What's New: Your B2B SaaS crash course
(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
The B2B SaaS space can be a tough one to enter:
- From putting intentionality behind your product, to determining your positioning, this crash course can help you crack the B2B code.
- The marketing and social media landscapes are changing rapidly, and it can be tough to keep up with what's new. Here are 12 key updates from the past 15 days, spanning from Instagram to Google!
- Founder Allison Seboldt made $2,157 last month from side projects. Here are 2 things that happened in July to help her increase monthly revenue.
Want to share something with nearly 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
👩🏫 Your B2B SaaS Crash Course
by Adam8
Does anyone have experience with B2B SaaS? Will companies buy if you just have a good website that spells out what problems you solve, or is it always going to require a sales-driven process?
Validate ASAP
Sayyed recommends pursuing validation right away:
Validate your idea ASAP. This is the only way to test out your B2B SaaS. No way around it.
If you are really solving the problem, you're already halfway there. B2B is lot easier to scale up compared to B2C.
Try to build an audience. It's not that expensive. Join Facebook Groups that focus on SaaS and share your thoughts with them. Also, talk to founders on Indie Hackers, Reddit, and Product Hunt.
Pdyc agrees that validation should be the first priority:
I am on the product and development side, but I have found B2B Saas to be very tough. Cold emails don't work. Networking doesn't work. People will give you a bit of their time as a courtesy if you reach out to them via your network, but after that, it's usually silence.
In my case, users of the product are different from the people making the decisions, so that presents another problem: I have to identify who the actual decisionmaker is, then try to convince them to buy. Even when users from their company are asking for the product, and I have an actual product, not just a promise to deliver, it can still be difficult.
Success will depend on the actual product, its price point, and access to the channel where the product can be sold. Before creating a prototype, be clear on how you will sell it. Make a plan to identify the purchaser, get access to said purchaser, and convince them to buy.
Try lining up just five customers before starting on your prototype. Your product may be valuable, but without sales, it is of no use.
Pain gain
Jan Sroka recommends being very intentional about the product that you choose to build:
Focus on the "solve a problem" part. Going even further, make sure that you're solving a problem that costs the company money, and a lot of it.
Build a product that solves a real pain, ideally a major financial pain, and you are on a good track.
Connect well
Kadiance says that if you have a product where there is demand, B2B is extremely easy, much easier than B2C:
For B2B, you know the owner's name, address, and business email. That removes a lot of the guesswork.
As a business, you are constantly looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition. Just be a normal person, talk about your product without being a weirdo, and connect with the owner (or decisionmaker, if different from the owner). If you are able to do this, you will easily get sales. The hardest thing is having the right product for the right customer. Once you have that, it's essentially just matchmaking.
Be sure you're actually B2B
Mattia Settimelli recommends confirming that your product is actually B2B:
Today, the lines between business and consumers are blurring more each day. There's the huge market of creators, freelancers, and small businesses that may not be B2B in the traditional sense, but aren't firmly B2C either.
I urge you to think about the market of "prosumers." As opposed to consumers, prosumer refers to the overlap of professional clients and consumers. In fact, selling to prosumers made Apple what it is today. Apple is a lifestyle consumer company now, but it has always sold professional tools. Before the iPhone, which was its first consumer product, Apple products were not for a typical consumer. They were made for professionals, creatives, designers, etc. So, it wasn't strictly B2C.
Today, with social and visual media, we are all prosumers in the photo and video space. If a creative becomes an influencer, are they still a consumer? Or, are they now a business?
All of the big consulting firms have been encouraging this mindset shift: B2B and B2C are blurring into H2H (human-to-human). Of course, there are exceptions. Cisco and Salesforce are clearly B2B, along with many other companies.
I urge you to brainstorm the positioning of your product. You can leverage the best of both worlds or widen your potential market. Be very intentional about your pricing, the solidity of your product, your backend processes, and your UX.
What are your tips for entering the B2B SaaS space? Share below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🤖 Facebook's AI chatbot called Mark Zuckerberg "creepy and manipulative."
🏞 Silicon Valley engineers are quitting for climate tech.
💲 Meme stocks are surging as retail investors shift back to taking risks.
🧐 Crypto could be making a comeback.
🥒 Expiration dates might be the worst idea in food.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
🔑 12 Key Social Media Updates for Founders
I track marketing and social media updates to help you get more reach online! Here are 12 updates for indie hackers from the past 15 days.
The changes
- LinkedIn post link Stickers and free courses:
Last week, LinkedIn announced that it is launching link Stickers for posts. You will be able to add Stickers to your website between your image posts to help people easily click to visit your website.
Also, LinkedIn's marketing courses are free for everyone throughout August.
- Twitter launched Location Spotlight:
Now, users can find local businesses easily. Twitter's new feature allows you to highlight your business location in your bio. This feature was launched globally.
- Google shows new snippets for quoted searches:
To help users discover quoted queries more easily, Google will display the search terms with quotes in bold characters. This will impact click rates for sure; writing excerpts with more alignment towards searchable keywords is the best thing to do. However, Google hasn’t yet announced how this will affect search rankings.
- Facebook will end live-shopping on October 1:
Facebook wants advertisers to focus on selling their products through Reels, and will end live-shopping on the platform.
- Google gives third-party cookies another year:
Facing privacy issues in the EU, Google Chrome extended the deadline of third-party cookies support into 2024. It seems that they need more time to find the best solution to third-party cookies, which is good news for bloggers and advertisers.
- Instagram Reels:
Instagram recently announced that it was planning a TikTok-like fullscreen feed. After a ton of backlash, with Instagram users calling out the platform for focusing so much on Reels, that decision was paused.
Now, Instagram has completely cancelled plans for fullscreen feeds and AI-based post recommendations.
- Pinterest launched real-time analytics in its mobile app:
You can access your Pinterest analytics more easily than ever with the app. Check out your posts' hourly performance in the new "last 24 hours" view.
- YouTube is asking you to create Shorts with this feature:
YouTube launched a new feature set to roll out to all users by the end of August (some already have access now). You will be able to edit a longform video into a Short with the new “Edit into a Short” option.
- Google's 2022 product review algorithm update is out:
This update was rolled out at the end of July, and was completed on August 2. It focuses on targeting low quality reviews to promote better content for e-commerce and product-first businesses.
- Microsoft Bing is testing new features:
Microsoft Bing is testing a bunch of new features and changes. The platform is testing moving its “Trending on Bing” section to the right side of the screen, an expandable menu for its news and video sections, and a trending videos section.
- TikTok announced access to two new APIs:
Advertisers care about the data that helps them reach a larger audience. To provide data, while keeping in line with privacy concerns, TikTok has provided access to new APIs. The first API will allow you to research TikTok trends and ideas, and the second one is the API for TikTok’s moderation system.
- Facebook is paying creators to try a new live-streaming platform:
Facebook is planning to grow a new live-streaming platform, "Super," which is similar to Twitch. The company is paying select Facebook creators to stream live on the platform.
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Which of these updates excites you the most? Let's chat below!
Discuss this story.
🧠 Harry's Growth Tip
from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Show, don't tell. We process images faster than text.
Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
💻 Allison Seboldt's Side Projects Hit $2K+
Hi, indie hackers! I'm Allison Seboldt, and I am making over $2K MRR from my side projects. Here's a breakdown of my July revenue, all from my indie projects:
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PageFactory: Just launched! No-code tool for programmatic SEO. $1,449.
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Fantasy Congress: Fantasy sports for US politics. $701.
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Garden Auntie: My niche site for growing your own food at home. $6.
Read on for more!
Two July gamechangers
This was my highest-grossing month ever as an indie hacker. Two big things happened in July to bring it about:
- I launched PageFactory to a waitlist of almost 300 people. Much of my revenue came from the purchase of annual subscriptions with a coupon sent out for the launch. So, I probably won't be able to replicate that again this month. My MRR was around $400 by the end of July.
- I'm going into the busy season for Fantasy Congress, so sales have started to pick up for that project. The timing for this lined up perfectly with the successful launch of PageFactory, and added a nice bump in revenue.
You can check out my July retrospective for full details on each project, and my big launch.
I'm not ramen profitable by any means, but I'm celebrating that this was a "ramen month" for me anyways. It's a small win, but hopefully proof that I'm headed in the right direction!
PageFactory's first sale
It's kind of hard to put a finger on the timeline for PageFactory.
I built a very rough version of the app for my own personal use, and wrote a blog post about it last November. That blog post got some traction, and in March, I cleaned up my personal app and put it online as a beta test. I asked around to see how people were solving the problem currently, and noticed that it was a real pain. I didn't touch the beta for about two months while I collected feedback, then at the end of May, I went all-in on building a proper MVP.
I sort of the took the approach of shipping the smallest thing possible, validating each small iteration along the way.
How I built PageFactory
I built PageFactory in Python using Cory Zue's SaaS boilerplate, SaaS Pegasus.
Honestly, I'm not that familiar with no-code tools. I've seen people do similar things in Excel, but it's quite convoluted!
Tips for getting started with programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO isn't a perfect fit for every business. Not only do you need to have some kind of data set, but your users also need to actually be searching for things that follow a pattern. Those two things don't always line up.
A good place to start is by looking at the current keywords that your site ranks for. Sometimes, patterns reveal themselves there. For instance, if your app involves helping users plan their day, maybe you could do something time-based.
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Adam, Priyanka Vazirani, Jaskaran Saini, Harry Dry, and Allison Seboldt for contributing posts. —Channing
