Short excerpt from a July 13, 2024 YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin offering practical lessons for building a SaaS business: prioritize a great product and product designer, staff analytical people across the organization, and be cautious about targeting the SMB market because customer acquisition for SMBs is costly and historically rarely leads to large businesses.
Find a great product designer, get the product right. And the thing we've learned is that yes, a great product is essential but there are so many other things that contribute because it's a large kind of very complex machine in the SaaS business and everything impacts it, right? So it's not just about getting the product team right. It's about getting analytical people across the entire organization. So that's the other thing that dropped our odds of success was the fact that we were focused on small business on the SMB market and everyone we talked to, literally everyone I'm paraphrasing, said this is a very bad idea. Do not. And the reason is like no one hardly ever has succeeded in building a big business in SMB. It's just really, it's like it's impossible because here's the deal, you're trying to acquire customers and it's expensive to reach SMBs because I don't know why. It just is.
