hire more employees, expand existing infrastructure, etc. If you don’t have enough funds, you cannot scale up your business at full strength, which leads to startup failure, so before you begin scaling up, secure the funds you need for the business expansion. You can go after series B or C funding.
- Increase marketing efforts: Increasing your marketing efforts is at the center of the scaling process. With active marketing campaigns, you can drive more customers to your business. During the scaling phase, along with your marketing team, you have to figure out which marketing campaign or approach can bring your business high ROI. It is important that you continue to build a brand reputation while you are scaling up and let your customers know the latest updates taking place in the company. Also, while running your marketing campaign, make sure you retarget your passive customers or visitors. Some customers do not convert on the first attempt, so target them at regular intervals. Besides marketing campaigns, you can even offer a free trial of your product or freemium to engage customers.
- Implement automation: Automation can be a key strategy for SaaS startups to scale the business and perform tasks with the available resources. It can help to automate various business activities such as customer service, sales and marketing, capturing leads, customer feedback, workflow automation, etc. Automation technology can be a one-time investment, but it eliminates all the recurring costs associated with repetitive tasks. It frees up your resources so that they can use their time in more productive and creative work.
- Invest in technology: Many start-ups consider investing in technology or software solutions as a cost to the company and hesitate to invest in it. However, if your start-up is in the scaling phase, it is wise to invest in software solutions at this stage. Moving forward, it can help you to manage your tasks more efficiently and let you do more with less. Various software solutions, such as CRM software, ERP software, marketing automation software, project management software, accounting software, etc., could help simplify all your business activities. Choose the software that meets your business requirements and priority.
- Integrate with third-party API: It is not ideal and sometimes even complicated to code all the features from scratch. Instead, using a third-party API is more advisable to reduce the burden on the developers and save their valuable time. It allows embedding features in your SaaS product without any coding.
- Pricing strategy: Your SaaS startup pricing can affect your business, and it should be done with due diligence. It is natural that as your business scales, the pricing would also change. However, unrealistic pricing can put off your customers and throw you out of business. You need to analyze various factors before finalizing the pricing, such as competitors’ pricing, costs of providing the service, customer acquisition costs, etc. Most SaaS businesses offer a flexible or pay-as-you-go pricing model, but if there is a loyal customer base, a recurring subscription model is also an ideal choice. Some SaaS startups also prefer providing a tiered pricing model with different subscription plans.
- Track SaaS growth metrics: For scaling up SaaS startups, there are a few metrics that could help you to understand the potential of your business and execute your scaling strategy. These metrics include CAC (customer acquisition costs), CLV (customer lifetime value), MRR/ARR (monthly/Annual recurring revenue), churn rate, activation rate, etc.
- Attract right talent: While scaling up your SaaS start-ups, it is essential that you attract the right talent that could add value to the start-ups’ goal.
- Expand business to global audience: Just by focusing on a particular audience or region, you are not positioning your product, and it is more likely that your SaaS startup will fail. By marking your presence in the global market, you open doors for new growth opportunities. But language and cultural differences are big obstacles in expanding business globally. You can hire a local salesperson to take your product to the market as it helps to overcome the language barriers and understand their expectations more clearly. In case you have to operate with the in-house salespeople, then you can take the help of translation services for communication.
Conclusion
SaaS infrastructure is setting a new trend in the business world with its agile and diversified offering. It has created a huge market for SaaS products, and many startups are coming up with unique services. However, besides having a great SaaS product, many startups fail to convert it into a large enterprise.
They lack strategy in scaling up the SaaS Startup. There are many attributes that startups need to consider to scale up successfully. If you are on your SaaS startup journey, and looking to scale your business, the tips mentioned here can make your process a lot easier.