Successful SaaS Beta Launch (Top 5 Sites to Launch your SaaS on Beta Stage)

You spent the last few months building your product, refining your model, and writing your code. After all this hard work, it's finally time to go out there and ship your product to the world and see if there's real market demand. I've worked with literally almost hundreds of different SaaS companies at this point over my career, and I've seen them launch at different places and what's worked and what doesn't work. And today I'm going to talk about 5 different places that you have to launch your SaaS product as soon as you exit that beta stage of building your product. Welcome back to another video here at SaaS District. Now, if you guys don't know who I am, if you haven't checked out my other videos, my name is Akeel Jabbar. I'm the founder and investment director at Horizon Capital. We work with SaaS companies specifically who are looking to take their business to the next level. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today at the early stages of launching your company, which is called the beta stage. Now, if you're not sure what the beta stage is exactly, it's a point of the business where you've, you know, you've written some code, you're probably, let's say, 80% of the product that you have in mind and you want to take it to market. Okay. So I would say you have, you know, not all the features in place, maybe the one feature that you really want to share with your users. You've done most of the coding and you've done most of the development. It's already in place and it's now ready for people to actually go use it, but it still has a lot of bugs. You have to know that there's still a lot of bugs. Things aren't perfect. Things aren't exactly how it's going to flow for the user, but that's okay. The point of being in beta is to get real feedback from users so then you can go out and refine it and move forward. So there's really 2 real purposes of why we have the beta stage and why you want to release at this stage. As soon as possible. Okay. The first part is to gather real product feedback. Okay. And what that feedback is going to do is going to give you your product roadmap going forward because you might have all these great ideas, right? You've built this product here and you think you're going to build this, but what's going to happen is when you ship this, you know, initial product, your users are going to tell you exactly where you need to go and they're going to, that's going to give you the vision, the direction, and the clarity of exactly what you need to build moving forward. The second purpose of actually launching in beta stage is you want to validate if there's real demand for your product. Okay? So you can spend, you know, maybe the last 3 months, the last 6 months, maybe in the last year building what you've built so far. You thought this was the perfect product that everybody's going to love, but you go out there, you ship it, and what's going to happen is the market is going to tell you if they're interested in or not. Okay? So that's the real purposes of launching at this stage. These are the 5 places where you should get it, where you should launch your SaaS product. Okay. Number 1, Betalist. This is a website you can go to, betalist.com, and you just literally submit your product. I think you just log in with your, with your Twitter account. You spend lots of time, you know, writing a nice profile. Be clear on what your features are. Be clear on your value proposition. Be clear on what value you're actually adding to the user. Have really, really nice images. Have really, really nice little GIFs and videos if possible. And highlight exactly what the user is going to get if they sign up with your product. So that's number 1, Betalist. Number 2 is BetaBound. So that's the second one that I recommend, very similar to Betalist. With both of these, you can actually pay a little bit of money. If you have the budget, I recommend, you know, boosting it, try to get ahead and maybe get it sponsored on their newsletter or promoted on their homepage. Because I guarantee if you get more upvotes, you get more visibility. They're already spending literally you know, thousands if not millions of dollars to get more traffic to that page. These are people who are actually actively looking for new products and want to give you that feedback. So Betalist, Betabounce, submit to that today. The third one is, I would combine these together, which is G2.com or Capterra.com. These are software review sites, okay? And what that does is it gives you visibility to these marketplaces of all these SaaS platforms And it puts you into certain categories and shows you how competitive your product is versus others that are out there. And if you actually have a bit of budget as well, they actually have an ad management platform where you can invest a little bit of money and try to get more reviews. If you're going to launch on these websites, ask for reviews. You need a minimum of 10 reviews. Ask all your friends, ask your family members, ask whoever you need to, or initial other users who've used your product. Ask them to leave you a review. And that's what's going to give you more visibility and then create that snowball effect of getting more users to your website. Okay. I think it's free for both of those as well. So those 2 or 3 are free to list it. But then if you want to get that more visibility on their websites, you know, you'd have to pay a little bit of money and it's well worth on both of those. So g2.com and Capterra.com. Number 4, the 4th place where you want to launch is Product Hunt. If you guys don't know Product Hunt, you just go check it out, producthunt.com. They literally release new products every single day. Okay. And there's, they get millions of users every single month who are visiting their page, looking for products to upvote, looking for products to test out, to play with. It's free as well. Okay. Just be strategic, make sure you have a good plan that before you go out there and launch, you should be telling your email list, be telling people who've been following you, be telling your community, anybody that you know that you're going to be about to launch on Product Hunt and you want to get as many upvotes as possible. Okay? So the second you launch, you want to get everybody you know to get on there, upvote it, and get you to the top of the page for as long as possible. So that's number 4, productohunt.com. Number 5, the final one. And now before I recommend this one, I want you guys just to be, just to be clear on this one, that this one is a little bit specific case after you have a little bit of more feedback. Okay? And the reason why, I'll tell you why. And that one is appsumo.com. AppSumo.com is a great place where a lot of SaaS companies have actually, you know, built the foundation. That was kind of the fuel, you know, acted almost as their angel investor or their seed investor that went out and, you know, kind of generated that initial traction to help them take them to the next level. The thing is with AppSumo is you're gonna have to give a major, major discount. These are all lifetime value, okay? It's free to get listed if they approve you. You have to— let's say you're charging $100 a month. You know, you're gonna have to give it a whole lifetime value. You can limit it for $39 or $49. That's it. Okay, you're not gonna get that recurring revenue, but the real value of that is gonna be that what I told you at the beginning, which is user feedback. Okay, take that fuel. You know, you're gonna get a lot of customer support tickets. You're gonna get a lot of questions. You're gonna get a lot of refunds. You're gonna get a lot of complaints. You're gonna get a lot of feedback. It's gonna be overwhelming. Be ready for that. Okay, they get lots and lots of views. They get lots of of users on there who are going to buy your product. You're going to get a nice injection of cash, but you can now use that money as fuel to build your product, take that feedback, and create your, your next version, which you're going to release to be the newer, the hotter, newer version of what you had previously. And that's going to— what's going to continue to build that momentum going forward. Okay, so there you have it, guys. That's number 5. Check out appsumo.com to launch your SaaS business at the beta stage. So hope you enjoyed that, guys. If you guys liked this video, subscribe, obviously, like the video below, and let me know what other places have you guys been— have you guys had success in listing your SaaS product at the beta stages? I'd love to hear from you. Comment below, and we'll see you guys on the next video. Bye.