The early stage of developing a SaaS application is one of the most critical times for a new business. How well prepared you are to deal with the adversities and challenges determines the success of your SaaS venture for years to come.
That’s why one can start thinking that everyone in the team needs to work as much as possible to grow and scale a SaaS product. However, it’s more important how you spend your time by prioritizing tasks rather than how much time you spend on work.
So how can you get the most value out of your day once you can no longer deal with the amount of work you have on your table every day?
Here are five ideas for increasing your productivity as a founder and tips you can use—including new productivity tools—to reach your next SaaS growth milestone faster.
1Create a dashboard with SaaS metrics
Have you ever hesitated to answer what your company’s MRR or ARPU is? These and a handful of other metrics give you an insight into where you stand with your business. However, you probably know how annoying it can get once finding and tracking the metrics become too difficult to handle. There are just too many tabs and folders to get a clear picture of the core SaaS metrics.
Good news—analyzing the health metrics of your business should not take you longer than five minutes a day. Thanks to introducing a SaaS dashboard, you can pull different data sources in one place. By keeping all data in one place, you can easily access it whenever needed. As a result, you make more data-driven decisions.
The image above illustrates what such dashboards can look like.
A dashboard will help you understand if your business is becoming profitable and, most importantly, help you learn what metrics need improvement. For example, if you notice that your churn rate is climbing from month to month, you can react faster by creating a plan to curb it.
2Adopt asynchronous communication
If you are in the technology business, chances are high you hire people all around the world. Introducing a remote culture in the company allows you to expand the global freelancer pool and have a wider choice of talent you won’t have when hiring locally.
However, managing distributed teams brings new challenges as well. For example, you might be struggling with keeping everyone on one page and maintaining good communication among all team members based in different time zones.
Read these tips on organizing a remote team to get some inspiration on what you can do to improve your daily communication with your distributed team. As there are many tweaks you can make to your remote work operations, let’s focus on one of the critical elements—communication.
By adopting asynchronous communication, you can help your team align on goals and execution, and together you will achieve your next growth milestone faster. Also, you can restore work-life balance and make your company a better place for everyone. So how does asynchronous communication work?
Asynchronous communication is about not having any expectations for people to respond to your messages right away. On the contrary, you would expect to react quickly in situations such as emergencies or pre-scheduled monthly strategy calls with synchronous communication. You can check out the differences between the two ways of communication in the illustration above.
Thanks to adopting asynchronous communication, you encourage people to take it easy when out of work and not rush to respond to all messages and emails. Also, this way of communication will help your team learn how to coordinate work among each other better, so you don’t do everything last minute while expecting your teammates to respond to their messages in a zip.
3Focus on the segments that drive revenue
SaaS startup founders usually take care of every business segment—hiring, onboarding, marketing, sales productivity, legal aspects, and many more. While in charge of so many tasks, learning to prioritize better will remain one of the core skills to develop and polish every day.
Sales are one of the areas that determine the success of your SaaS and should remain your focus in the first years of launching your business. In this area, you can also find a way to prioritize.
When building a winning sales strategy, you should consider focusing only on the segments that bring you the most revenue. You can use the segment value matrix to understand what elements have more potential in terms of revenue.
4Learn to delegate and outsource more
As your SaaS product grows, you would try to squeeze more work into your daily schedule and possibly extend your office hours to weekends and nighttime. However, this schedule probably won’t take you anywhere, except for an inevitable burnout.
Instead of working for two, learn how effective leaders delegate and work with some contractors or hire the people your organization needs the most. Also, in some areas, you can consider outsourcing tasks.
For example, suppose you don’t have enough time to motivate your customer support team and provide them with new incentives for more effective work. In that case, you can reach out to the companies that specialize in customer support. To stay on top of the market, they will invest in agent training and motivate them for success, so you don’t have to.
If you don’t have a strong marketing department but just a one-man-band marketer, consider reaching out to a professional agency that has got the resources and can scale your marketing activities. For starters, check out this guide for SaaS marketing to see how much can be done about your marketing when you outsource.
5Collect user feedback regularly
The pace of growing your SaaS business depends on how well you listen to your customers and collect their feedback. That’s what is called product-led growth. For example, if you want to introduce some features in your product, first listen to what your customers say regarding it. They know it best. In the end, they are the ones using your product. So how can you become more effective at collecting user feedback?
With user feedback tools, you can reach your customers at the place and time when they will want to share their opinion on your product and show the direction on how to improve it. Check out these ways of using feedback tools to get more valuable feedback from your customers.
You can choose to go for long-form or micro-surveys. For example, you can collect feedback from churning users on the reasons for canceling an account or active users on product features, things to improve, and their satisfaction, to mention just a few.
For example, you can create your survey for churning users in a third-party tool such as Hotjar or Refiner with just a few clicks.
Summing up
When growing your SaaS, a 24-hour day is not enough to cope with everything. When you feel you can no longer deal with the workload, outsource more and try to find ways to spend less time on the tasks you don’t like.
You can automate many things in your SaaS company, such as analyzing business statistics, communicating more effectively with your remote team, and spending less time reworking your product, thanks to collecting customer feedback.
If nothing helps, don’t be afraid to outsource some tasks that are not the core of your product. You can’t be the best at everything, so get others to help you become the best you can be.
