A collection of proven SaaS growth strategies

A nuanced approach to onboarding quality affiliates

Referral

Affiliates do the heavy lifting for early-to-growth stage businesses by bringing good-fit customers. Their content also helps customers quickly set up your product and integrate it with their existing workflow, leading to high retention.

Often, early-stage SaaS businesses don't find talented affiliates to work with them.

Here is a proven process to find and onboard quality affiliates and lay the foundation of a successful affiliate program.

Continue below to read the full post.

Advanced strategies for keyword search

Acquisition

Finding quality keywords that match your business goals and are of interest to your market is immensely helpful in attracting organic traffic. But it's not easy. Here are advanced strategies for it.

Contine below to read!

How to get customer reviews and testimonials

Acquisition

Testimonials are high-trust content, and prospects value them a lot. A lack of testimonials is immediately noticeable and reflects badly on your business.

However, it's not always easy for an early-stage business to get testimonials.

If the early version of your product is genuinely ground-breaking, customers will not want their competitors to know about it and will not want to reveal their usage of your product. Thus, they might avoid providing testimonials.

On the other hand, if the early version of your product is half-baked, chances are your early users are not delighted enough to provide a positive testimonial.

But as an early-stage founder, nothing should come between you and lucrative positive testimonials.

Here are time-tested strategies to get them.

A lean funnel to acquire early customers

Acquisition

Acquiring the first 20 customers for a B2B SaaS business is tricky.

During the early stage, when you have not yet figured out the market and do not have a proven growth playbook, you are likely to waste time and resources on growth activities that are not a good fit for your business model.

Whether angel-funded or bootstrapped, every early-stage SaaS business should acquire clients quickly and get the ball rolling.

Here is a lean funnel to get early clients.

LTV based pricing for maximum revenue

Revenue

Pricing is one of the least explored growth levers in most SaaS businesses.

A very effective way to maximize revenue is to optimize pricing around lifetime value (LTV).

It benefits revenue as well as retention.

Continue below to read the full strategy!

Leverage third-party distribution with just one customer

Acquisition

If you have just one customer, you can reach a massive audience for free and acquire new clients.

There is a particular type of content that can help you reach a massive audience without using paid ads.

And it works even if you do not have an email list and a big social media following.

You acquire new clients when you communicate with the audience that's a fit for your business in ways that show them the solution to their biggest problems.

Continue below to read the full strategy!

Social media ads progression for booking demos (B2B)

Acquisition

Many B2B SaaS founders have told me about their horrible experiences with paid ads during the early stages of their SaaS businesses - reducing response to ads every week, high acquisition costs, poor-fit customers, low activation rates, no deep market insights, and waste of resources.

However, after achieving the product-market fit during the growth stage, paid ads can do wonders in scaling a SaaS business.

Here is an in-depth, comprehensive strategy to use paid ads for booking more B2B demos.

A simple strategy to get free PR with creative content

Acquisition

Getting featured in publications like TechCrunch or the New York Times is a once-in-a-lifetime event and can bring a lot of exposure to any business.

In fact, it's not just the biggest publications - you can generate a lot of interest, backlinks, and exposure for your business if you can get featured in many medium-sized publications, including the ones known in your niche.

PR seems like a mystery and something only well-connected, flamboyant founders can afford. Still, like all industries, journalists work under tight deadlines, fierce competition, and a quest for new opportunities.

Here is a simple strategy to create a win-win situation and get free PR for your business with the help of creative content.

Get high-intent leads from Google without SEO ranking for competitive keywords

Acquisition

In every industry, some keywords bring high-intent prospects. Many companies create content to rank for these keywords. Many companies also run Google ads for them, making these keywords highly competitive. Because many companies are bidding for them, these keywords have high cost-per-click costs and are generally expensive.

If your content is not already ranking for these keywords, it's an uphill task. But that does not mean you should ignore them, for they are too lucrative.

Here is a strategy that combines content and ads to bring traffic related to these keywords to your website and help you generate high-intent leads.

Continue below to read the full strategy!

Define activation to improve it

Activation

In product-led motion, activation is a true indicator of growth, retention, and revenue. It is one of a few leading growth metrics that can deliver multiple benefits when you move it up.

Activation is a pro-user metric that indicates that users are driving value from the product.

When a user drops out before reaching activation, it wastes acquisition efforts and possible opportunities.

You must improve activation; the first step is to define it.

Read on to learn how to define activation.

Help developers to recommend you

Acquisition

Many SaaS products need to be integrated with the existing system, accessed via API, or configured in ways the client must involve developers before using it.

For example:

Payment services like Stripe and Paddle that developers have to integrate.

Web hosting platforms like AWS and Digital Ocean that need to be configured correctly.

Martech products that need DNS access, and so on.

In such a scenario, developers have an important say in the vendor selection.

Being nice to developers can give you an edge over your competitors.

How to be nice to developers?

Here is a detailed strategy to follow.

Improve activation with personalized onboarding

Activation

In the self-serve model, inefficient onboarding is a common problem that adversely affects the lifecycle funnel in multiple ways - from increasing acquisition costs to fueling negative word of mouth.

In recent years, personalized onboarding has shown tremendous results in improving onboarding experience and activation.

Even though personalized onboarding usually benefits companies with high annual contract value (ACV), with strategies discussed in this post, you can successfully apply it even at a relatively lower ACV.

Here is an actionable plan to get you started with personalized onboarding right away.

Increase conversion with magical reverse trial

Free To Paid Conversion

Freemium plans work well in the product-led era. They help in low-cost new user acquisition, the discovery of use cases, the design of growth loops, and product-market fit.

However, freemium plans have led to poor conversion to paid plans. Studies show that the best freemium plans only have upto 5% conversion rate. That's very low, considering the resources companies invest to sustain freemium users.

On the other hand, free trials have a better conversion of about 15%, but they do not provide the benefits of freemium.

So, how can you reap freemium's benefits without facing its shortcomings?

Here is the magical way to get the best of the freemium and free trial!

Framework to design a freemium plan that converts

Free To Paid Conversion

Freemium plans are everywhere in this product-led growth era. They help attract new users, ease the friction, facilitate value discovery, and pave the path for monetization.

But they come with a big problem:

Offer too little and risk users never discovering the value in the product to stay.

Offer too much and risk users staying in the free plan forever without having any incentive to upgrade to paid plans.

There is a constant struggle between being valuable and monetization.

Here is a framework to optimize a freemium plan so that users fall in love with the product and want to upgrade to paid plans.

Do continue to check in!

Define and detect product qualified leads

Free To Paid Conversion

If you are following a product-led growth motion, you must clearly define product-qualified leads and set up a system to detect them every week or month.

PQLs can fuel your marketing and sales outreach - high-intent leads that are easy to convert.

PQLs are a source of new paying users as well as expansion revenue.

Learn all about PQLs: how to define, detect, and convert them.

Two dimensions of an effective onboarding

Activation

Onboarding converts new signups into users; it is a necessary step.

However, not all onboarding flows are created equal.

A poorly designed onboarding flow can harm your business - it can attract the wrong audience that will never convert to a paying plan or can drive away a good-fit audience.

There are two dimensions of an effective onboarding flow.

Continue below to read it.

Blueprint of a high-performing product demo

Acquisition

It's one thing to add a 'Book a demo' button on the homepage and another to deliver a winning demo.

Many things can go wrong with a product demo, from tech glitches to objections you never considered.

Here are some high-impact secrets to improve win rate on product demos.

Sharp Positioning using JTBD Insights

Acquisition

Positioning your business in the market can make or break it's success potential.

A correct positioning can make your prospects instantly think you understand them, while a wrong one can alienate them.

Here is a how to use jobs-to-be-done framework to position your SaaS business in ways that your market can't resist.

Win over the lovers of your competitors

Acquisition

Here is a strategy you can use from day one of your business to acquire new users for your minimum viable product.

In fact, you can use it even before building an MVP.

And, if you do it right, you can build a community of supporters who will help you with their insights, feedback, and, of course, money.

It is the way to become a revolutionary.

Let's dive right in.

Leverage subject matter experts for quality content

Acquisition

There are two tactical challenges to getting real business benefits from any form of content:

Organic distribution: How will the right audience discover this content?

Conversion: How can a content piece help you get more clients or retain the ones you already have?

Here is a strategy to produce high-quality content that has the solution to both of these problems built-in.

Let's dive right in by clicking below.

Supercharge product guides for retention

Retention

Product education is important to help customers use the product.

What do you think most users do when they can't understand how to use a product?

Here are behavioral insights and two powerful elements to supercharge your product's help content and improve retention.

Don't let confused customers churn.

Ungate product experience for fast conversion

Acquisition

Product-led self-serve SaaS motions see only 3% of website visitors signing up for free plans. Many of these new users quickly churn, leading to low activation.

Regular sales funnel relies on landing pages and demo videos to convert prospects to users. However, most new users enter the product without having a clear idea about its capabilities and use cases.

Confused new users with 'less-than-ideal' excitement never complete the onboarding and do not activate, wasting marketing efforts in their acquisition.

Here is a better way to leverage the product to sell itself.

Drive growth with just one pillar content piece and lean distribution

Acquisition

When it comes to growth, there is one content type that consistently outperforms everything else in the long run.

It provides the highest return on investment among all content formats, and you can use it to generate new leads even without building an audience first.

Here is a strategy to create pillar content and promote it using a lean distribution.

Do continue to check in!