Back in September 2015 I sent the very first edition of SaaS Roundup to 195 recipients.
As someone who was new to the SaaS industry at the time, I felt somewhat overwhelmed at the volume of content available — blog posts from startups, enterprise businesses, VCs, bootstrappers and everyone in between. There were a wealth of insights out there but it wasn’t all that easy to filter through the noise to find those truly valuable reads that inform your thinking.
Today, it’s quite clear that the value of curation is even higher, and our refined, evolved SaaS Roundup newsletter aims to deliver just that. The hours put into digging out fascinating, useful content feel well spent and the challenge of getting to just three top articles each week is tough but rewarding!
Now we’re sharing that same curated content — with some added commentary — here on the ChartMogul blog. Not everyone wants to consume information in their email inbox, and it’s for those people that we’re sharing our weekly roundup here (also now that RSS is officially “undead” this means you can read the newsletter in your reader of choice).
If you do want to join the >15,000 SaaS professionals receiving SaaS Roundup in their inbox every Friday then you can sign up here!
This week’s top reads
How we went from 10 to 200 paying customers in less than 6 months 🎉
Maxime Berthelot — Buffer, PixelMe
“NPS will help you gather feedback and face reality. It can be a bit hard sometimes, but remember — you’re making a product for your customers, not for you!”
Maxime and his Co-Founder Tom Benattar have been sharing their experience of bootstrapping PixelMe from the very beginning. This update is packed full of metrics, discoveries and some surprises that will no-doubt be useful to anyone at the very early stages of building a SaaS business. Read the full post
3 Simple Ways To Improve Your Prioritization in SaaS
Hannah Chaplin — Receptive
“Not all product feedback is equal. Make sure you can segment the data when it comes to prioritizing it. Treating feature requests & product feedback as just one fat lump, is not helping anyone. You should rarely build the feature request with the most votes in your forum!”
With so many inputs and stakeholders pushing for new product features, the task of prioritizing and selecting the single thing to work on next can be overwhelming. Common mistakes here include prioritizing things with the largest number of customer requests, or features with the largest revenue figure attached. Hannah and her team have been doing a lot of thinking around this, and this post contains some really useful advice.
What we’ve learned about selling high-tech to mainstream customers
Mike Sedzielewski — Voucherify
“We’ve learned that mainstream companies aren’t quite ready for the self-service model. They find face-to-face meetings helpful in uncovering all the benefits of Voucherify. At the same time, we’ve found out that F500 companies, despite having hundreds of developers, find value in an API-first platform like ours, too.”
Mike’s insights here are really interesting — particularly for anyone looking to move up-market and sell to enterprise businesses. Voucherify is an API-first SaaS product, so onboarding requires some level of technical integration. It’s interesting to see how different companies approach this point of friction.
My biggest takeaway from Mike’s experience is just how much hands-on time is required to make this process work effectively. Has anyone out there solved self-serve API integrations yet?
Bonus: Recommended podcast
This week you should definitely catch the SaaS Revolution Show‘s episode with Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared. Fred explains how staying laser-focused and NOT going global was a key factor in the company’s success: How Fred Shilmover grew InsightSquared by not going global.
That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still receive forthcoming issues of SaaS Roundup in your email inbox. See you next Friday.
