eFounders is startup studio building SaaS companies. We’ve been crafting SaaS products for 3 years now and we’ve learned many things on the way.
In this presentation Mailjet, Textmaster, mention, Pressking, Front and Aircall, 6 eFounders family members, are sharing tips they’ve learned while growing a SaaS business.
2. Building SaaS
eFounders is startup studio building SaaS companies.
We’ve been crafting SaaS products for 3 years now and
we’ve learned many things on the way.
In this presentation Mailjet, Textmaster, mention,
Pressking, Front and Aircall, 6 eFounders family
members, are sharing tips they’ve learned while growing a
SaaS business.
http://efounders.co
3. Product
At eFounders, we mock the entire product up before
writing any line of code.This gives us a very good idea of
what the whole project will look like. By making
mockups as sharp as possible it almost doubles the
speed and efficiency of coding, design and content
writing.
Thibaud Elzière
eFounders Founder
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4. Sales
Edouard Level
Mailjet Head of Sales
At Mailjet, sales teams need to understand and master
storytelling. It's very important to know how to tell a
story when you are involved in sales, even for a highly
technical product.
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5. Customer Acquisition
Thibault Lougnon
TextMaster CEO
Customer acquisition costs must be kept to a minimum,
otherwise your entire funding will disappear in just a few
months.
My best tip is to keep your advertising budget as low
as possible, extensively use social networks with low-
cost strategies to target your first users and leverage
them to spread the word through affiliate programs,
contests, games, etc.
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6. Finance
Quentin Nickmans
eFounders Founder
Many SaaS founders are obsessed with fundraising before
they understand how their business really works.Your #1
aim is to master your key business metrics: CAC, ARPU,
CHURN, Cohort behaviours and MRR*
Once you’ve understood how they work and what your
leverages are, your fundraising strategy will follow.
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* see last slide for details
7. Marketing
Clément Delangue
mention Head of Marketing
Nobody knows what can or cannot work. Take time for
the things that “can’t work just because.” Prove
“because” wrong.This is how @mention we could close
great partnerships, like the one with Buffer, or that we got
some amazing media coverage.
Don’t be scared to be creative and bold even if your
are selling software to businesses.
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8. Public Relation
Bertrand Besse
PressKing CEO
SaaS founders have a tendency to reuse their marketing
pitch when they contact a journalist. Instead, they should
explain why it is relevant and newsworthy for the
journalist. Marketing and PR are 2 completely different
fields.And writing a press release is different from drafting
your sales pitch.
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9. Pricing
Olivier Pailhes
Aircall CEO
Don’t be afraid to price your product while in closed
Beta. One of the first questions our beta users ask after
trying Aircall is “How much will it cost?”. B2B users need
to know your pricing as soon as possible because it
inspires trust. Don’t overestimate the power of free.
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10. Development
Laurent Perrin
Front CTO
The number of 3rd party APIs and services which developers
can use to speed up product development is exploding.These
tools are great but nowadays, when you build your tech stack
you must absolutely take into account all the inherent risks:
service discontinuation, tos changes, service getting acquired,
pricing changes etc. Risk management for 3rd party
services is becoming increasingly important.
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11. Design
Didier Forest
eFounders Partner
UX and UI standards have increased dramatically in
the software industry. Crafting a beautiful and easy to use
product is now compulsory to appeal to users and to
compete with the myriad of new SaaS coming out every
month. Design should be a priority from day one.
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13. Finance *
Here are additional information from Quentin’s tip:
CAC: Cost of Acquisition of a (paying - long term) customer
ARPU:Average revenue per user (or account)
CHURN: Often split into short term (first 3 months) and long term (after first 3
months) churn behaviour / analysed per monthly cohort
MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue = compilation of signups, conversion,ARPU
and churn - resulting in the bottom line figure =>MRR
We’re talking about post seed rounds (A and more)