Have an idea. Now what?

Hey Shrini, it's amazing that you're ready to take the plunge and start working on your idea! The journey of building a SaaS can be overwhelming at first, but with your background in data engineering, you've got a strong foundation to build upon.

First, try breaking your idea down into smaller, manageable tasks. Start by researching similar products or services in the market to understand what works and what doesn't. This will help you refine your idea and identify potential competitors.

Next, focus on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – a simplified version of your product that has just enough features to test its viability. This will allow you to gather valuable feedback from early users before investing too much time and resources into development.

Remember, every successful project started with an idea and someone taking that first step. You've got this, Shrini! Embrace the journey and learn as you go. Good luck! 🚀

Before you build anything, you should do one of two things:

1. Go on google keyword planner, and see if anyone is searching for solutions to the problem you're solving, or if they're straight up searching for your product name.

2. If you don't see your audience coming through search, speak with with your target audience in any way possible. That's either doing things like going on reddit and asking questions, calling up companies, messaging them on LinkedIn / Facebook, or getting a hold of someone who works in a company and asking them ALOT of questions.

You'll find out if people are having a problem, what tools/softwares they're currently using to solve their problem, and if they will pay for your solution.

At most you want to just make a simple landing page, explain what you do, make some fake demos of what your product will look like, put an email input and take early access payments or down payments (I've used stripe, they have a payment page, you just put the link on your website) and send that to people or advertise it.

This worked for me for my site Toblio, I launched a marketing tool, I found keywords, advertised on google ads and got some early access payments. If i never get those early access payments, i wouldn't have continued building my site.

Best of luck, keep us updated!

starting point:
use a no-code tool to create a TRASH landing page that collects people for a waitlist
(2 days max)

then
market like crazy

I wrote about it at length at Zero To Founder but here are some quick action items if its too overwhelming to start with.

• Start with a landing page
• Build the waitlist by talking about your product in various forums like IH, Reddit, Facebook groups.
• You can share with audience about how your brainstormed your idea, finalized domain, show how you plan to build product and drive traction by building in public
• Allocate more more more time for marketing your landing page
• If possible, talk 1:1 with your waitlist users and see what they were looking for. (Read The Moms Test book)
• If still no luck, try with some ads and stick to less than $100 budget and improve your waitlist.

If you are still open for new product ideas, check our Micro SaaS Ideas

Yesterday, I use GPT4 to brainstorm a new idea related to a nutrition/fitness/well-being AI coach app
I asked it to give me the full step-by-step detailed roadmap
First step is often asking to communities (FB groups, quora, reddit, ...) to answer a survey... excepted that most of those private communities don't allow surveys ^^
I raised that issue to GPT4 which then advised me to participate in those groups and even ask if I could post my survey - sometimes asking before open doors

It's great to hear that you have an idea for a SaaS product and are interested in pursuing it. As a data engineer, you have a strong background that can be very valuable in building a SaaS product.

To start, I would suggest researching and reading about SaaS product development and business strategies. There are many online resources available, including articles, blogs, and courses, that can help you understand the basics of building a SaaS product. You can also check out industry events and forums to connect with other professionals and learn from their experiences.

In terms of building your analytics page, you'll need to decide on the specific features and functionality that you want to include. This will require some planning and design work, so you'll need to set aside some time to map out your ideas and create a basic plan.

Once you have a solid plan in place, you can begin building your SaaS product. There are many tools and technologies available that can help you develop your product, such as cloud platforms, programming languages, and frameworks. You may want to consider working with a team or hiring a freelancer to help you with the technical aspects of development.

Finally, keep in mind that launching a successful SaaS product requires more than just technical skills. You'll need to think about marketing, user acquisition, and customer support to ensure that your product is successful in the long term. Good luck with your project!

Hello Shrini.

Your idea is a compound made up of many elements, all of which are assumptions to some degree. So, the first thing you need to do is formulate your idea into a shape that shows what the assumed elements are, and then you can address each element in a structured manner. Without structure, you will not know what to address, when to address, why you should address, and what amount of validation has been obtained by doing so.

Failing to do so will result in you using any number of tactics, before they should be used, before you are ready to use them. Furthermore, some tactics are built on further assumptions.

As an example, the popular tactic of use a landing page, use google-ads to drive traffic, etc, etc.

What are the assumptions in this tactic:

1. You know the problem
   a) Problem
   b) Pain Points
   c) Causes and Root Causes

2. You know a possible viable solution that alleviates the problem, and helps the user to achieve a desired goal, with resultant benefits, and layered benefits derived from addressing things in point 1.

3. You know a segment within the market enough to present a solution that will target either the Early Adopters, or the Early Majority. There is a massive difference in what is required by a solution depending on who you are targeting. If you haven't done your research, then a sizable proportion of the Early Adopters will know more than you, and you trying to appeal to them with "Solve your problem", and a better mouse-trap won't work.

4. You know how to create a good landing page. A percentage of landing page guides, are not taking into account the difference targetting Early Adopters or Early Majority make to the composition of a landing page.
   a) Copywriting on the landing page
   b) Structure of the landing page

5. Google ads and that you know what you are doing: keyword research, keyword targeting, negative keywords, ad-copy, locations, audiences, devices, intention, etc. When it comes to intention, Google-ads won't let you tell the difference between an Early Adopter, and and Early Majority, if the market has matured enough to where it is now in the mainstream. i.e. you won't be able to target one type.

Anwyay, that will do for the above, the point is, why bring more assumptions into the mix? More moving parts, more things to attempt to validate at the same time. There is a time and a place for such things, in certain cases, but it is just one type of market demand validation. As you are at the stage of you have an idea, what now; market demand validation is too soon.

So your idea, formulate it so it has a few assumptions as possible:
For (Target Audience) who have (Problem), my (Solution) helps them to achieve (Goal).

Now, research the problem. Understand the problem, deeply. A problem worth solving has to hit many points. It’s not just about big severe problem. It has to be a problem that is frequently faced.d A problem that generates a strong emotion. A problem that has an impact on a tangible metric, typically time or money.

Create a map of the problem, showing how casues, root-causes, etc, are connected, how they contribute to the existence of the problem, how them, and the overall problem affect a person from attaining their goal.

The problem will more than likely affect more than one audience. Drill-down into an audience making the segment smaller and smaller. Get more detailed into this segment. Once done, you reach out to them, and quickly find out, is the problem a problem to them or not? Are the pain points, pain points to them or not? I would not start any problem-exploration interviews, and certainly no customer-discovery interviews, at this stage, for a multitude of reasons.

After you have increased your appreciation of the problem, and have what appears to be a viable audience, look into the product market. Not too deep, but enough to check out the following things: solutions to problem, direct and indirect competitors, distribution channels, brand volume, brand traffic, product category search volume, revenue generation structure, price points, market size, market opportunity, market growth rate.

If viable, I’d then interview target audience members. Make sure they are either potential Early Adopters, or Early Majority. Basing the information you need to obtain on one book is not recommended, The Mom Test. Good book, but you need a more holistic and granular appreciation, as well as to help balance whatever biases and blinkers are present from any one source. Other books off the top-of-my-head to check out include Talking To Humans, Testing With Humans, by Geoff Constable. If you want to know information to obtain, let me know, will share something with you.

Shame I can’t share the main thing, alas currently in development, you would have found it very useful. Step by step approach to starting a startup, auto generation of various marketing and sales collateral, MVP proposition based on if you are targeting Early Adopters or Early Majority, built-in multi-path pivots, etc, etc.

Good luck,
Ace.

I am positively overwhelmed to see the responses. Thanks so much everyone!

1. Create a landing page explain clearly what "benefits" your analytics product provides and how it maps to feature of your product.
2. Explain different use case of your product in a different page
3. Explain benefits from the pov of stakeholders in companies for e.g. how does it benefits ceo, vp, data analyst etc. Same thing will not appeal to everyone you will need to highlight what is most relevant to the stakelholder.
4. Get a list of potential customers talk to them and keep on tweaking your messaging until you get commitment from atleast 5 custmers who will buy the product when it is ready.
5. Start development and keep telling everyone what you are building on different social media channels like twitter, reddit, ih, linkedin etc. This will keep you accountable, create seo trail and will keep your potential customers engaged.
6. launch on producthunt, reddit, hackernews etc., get your product listed in different startup directories.

I think this is enough for you to launch you can always come back and ask for more if you have any questions.

One thing to go about this is try and pitch this to businesses from your personal/professional network. Your first customers can actually fund the first implementation of your idea.

Hey Shrini. Hello from a fellow Indian 👋 I'm a software engineer by profession and have been in the industry for about 8+ years. There are, I think only 2 ways to go about it.

Either take the time to learn (and potentially build in parallel) or hire. From your post it looks like you want to build it yourself.

In my opinion, after working with a plethora of technologies, the quickest to learn and get up and running with is Javascript. This is because its the language that powers both the front end and the backend.
If you're familiar with python already then checkout Django to build the backend; you're still going to need to learn some JavaScript to build out the web front end though.

Hope this helps and all the best with your idea!

As a Data Engineer, you have a valuable skillset that can be applied to building a SaaS product that involves analytics. The first and foremost thing is, you should validate your idea.. Before you put effort into building your product, you should validate your idea to ensure that there is a market demand for it. You can start by conducting market research, speaking to potential customers, and analyzing your competition.
I hope this helps you get started, and good luck with your SaaS product!

I'm in a similar spot! As I come from a design background, I thought I might share my ideas for steps I plan on taking AFTER the steps provided by these other comments- using AI to help code!

After designing some mockups you can use AI tools to make your low fidelity designs into an mvp!

Certainly - find people to talk to, beyond your friends and relatives. Don't sell them your idea, ask what their needs are!

Hi Shrini,

It's great to hear that you have an idea for a SaaS product and that you're eager to start working on it. Here are some initial steps you can take:

1. Research your idea
2. Learn the basics of SaaS
3. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
4. Choose the right technology stack
5. Find a co-founder or mentor
6. Launch your product

I hope these initial steps help you get started on your SaaS journey. Good luck!

1. Build a landing page.

2. Build and deploy a full-stack app (preferably with the MERN stack).

Feel free to reach out to me if you need further help. All the best :)