Open Startup Report - November '24
Is your SaaS' growth rate terminal?
Some products seem to take off of their own volition and others need a little massaging. Like the engine of an old crank handle car. You need to give it a few turns to get fresh air in the cylinders before it splutters into life
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Jason Cohen reminded me of this when he replied to my skeet (is that what we’re calling them?) with an interesting take on SaaS growth. It’s no secret here that the MRR for PriceWell is growing ever so slowly. Jason pointed out that I do not have 10 years to wait, my product really won’t be relevant in that time (most likely).
I’ve never been one to think that growth doesn’t matter but this throws a new perspective on the matter. I must increase the growth rate of PriceWell or risk it becoming irrelevant.
To do this I need to do something radical. I don’t believe that increased marketing efforts alone will increase the growth rate as we have very good marketing channels right now. Something more radical is required, either:
Pivot the product to a different niche.
Find something I can charge 10x the price for.
Some marketing channel that is 1000% more effective
PriceWell re-design
Thinking back at the previous point on growth, this feels like a waste of time. I’ve always wanted to hire a designer for PriceWell and the bank balance is finally big enough to pay for a freelancer.
There are two goals with the redesign:
Quality look and feel: Apps that feel quality have greater value in the minds of the users. Look at all Apple products for an example. Here the designer took heavy influence from Stripe (which PriceWell is built on top of) who themselves have very high design standards.
UX improvements: The book Don’t Make Me Think teaches that UI design should be intuitive simple, not overwhelming and complicated. The reality of bootstrapping a SaaS product is adding feature after feature. The redesign sorts out the chaos of settings littered all over the app.
I’m really happy with the way the design is going and thanks to the power of AI, I can convert designs into code changes with a high degree of accuracy. A couple of years ago I’d have had to pay the designer or someone from Upwork to do the conversion for me costing both time and money.
More next month…