When you're building a niche SaaS, you want your tool to be clean, focused, and distraction-free. But lately, I've noticed that keeping our product standalone is actually what s driving our workflow churn.
If users have to copy-paste data or manually move between their primary workspace and our tool, it eventually gets abandoned the moment things get busy.
For mature founders: At what point did you realize you needed to stop being an independent destination and start embedding deeply into tools like Slack, Notion, or existing IDEs/CRMs? How did that pivot affect your roadmap?
Most first time founders will go about coding an MVP and designing flashy LPs, launch and see no one coming to use their tool So here is my advice: First how well do you know that need? Have you spoken with at least 10 of them? Have you asked those customers to pay your software based on your clickable prototype (Figma is your friend here)? Asking for money on a prototype helps settle the debate and we go from that's a great idea to well I wouldn't actually pay for that because of X. So talk to customers and get them to buy before coding anything. You would be amazed at how far you can take a customer down the buying process without having anything that works. When you have validated that customers are actually going to pay for your software you know how to convince them and write a proper LP to sell your product. Make your LP pain focus not feature focus and avoid overwhelming users with too much information! At this point, no ads required yet only things that don't scale. You can start reaching out to your customers with personalized soft sales pitch by email, Linkedin and Twitter. There you can identify your one channel where you're going to build your go to market strategy. This will help you better qualify your ICP and refine your sales pitch.
Last year, we spent half a year courting a mid-market company. We did endless demos, built a custom integration for their legacy system, and jumped through every hoop. Finally, we closed a $2,000/month contract. The Head of Operations, who loved our product, was our internal champion and promised it would be a massive success.
Three months into the contract, our champion resigned.
Two weeks later, we got an email from the new VP of Operations. He wanted to "review the software stack." We jumped on a call, and he told us he was canceling the contract. His reasoning? "I didn't buy this tool. I don't see the ROI. And frankly, I want to consolidate vendors and use the tool my old company used."
I was devastated. We had built custom features for them, spent weeks onboarding their team, and the product was actually working perfectly for the users. But because the person who signed the check was gone, we were treated like an unwanted stepchild.
We spent months cleaning up an interface that worked fine but looked a bit dated, only to watch users get completely disoriented by the new layout.
Even though the new design scored much higher on aesthetics and modern UI tests, our churn spiked because people couldn't find their regular daily workflows anymore. Muscle memory matters way more than pretty padding.
How do you roll out a massive UI overhaul without frustrating your oldest power users?
Okay, this will be very honest, so hopefully, if they read it, they will not kick me out.
With a client from a fintech, we are trying to come up with ideas on how to present a company (tone of voice, type of posts) in the industry, that is "serious".
Bigger companies pay for SOC 2 certification to make sure that data are safe. The question is: Is it enough for you?
How possible do you protect yourself and your data from your side?
