Top 5 Steps to Validate Your SaaS Product

Over 70% of VC-backed companies and startups fail. Over 50% of those startups in the US will fail within 5 years. Now, the best way to overcome that stat and become part of that successful group is to make sure you launch and validate your product successfully before going out and investing all your capital into your business. If you're running a SaaS company or you're planning to run a SaaS company, you know how time-consuming, how expensive it can be. And how much draining it can be, especially if you don't do the right steps in order to validate your new product and service. In this video, I'm going to talk to you how to nail that process perfectly so you don't become part of that failure stat. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. My name is Akeel Jabbar. I'm the investment director and general partner at Horizon Capital, where we work with SaaS companies to launch, validate, and grow their SaaS businesses. We work with tons of SaaS companies all over the world, and we want to make sure when we work with SaaS companies, we always make sure that they get to product-market fit. And we work with SaaS companies who want to grow and take their business to the next level. So the number one thing before you go out and build your entire product and spend 7 months coding, hiring development team, and, you know, trying to build a big business is make sure you develop a prototype. Okay? That's the first thing you want to do, or we call it an MVP as well, your minimum viable product. And what you want to do with that is you want to build a platform or a system that's just good enough to get user feedback. Okay? You want to build a product that has just enough features, maybe just one feature, simple enough where you can go out there, send it out to your customers, send it out to people to try it out, send them feedback forms, get that feedback, and then go out and iterate that what you originally thought would work to be able to build on top of what they said. Okay, so don't go out and build the entire product. Build a super small lean version of it, get that feedback right away as soon as possible, and then go back to drawing board and start building on top of that. Number 2, so now that you've got that, the second thing you can do is give them early access. Okay, offer early access to the users to be able to test it out and maybe just sign up to— as soon as you launch, you have users ready to use it. Don't wait until you've built all this stuff, then it's too late and you don't have the right users to go and validate it. So you can do that by building a simple landing page, a one-pager. You can use tools like Webflow or other landing page creators, which I really like, and create a landing page, create an opt-in, tell people all about your story, what they can expect, get them excited of what's coming soon, invite them to be a part of the VIP process. Once you have their email address, you've collected that, keep them updated through different emails and updates every single, single week as you make progress. And as soon as you launch or you have your product, you can go and reach out and let them know it's available for them to use. So that's number 2, make sure you give early access as soon as possible. Now another way you can do that, which is going leading into my 3rd step, which is social media. Obviously get your social media channels going. I would say pick 1 or 2 channels that you're really, really good at. That's where your audience lies and start building buzz on there as well. Join Facebook groups, advertise your new product. Don't be afraid to spend a little bit on Facebook and Google AdWords. See what kind of response you get, what kind of engagement you get. Create that content on your social media pages and redirect them to that landing page you created to get people to sign up, try your product, and give you back feedback. So you can see this is kind of a continuous product that helps you grow your brand and validate your product. So if you already have a social media presence, maybe elsewhere, or you've already built this up, you know, send that out to them. Let them know, hey guys, you know, we've got this new product coming out. What do you guys think? Need your feedback. Send it out into the groups. Facebook groups are amazing. People love giving feedback. Just give them free access in return or give them something, some kind of gift card or something in for, or access to your platform for say a year for free in exchange for feedback to be able to iterate and build the product. That's probably the cheapest way you guys can get free feedback is giving something in return. So building these channels as soon as possible will only just add more buzz. So as soon as you launch, you have that audience ready to be able to try your product and help you continue to build your product. So once you have that feedback, you've got people using, using your product a little bit, give you a bit of feedback, uh, and they enjoy your product. The 4th thing you want to do is get video testimonials. Okay? This works super powerful for social proof. Okay? People who said that they love their product, they love what you're doing. They, they've actually used your product and they get specific onto why they liked it or what they're using it for that you can now leverage and use as part of your overall buzz and growth strategy. So think about the last time you bought something, You know, when you look at a product and you see that a company is trying to tell you how good it is, how much do you believe that versus if a friend or somebody who shared their story of how powerful or impactful that product was? When you see your friend tell it to you or somebody on video or a human being that tells you that's not the business, that this product or service changed their life or it's helped them, you're a lot more compelled to want to now sign up and use it yourself. Whereas before you say, you know, I don't know, they're just, you know, all these fancy buzz copy words and the advertising and the push they're throwing on me. I just don't trust that the product works. So that social proof and that video testimonial adds that layer of trust and credibility that somebody else has actually used it and also enjoyed the product. So keep them short. It doesn't have to be super long. I'll keep it under even a minute. Ask your users to create that video. Sometimes even creating a script for for them and sending it over will make it a lot easier for them to, to actually record it. Um, and it could be simple on their, on their cell phones, nothing too, too fancy, but use it, get as many of those as possible from any user who actually uses your SaaS product. Last but not least, number 5, humanizing your product and your story and the overall experience. Now you can do that a couple of ways. Some people do this through the traditional explainer video. People will create a video talking about all about their product, their features, the benefits. This is who I am. I am the CEO of the company. People want to see a face to the company. Okay, don't hide behind the monitor or your brand. People want to see who's the person behind this business. And people love stories. Okay, we're human beings. We absolutely— that's all we live and breathe and we survive by stories. That's what keeps us going. So share your story, share your experience, share what's your struggles, share what you're going through. There's powerful websites such as IndieHackers where people love to share different Milestones that you've reached. So let's just say, even if you're at the prototype stage, say, "Hey guys, I am the CEO of this company. I've launched it. I've now built my version 1.0, my beta version. This is my goal with what I want to do. This is my vision. This is my passion. This is what I hope to achieve with this company." People love to see that passion behind who's behind this product, and they're more willing to support you if you have that that explainer video or somebody. Human behind that product. So with explainer videos, obviously you can screen record, you can show your product, what they can expect, show them, get them excited about what's to come. You can show captures of different screens and how the application will look like. There's a lot of recording tools such as Loom, which is available for free. And then obviously once you create that asset, you can now use it the same way. So you can put that on your landing page, you can throw it on your social media, and you can throw it to your— send it to your email list and get people to to kind of build that trust and engagement with who you are and get them to also follow you as the human as well behind the name of the company. And people start to trust you and they'll start talking about you and what you're about to— what they can expect to see with your product that comes out. So there you have it, guys. There's 5 simple steps I want you guys to try out. If you're looking to validate and build your next SaaS business, try these 5 simple steps before you go and spend a lot of money. Okay? This could probably take, you know, $1,000 to $2,000, maybe, maybe a little bit more. Of your money, but it's a lot better than spending, you know, 8 months, a year of your time to build a full-fledged product that costs hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Okay, so hope that was helpful, guys. If you guys are building a product right now, I'd love to hear what have you guys done to validate your own business. Have you launched a SaaS business recently? If so, what steps have you taken to validate and get real user feedback? Let me know in the comments below. Uh, like this, this video, obviously share it. I'll see you guys on On the next video. Bye.