Launching and growing a SaaS product
Just started reading Dharmesh Shah’s new book: Inbound Marketing. I’m at the very start so I don’t have much to report now other than it looks pretty damn good so far.
Finished up Seth Godin’s book called Permission Marketing. It was pretty good, though I could’ve gotten plenty out of it if the book was half the size. Not a big book at all, it’s just that I’m not a big fan of having the same concept repeated to me over and over.
Totally not related: I love my Kindle!! 🙂
Ok so I’ve been live for about 3 weeks now and I have over 250 users on Bidsketch. About 20% of those are paid accounts, most are on the premium plan.
I’ve introduced a Basic plan but I’ve received very fews signups on that plan even though I had people say they were going to sign up.
Currently trying out some A/B testing to see what the difference between 3 plans (Premium, Basic, and Free) vs. 2 plans (Premium and Free) is like. So far the numbers indicate their isn’t much of a difference at all. Not what I expected!
Next up, I’m going to do some A/B testing with the Free plan. Certain SaaS based apps have taken away the free plan (or hidden it). I’d like to see what the impact of this is on sales.
The reason why I’m trying all this stuff out? Sales have slowed dramatically in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been working on a couple of features people have been asking for which might help with that.
My plan to help keep things moving on the sales site:
Unfortunately, this isn’t all I’m doing. I have to show activity by releasing new features at least every other week — activity early on is critical.
I’ll follow up in a couple of weeks with an update on what I’ve gained with my efforts 🙂
So it’s been a week after launch, and I’ve not had much time to do any development. Most of my time has been taken up responding to emails, hacking my sales website, introducing a new plan, and sending emails out to my lists.
Today I introduced a $9/month pricing plan. Now I have the following plans: Free, $19/month, and $9/month.
One surprising thing about increasing the Premium Plan price to $19/month is that I’m still making sales. I honestly thought they’d stop coming in after that. I haven’t had a great deal of them, but much more than I thought I would.
I feel like I’m underpriced here, but I recently launched and I’m more interested in getting enough users to see patterns in the feedback that I’m getting. So far so good 🙂
I’m still very cautious, and I expect to hit tough times any day soon, in the meantime I’m enjoying getting sales! 🙂
So I’ve now been live with Bidsketch for several days now. Things are going well still, though my paid signups have decreased as expected.
I’m going to be working on adding a new pricing plan to Bidsketch. Right now I have Free and Premium. I think a Basic plan will give people a much needed choice when I move up the pricing to $19/month.
It’s funny, now that I’ve launched I feel like I have more on my plate than ever. I’m managing two blogs, a Facebook account, two Twitter accounts, two products, and the most time consuming thing of all — the day job.
I think things will get a little less crazy once I migrate SixCentral over to Bidsketch.
On the SixCentral front, I let everyone know that I’ll be changing SixCentral’s name. I blogged about it, sent out a tweet, and an email to all users and newsletter subscribers.
Some more info on that here:
http://www.bidsketch.com/uncategorized/bidsketch-sixcentral/
So far so good. I’ve received some great feedback and I’ve had a lot more people sign up than I thought would 🙂
So far, my visitor to account signup conversion rate is at about 25%! And about half of those are paid accounts.
I received some “media buzz” from about.com:
Blog post
http://webdesign.about.com/b/2009/10/14/new-tool-launches-bidsketch-limited-time-offer.htm
Product review
http://webdesign.about.com/od/websoftwarereviews/gr/bidsketch_gr.htm
There’s one more day left for users to sign up and get the $9/month price. After that I’m going to redirect everything to “www”, and raise the price. I was going to raise it to $19/month right off the bat, but I’m going to try out $14/month first. That way I can see what sort of effect going to $19 has on my conversion rate.
These last two days have been awesome. Lots of great feedback and I’ve talked to some really enthusiastic new users.
Oh, I kind of slacked off on emailing bloggers for a website review but I’ll be putting in around 30 mins each day to try to get some mentions going.
I’ll be posting another update after I move everything to “www”.