Breakout SaaS companies don’t succeed by accident. Behind every unicorn is not just a high-quality software product, but a comprehensive growth strategy that creates a map for the journey to success. Everything from the development of the software tool itself, to the go-to-market strategy, to launch day is carefully planned to maximize the likelihood of positive market reception.
7T has extensive experience assisting SaaS companies with product development and SaaS growth strategies, with countless clients across several industries. Throughout our tenure, we have helped several SaaS firms plan and execute successful launches and helped them add core functionality to their products, assisting with every aspect of their growth strategy.
In this guide, we will cover 7T’s seven keys to a successful SaaS growth strategy.
| Key #1 | Identify a Clear Market Problem | Target pain points within an industry with solutions that have high demand and reasonably low competition. |
| Key #2 | Develop a Robust Minimum Viable Product (MVP) | Develop a basic version of your software product with all core functions included to demo for investors and enter the market quickly. |
| Key #3 | Create a Scalable Tech Stack | Choose cloud-based and modular software tools for internal functions to ensure cost-effective scaling. |
| Key #4 | Build a Strong Go-To-Market Strategy | Identify the most valuable market channels for your product and develop a plan for investment in these channels to cover short and long-term lead gen goals. |
| Key #5 | Focus on Customer Experience | Leverage cutting-edge tech like AI and machine learning to create seamless customer experiences and provide accessible customer support. |
| Key #6 | Establish Reliable Analytics with KPIs | Develop an infrastructure for analytics and identify the most valuable KPIs for your software solution, creating benchmarks for success throughout your growth plan. |
| Key #7 | Secure Funding and Establish and Financial Plan | Find and pursue investors with a similar vision to your company, and manage finances prudently to avoid overspending and needless financial risk. |
Let’s dive into each of these keys, and exactly how they play out practically within a holistic SaaS growth strategy.
Key #1: Identify a Clear Market Problem
The first step to a successful SaaS strategy is creating a software product with high demand and reasonably low direct competition. To achieve this, developers need to identify a market problem within an industry that isn’t solved sufficiently by current market offerings. While many unicorn companies are built off of completely novel solutions to market problems with almost no competition, the majority of them are created by offering a more comprehensive solution within a market with existing players, or one that provides unique value to a niche large enough to create its own market.
For example, massive unicorn companies in the consumer financing space like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay were all born out of slightly different approaches to the same market problem: Consumers looking to buy retail goods now and pay for them over time. This was technically already met by layaway services offered by individual retail stores and chains, but these SaaS companies made it far more accessible and frictionless, creating markets simply by offering convenient mobile or online applications.
To accomplish this, companies can perform surveys and interviews of business leaders or consumers (depending on whether they are a B2B or B2C SaaS firm) to validate problems they are seeing in an industry. These Surveys can focus on whether the problem represents an obstacle they’d be willing to spend money to overcome, what options currently exist in their eyes to help them overcome it, and whether they see value in a developer’s prospective strategy for solving it.
Key #2: Develop a Robust Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
An MVP is a basic version of your software product with all core features necessary for it to perform its intended function. Developing a quality MVP without too many frills will allow for quick market entry in a limited capacity, allowing you to have a demo-ready product for investors and potential clients to interact with early on. This will unlock your firm’s ability to secure funding for a more robust software solution, and/or develop an early clientele while your final product is still in development.
The best way to accomplish this is to work with an experienced developer who has created and demoed MVPs for clients across several industries. This will help you identify what is needed and what isn’t, allowing you to enter the market early on without risking poor reception because your MVP doesn’t include everything it needs to demonstrate value to investors and prospective customers.
Key #3: Create a Scalable Tech Stack
A growth strategy isn’t truly a growth strategy if it doesn’t optimize for scalability. Creating a scalable tech stack means opting for cloud-based, modular tech solutions that minimize the investment needed to store or process more data, and allow you to carry your software stack forward into larger ERP solutions as you grow into more comprehensive software needs.
Key #4: Build a Strong Go-to-Market Strategy
Once you have an MVP and a tech stack that can carry you through as you begin your company’s growth, you need to invest in your growth channels. This means planning how you want to market your product pre-and-post-launch.
In the modern software market, the most effective channels we have identified in our time working with young SaaS companies are the following:
The Best SaaS Growth Marketing Channels
| Digital Advertising | Digital advertising includes Google Ads, social media ads, and any other digital ad space that companies can purchase. These provide lower Roi, but higher volume in the short-term, which is vital for a successful launch to quickly capture a portion of your market. |
| On-Site SEO | On-site SEO refers to creating a website that is optimized for search engines, ensuring all of your core landing and product pages are indexable by search engines and AI search LLMs and designed in a way that will allow them to rank highly in searches closely related to your product. |
| SEO Content Marketing | EO content marketing is the creation of SEO-optimized blog and/or media content that will allow your product or website to rank highly for search terms that your target audience will be searching. This allows you to catch searchers that aren’t specifically looking up your name or software, but rather searching questions or terms that suggest that they could have a need for your software. This type of marketing provides exceptionally high ROI, but results take longer and are more of a “slow drip” than those from lower-ROI paid ads. |
By investing in these marketing channels, SaaS firms can cover their short and long-term marketing needs without overextending themselves financially and needlessly increasing risk.
Key #5: Focus on Customer Experience
At this point in the process, you have an MVP that is functional for demo purposes, but isn’t built out enough to meet the needs of customers long-term. The best way to make a good impression and become a core aspect of customer workflows is to have a quality user experience and accessible support.
For this, we recommend working or consulting with an experienced AI software developer, as modern SaaS products are likely going to struggle to compete without the convenient automation, customizability, and prompt access to customer education that AI provides.
Key #6: Establish Reliable Analytics With KPIs
Data-driven decisions lead to better outcomes, and the more data, the better. So, act early to establish robust and reliable analytics to ensure you have a large enough dataset to make strategic decisions.
It isn’t just about developing a data collection infrastructure, though, but also about identifying the KPIs that matter most to your company. For some software solutions, total users may be the key to success. For others, though, average client tenure and lifetime value are far more important. Choose the KPIs that provide the most value to your company, and set benchmarks that will allow you to continually audit your strategy and identify when a change needs to be made.
Key #7: Secure Funding and Establish a Financial Plan
Utilizing the growth plan you’ve developed thus far, you should have the necessary tools to secure funding from investors and develop a financial plan for the funds that you’re able to raise. If you’ve completed every key up to this point, you should have a demoable MVP for a SaaS product that investors will see value in, a plan for turning it into a market-ready solution that customers will respond well to, a marketing strategy that will get the word out to those prospective customers, and data infrastructure that will ensure investor confidence in your ability to be held accountable to your goals.
The key here is to identify investors that align with your company’s vision and have experience with markets similar to yours. These investors are more likely to provide you with both adequate funding and flexibility to operate the way you need to in order to create value in your market. Then, simply making data-backed decisions and managing your finances prudently based on the growth strategy you’ve laid out up to this point should carry you through to a successful launch.
A strategic launch is the key to successful market entry, which typically makes or breaks the success of an SaaS firm. With AI making it easier and faster to rush SaaS solutions to market, developing a comprehensive strategy ensures that yours rises above the competition and creates lasting value for you and your customers, as opposed to being the next “flash in the pan” that overpromises and underdelivers due to poor strategy.
Do right by the people within your organization and your prospective investors/customers by taking the time to develop effective SaaS growth strategies. If you’re unsure about your ability to craft one on your own, consider consulting with an experienced partner who understands how to take a successful SaaS product to market.
Develop SaaS Growth Strategies with 7T
At 7T, we use a “Business First, Technology Follows” approach to create SaaS growth strategies and products for our clients across countless industries. Our custom-built platforms leverage machine learning and AI technology to deliver significant operational advantages with a robust ROI, and we have robust experience helping clients get them to market. Our team will audit your organization’s challenges, often showing up on-location to embed ourselves in your workflow to understand your needs from a first-person perspective. Then, we’ll architect a value-generating solution to transform your vital processes and meet your goals.
7T is based in Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte, NC, but our clientele spans the globe. If you’re ready to learn more about how to build a SaaS growth strategy, contact 7T today.
