Before we get excited and charge full-steam into building our world-changing-genre-defining-all-conquering product, we need to know if there is a market for our product idea.

Or in short, could we actually make any money from our idea?

In this episode, I'm going to show you exactly how we figure that out.

Let's dive in.

We know what we're going to build, or at least we have an outline of the tool we're going to make plus, we know for whom we're building and the pain we want to solve.

Decent.

Before diving into the details and getting caught up with names, domains, wireframes and prototypes, we need to uncover the things that will kill us in the future.

We need to understand and defend against some arguments that will prevent our product from being a success.

We call these 'The reasons not to buy.'

Reasons not to buy include:

• We don't need it (you really messed up)
• You can't prove it works / I doubt the value
• I don't understand it
• It's too expensive
• It's too complicated
• It's too much hassle to implement
• If it goes wrong, I'll get fired
• The competition is better
• We're already using the competition
• We have an internal solution
• We don't feel good about you

etc

By identifying and addressing as many potential reasons for customers not to purchase our product, we will significantly increase our chances of developing a desirable product that people are willing to pay for.

Ideally, if there are no apparent drawbacks and everything appears to be positive, that would be perfect!

Hence, our focus should be on identifying and examining various factors that could potentially hinder the success of our product in the minds of our target audience.

Once we have compiled this list, we can utilise it as a guide to inform the design of our product, including its features, as well as how we position and price it in the market.

I cannot stress enough the crucial nature of this step. It's like mission-critical, with bells and whistles. If you attempt to address these concerns as part of a marketing exercise after developing the product, you will find yourself either vulnerable or in serious trouble.

By that I mean, out of money and looking for a new job.

Honestly, the latter is more likely.

If you have a marketing department, they'll hate you. If you are the marketing team, you'll hate yourself.

Trying to use marketing to dig yourself out of a hole because of your lack of foresight is a terrible place to be.

Trying to find a way of presenting your product in a positive light when you finally realise they your competitors have you pipped in every way is not only hard, it's disingenuous and if you're anything like me, would nibble away at you.

Going to market with conviction and a real belief in your product is better.

So. Much. Better.

It's been about fifteen years since I attempted to launch a SaaS for the very first time. I needed a deeper understanding of behavioural economics, which I had yet to develop, and I followed my gut instead.

Compounded by the fact that I was excited and keen for world domination, it went as well as expected.

The following is what happens when you're All-Passion-and-No-Planning.

1. Decide what kind of thing we'd like to make
2. Look at some other products and decide how we could 'make them better
3. Find a .com domain name
4. Find a cheaper .com domain name
5. Settle for a .io domain name
6. Write a loose feature list and start building
7. Realise that you could make it do so much more!
8. Increase the scope
9. Increase the scope a bit more
10. Abandon the MVP
11. A long, long time later have a working product
12. Whip up a website listing all the incredible features without any audience targeting or compelling pain-solving content.
13. Wait
14. Realise that you could have built it more efficiently
15. Rebuild it again
16. Wait
17. Despair
18. Post on Linkedin
19. Sink money into Paid Ads
20. Wait
21. Reduce the price
22. Wait
23. Start loosely blogging about your industry
24. Make a video for YouTube
25. Despair...
    

I like to laugh about this now, and if you've been there, I raise a sympathetic glass to you. Lessons hard learned and all that.

I could have avoided this if I'd identified every way to kill the project before I started.

This Time, I'm Killing It

That was then and this is now. Older..Wiser. As per the (new) norm, I created a spreadsheet to list every reason I could think of that would kill this project.

Then, when I had as many reasons as possible, I asked our potential clients what would kill it for them.

I specifically phrased the question: "if we were to build (Insert positioning statement from Episode 2 here), why would you NOT buy it?"

Here are the results for our Self-Help Triage Support Bot Thing (Working title!).

We need to build a product that.

1. It makes self-help so intuitive that fewer people talk to support agents.
2. It must be straightforward to use, with little to no learning curve. Sales, marketing and customer support teams will all want to contribute to the content. These teams are incredibly busy, so we must make it easy for them to all contribute.
3. It must not add another continual burden to the aforementioned overworked teams.
4. It must be so simple that a child can use it (from the customer's point of view).
5. It shouldn't try to do too much. There are already tools on the market that can offer on-page chat-based help but they are costly. It would be better to have a lightweight 'support triage' system that intelligently routes users to the information they need.
6. It should not be expensive. Less than $20 a month.
7. It must be reliable. If it goes offline, users lose a help path and will gravitate to support agents, generating a support cost.
8. It should use as little free text as possible or be smart enough to handle customer support enquiries without getting 'stuck' and defaulting to 'you'll need to talk to an agent'.
9. It needs to prove its value. We want to see how effective it is at helping people before they require a support agent).
10. It needs to integrate with our existing support systems.
11. We're going to want to try it for free.

I also snuck in: If you were going to search on Google for this solution, what would you search for?"

This question lets me know what kind of product our audience thinks this is.

Is this a self-serve customer support tool or a tool to reduce support agent costs?

I can use this as a jumping-off point for some marketing when we get to that.

More of that later.

So, there you have it. If we do all the above, we identify and start to design againt the many reasons not to buy.

Plus, we now know what we're building, who we're making it for, what our clients think we're building, what pain they want us to solve and what things the product absolutely must do (or not).

So, is it time to start thinking about a name and hunting for a domain?

Nope. First we need to see if there is even a market for our idea. Come and see how we do that in the next episode.

— Mark

Up Next

Episode 4 — How to determine market size using SAM and TAM

How I use TAM and SAM to get a ballpark on market size before we even start thinking about making anything.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale

By the end of this article, we’ll have picked a SaaS product to make and explained in detail the process we’ve developed to limit our chances of picking a total lemon.

Let’s dive in.

Suppose you’ve sat down and given some real consideration to what SaaS product you should make. In that case, you already stand a better chance of avoiding the bullet that's gunned down countless fresh-faced SaaS products.

And that bullet is:

A lot of SaaS founders have the same challenge. They’re a solution on the hunt for a problem.

“What can I make?” and “What would I like to make?” are the worst places to start when considering what SaaS to build.

If you start from this place of self-service, you’ll have to be the luckiest person (or team) alive to accidentally hit on a solution to a problem that a load of other people will pay to have solved.

Because that’s what we should be doing here; solving problems.

And much like the axiom that ‘There is no I in team’, there is equally no I in problem.

Building a profitable product is about solving problems and convincing your audience that your product is better than any other solution in the market - or at least, better for them.

In an ideal world, you would want to disrupt the market.

An important note about disruption

Disruption is a phrase that I frequently hear and is commonly misused. We often joke about it in the office.

So.....I’m just going to clear this up.

Come a little closer now...

Doing something slightly different from the competition is not disrupting the market.

Turning the status quo on its head and making the competition irrelevant is the true meaning of disruption.

It’s actually….disruptive.

For example, Spotify.

Like many, I used to make a weekly pilgrimage to my local record store to buy CDs. Then Amazon made it really easy for me to get them online.

Then Spotify said, “Hey, just rent more music than you could ever hope to listen to”, all for a tiny monthly fee.

They truly disrupted the music distribution industry by completely changing the model.

Amazon removed one level of friction, and then Spotify took all the friction away. Removing friction (hassle) is a common theme among disruptive startups.

Netflix has basically done the same for an adjacent industry.

These companies solve many pain points for their subscribers, mainly convenience and cost - and critically *this is important* — They were designed to do this from the beginning; it was not a side-effect.

It’s not about ‘what it does’; it’s about ‘the pain it solves’.

“Going to Blockbuster is a pain. Wouldn’t it be better if people could have what they want, when they want it, without leaving their homes?”

They started with the problem rather than the product.

You should do the same. You must.

How to figure that bit out

When your prospective audience doesn’t know why they should buy from you, and if your solution doesn’t solve a pain they keenly feel, they won’t buy.

Plus, if you don’t know what problems you solve, you also don’t know who has these problems.

You don’t know to whom you should market your problem.

You’re in a big fowl-tasting pickle, to be sure.

Rewrite the following sentence for your product:

We help X audience to Y so they can Z.

The official line from European airline easyJet is as follows:

easyJet aims to make European air travel easy, enjoyable and affordable for customers, whether for leisure or business.

Or.. simplified further (by me): Helping Europeans fly around Europe cheaply, so they can spend more cash on other bits of their trip.

If you can’t do this for your product right now, you need to stop and figure it out.

If you want people to buy, you need to be clear about the problems you solve.

As hard as it can be to hear, your customers do not care about your product; they care about their goals and the problems that stand in their way.

No Pain. No Sale.

Swipe files

I’ve made a brand positioning spreadsheet to help you with this. You can swipe it for free (it’s not gated).

Now, let’s find some pain and poke It

With all that in mind, we need to find some pain, see who else is out there solving it and then see if we can come up with a better solution.

Because a few of us are working together, we consolidate all our ideas into an idea-grading spreadsheet.

This is affectionately known as ‘The List of Mostly Bad Ideas’ spreadsheet.

Named as such to remind us that most ideas are indeed terrible and not to get carried away by a passion project that no one needs.

Better still, it helps us avoid following an idea with a poor chance of success.

Check out our list here.

Even if you’re already way past this stage and have a fully functioning SaaS, put it in the spreadsheet and answer all the questions.

It might help you reaffirm your positioning and give you more laser focus.

When starting out, this spreadsheet will help you keep your product ideas together and make sure you ask the right questions.

For each idea, we want to know the following:

• What pain(s) it solves
• Who needs this solution
• What the estimated market size is (TAM)
• Who else is doing it
• Is the market saturated
• Could we really be better / different
• Can we be passionate about it?
• Do we have any moral objections
• Estimated complexity

Keep adding ideas until you feel like you have a winner.

We identified early on that we want to target a specific audience - B2C SaaS - or, at the very least, build a tool that includes them.

We don’t want to build a tool that exclusively adds value to B2B SaaS businesses.

For idea generation, remember we’re looking for pain points that we could profitably solve. If you have customers, talk to them! Dig for some pain, and if you start hearing the same things, look online to see if you can find more people in the same situation.

One good indicator is that there are already profitable companies solving the problem.

If the market is growing and you can see some openings where you could slide in with a different / better product, then go for it.

Project management was fully saturated, and then monday.com appeared, and with some solid, consistent and aggressive marketing, they exploded into the space.

This shows that there is always room for a better product, a better business model or a more aggressive marketing campaign.

If you’re experiencing pain yourself, do try and validate that there are many other people around the world that have the same problem too, or you’ll sink time and money into a product that only a few, or worse, only you need.

Ask me how I know.

We have a shortlist - now what?

This didn’t happen overnight.

We spent time on this. We talked a lot by the coffee machine.

We spoke to our clients, did our research, talked some more, reviewed our validation criteria again, and then wrote our shortlist.

We started with 20 ideas, and we whittled them down to:

• Point-and-click testimonial maker
• Trigger-based emails and in-app messages (for upselling)
• A customer support ‘bot’ that triages support requests. Maybe an AI thing.

We’ll pose these ideas to our clients/audience and see what they say.

As I said earlier, we don’t want to invest time in a product no one wants. I don’t want to know if it’s cool. I want to know that a genuine customer base will pay for what we build.

There are excellent tools to help you find and poll your target audience en masse. And I highly recommend you make use of them.

Tools such as Catalyx can help you to access a huge potential audience and ask them some direct questions before you jump off the deep end.

Or, if you’re on a tight budget, you can do the legwork yourself by reaching out to the communities that host your customer base. It’s a lot more work, but you should invest time here.

We want to reduce as many risks as possible because it increases our chances of success.

We’re also in a lovely position of already having a customer base from other businesses. This is a massive advantage for us as we have a direct line to an audience that already knows us.

We can get their honest opinion about our product ideas. Sometimes, you can get a client to sponsor a product - but we’re not going into that for this project.

Now, before you go and talk to your audience (and client’s if you can), make sure to have a little brand positioning in place so they can understand your idea and how it would benefit them.

So, write the 'We help X audience to Y so they can Z' for each product and then conduct the polls. If you poll in different places simultaneously as we did, combine the results and then make a decision.

Getting users before we have a product

The overwhelming response was that we should build a tool to reduce customer service costs. Our enterprise customers spend tremendous sums on support agents, a huge pain point.

Even a 10% reduction in support agency costs for an enterprise company would be a significant saving. A solution that our clients indicated they would be thrilled to pay for.

Smaller SaaS companies were thrilled that their customers could be automatically hand-held through their self-service support.

As a result, the aforementioned company is no longer tied up in dealing with support requests. Instead, it can focus on the product (without harming its reputation from disgruntled early adopters bemoaning their terrible customer support on social).

Plus, their customers have a more pleasant experience and are more likely to stick around.

Everybody wins. Which is nice.

The other two ideas received mixed feedback.

The tool that makes it easier to collect testimonials was deemed ‘exciting’ and 'a good idea', but in that muted tone, that really means ‘I suppose it’s ok, but not for us.’

Our idea doesn’t have a direct or easily accountable way of affecting revenue, so it’s not a mission-critical priority for many.

Simply put, the pain is not significant enough to drive action.

If we solve the accountability problem, we could more actively turn testimonials into marketing tools.

We’ll update the Bad Ideas List, but we’re shelving testimonials.

The event-based in-app email system received warmer feedback than the testimonial ideal.

On the whole, people could see the benefit. Because that benefit could be measured - we can see how many event-triggered emails led to successful up-sells - our audience said they would consider implementing something similar.

So, this is a winner too.

However, the reaction we got for reducing service agency costs was electric. This is a natural and immediate pain with an obvious financial upside.

As such, the appetite for a solution was big. We could have sold it today if we had it now.

We’ve gone from fifteen ideas to one validated idea.

So now, we know what to build, who we’re making it for, what problem we’re solving for them and also…and this is my fave bit…we already have a small receptive audience to whom we can sell.

And we don’t have a product.

We don’t even have a name.

—

In Episode 3, you’d probably expect us to show you how to find a memorable name for your product, the best methods to get an incredible domain name and start rolling on designing an all-conquering masterpiece of a logo.

But of course, we’re not going to do any of that.

What we are going to do instead is waaaaaaay more important.  

Check it out ->

— Mark

Up Next

Episode 3 — How to use your target audience to validate your SaaS product idea

Starting with all the ways in which we can fail, so we can do our best to avoid at least the traps we can forsee.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale

Our team is set to kick-start another SaaS business, aiming to take it from $0 to $1 million ARR in revenue. Again.  The twist? We're putting it all out there. Every decision, every strategy, the ups, the downs, the whole nine yards. We're providing an open window into the rollercoaster ride that is startup life.

And it will be absolutely unfiltered - and that's rare.

Oh, and it won't be written by an AI, which is probably going to be pretty bloody rare soon, too.

So, why follow this project; what's in it for you?

The team around this table has either directly built or significantly contributed to designing, building, marketing or selling many SaaS companies that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars.

We've been through slow growth, explosive growth, mergers, exits, huge triumphs and, most importantly, failures.  

We know what works. We've see a lot of mistakes because we've made them before, and we know where to take risks and where to play it safe.

And we will keep publishing everything about this journey, in detail, with no filters until we hit our $1M goal.

Or it all goes up in flames.

Which it might.

At the very least, we can show you when to hard charge, when to pivot and how to recognise when to stop and start again.

In reality, we hoping that this endeavour will be a success and we'll be able to impart decades of knowledge combined with up-to-date strategies, tactics and experiments, to you, so you can move forward, better.

We'll try our best to be entertaining along the way!

Where we have 'secret-sauce' frameworks, procedures, strategies and tactics, docs, images, flow charts, meeting agendas..everything...we'll share it all, for free, for you.

Swipe it, use it.

We'd love it if you would come on this journey with us.

So, where are we at, right now, today?

At the time of writing, we don't even have an idea of what to make.

But we do have a very robust framework for coming up with ideas and vetting them, so we will be setting off on the right foot with a product that, at least, could be a hit.

We'll be sharing the framework and a bunch of files that you can swipe in 'Episode 2 — How to pick a SaaS product that has the highest chance of success', so if you want to see that, be sure to come back or signup below.

It covers some of the most critical thinking that cements the foundations of everything we'll do after. Messing this up or not doing it at all (which happens a lot) will set you (or us) up for almost guaranteed failure.

So, you'll want to swipe that for sure.

Will this all really be for free?

Yes. It will be 100% free to follow along, and you can be sure that we'll never share your email address or use it to spam you about other products, etc. We'd hate that, just like you.

Here's an idea of what the future episodes might look like. We've roughed this out before starting, so it will likely change along the way, but it gives the flavour of what we're going for.

Episode 1 — How to make a million dollar SaaS company

Hello there, and welcome to Zero to One! we’re putting it all on the table, warts-and-all, so you can follow along.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale

Episode 2 — How to pick a SaaS product that has the highest chance of success

I like lemons, a lot, but we don’t want to build one. This is how we’ll (hopefully) avoid that bitter disappointment.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale

Episode 3 — How to use your target audience to validate your SaaS product idea

Starting with all the ways in which we can fail, so we can do our best to avoid at least the traps we can forsee.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale

Episode 4 — How to determine market size using SAM and TAM

How I use TAM and SAM to get a ballpark on market size before we even start thinking about making anything.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale

• Episode 06 — Choosing the Perfect Technology Stack for Us
• Episode 07 — Our Journey in Building the MVP
• Episode 08 — Implementing Agile Development in Our Process
• Episode 09 — Our Approach to SaaS Pricing Strategy
• Episode 10 — Creating Our SaaS Brand Identity
• Episode 11 — Our SaaS Marketing Plan Blueprint
• Episode 12 — Our Strategies for Customer Acquisition
• Episode 13 — Behind the Scenes of Our Product Launch
• Episode 14 — How We Set Our Growth Metrics and KPIs
• Episode 15 — Building Our Customer-Centric Support System
• Episode 16 — How We Onboard and Train Our Users
• Episode 17 — Our Approach to Customer Retention
• Episode 18 — Our SaaS Product Expansion Journey
• Episode 19 — How We Scaled Our SaaS Infrastructure
• Episode 20 — Forming a High-Performing Sales Team
• Episode 21 — Our Experience with SaaS Partnerships and Integrations
• Episode 22 — How We Use Content Marketing for Our SaaS
• Episode 23 — Our Journey with Social Media Marketing
• Episode 24 — How We Optimised Our Website for Conversions
• Episode 25 — Our Milestone of Achieving $1M

If you want to get the inside track on how we built a SaaS company from $0 to $1M ARR pop your email in here.

I promise you'll learn stuff that adds immense value to your SaaS business, no matter what stage you are presently at.

— Mark

Episode 2 — How to pick a SaaS product that has the highest chance of success

I like lemons, a lot, but we don’t want to build one. This is how we’ll (hopefully) avoid that bitter disappointment.

ZERO to ONEMark Neale