Why we gave up $3k MRR of early SaaS revenue
Why we gave up $3k MRR of early SaaS revenue
And why you should pay attention to customer behavior.
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Let’s do this…
Yeah, we pulled the plug on $3k MRR.
Stupid, right? I guess I need to explain myself.
It’s crazy to say this, but we soft-launched the first version of Aware, our LinkedIn engagement tool, 3 years ago.
Aware started as a side-project, and for a while our activity on it toggled between fairly inactive, and on the back burner.
Yet once we had a usable product, we got to $3k MRR with relative ease. We acquired those early customers mainly through outreach to existing contacts, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting, mainly just a bunch of demo/feedback calls.
It might seem at first glance that we were golden, and the only direction to go was up and to the right. But it wasn’t.
The product worked fairly well, and was quite powerful, but we quickly realized we were expecting too much of our customers, and forcing our workflow opinions on them.
The main bottlenecks were:
Customers not knowing the information we were asking of them during onboarding (i.e. target audience)
Customers not knowing what to do once they were onboarded
This meant we lost a lot of people right away on their journey with our product. We could often save them through manual outreach and a one-on-one onboarding call. At our then-price-point of $199/mo, it wasn’t that big of a deal. But it wasn’t scalable, and we were missing out on a lot of potential customers.
The good news was that we were clear on where the problems were, this isn’t always the case.
After lots of customer calls and seeing how people used the product, we decided we needed to rethink onboarding, simplify the product overall, and focus the core value proposition.
So we started on V2 behind-the-scenes. We left V1 alone while we built and launched V2, at which point we turned off V1, and migrated over everyone who was willing to move over ( at a much lower price-point ).
In the transition we lost a couple (mostly unused) features. And we lost our existing revenue.
However, here’s what we gained:
Users get seamless onboarding
We have a more focused value-proposition (engage on LinkedIn at lightning speed with curated, dynamic, and customer feeds)
The app is more flexible, and less opinionated in how it can be used
Customers don’t require onboarding calls
So here’s the takeway…
As I often say:
Believe in your idea, but don’t get married to it.
And I feel we stayed true to that here. We knew we were on to something, almost from day one. But something wasn’t right. It took trial and error to figure it out, and that’s how you have to do this.
People rarely launch with perfect product/market fit. You make your best attempt, then get feedback and iterate. Eventually you’ll get there.
To find that product/market fit, it’s crucial that you pay attention to:
Where users are falling off
How users are using your product
Why users stop using your product
Are you solving an actual pain point that they have?
Is the product saving them work, or creating more work for them?
Focus on the long run.
If you do, you’ll eventually wake up to a bunch of trial conversions (without requiring hand-holding during onboarding):
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