Devops for Growth

It can be challenging to balance providing great support to existing customers with further developing the product to attract new customers. If you did a minimum viable product (MVP) launch correctly, your product currently lacks a ton of features and has more than a few bugs. You will be getting a lot of bug reports and feature requests (and occaissional feature demands) from customers who are at times frustrated and confused. If you launched really well, the backlog will be much more than you can reasonably handle.

Navigating support as a solo founder can be a minefield and it’s important to have a strategy before frantically wading into the queue of emails and tickets.
The Guiding Principle: Every support ticket is an opportunity

But there’s hope. It’s too easy to view support tickets in a negative light. It’s a long task list that you need to check off before getting back to work on product. It’s a stream of grumpy users who can’t even read the dang instructions you so clearly wrote out inside the app.

But this is completely the wrong mentality because the reality is that every support ticket is a massive opportunity. Your worst customer is not the one sending you a support email every day for two weeks, your worst customer is the one who signs up for your app, then cancels without ever giving you a word of feedback. Customers who take the time and energy to write you a support email have now taken a vested interest in getting your app to work for them. It’s important to listen to them, ask follow-up questions and not just view the goal as getting the customer from A to B as quickly as possible.

Repeatable freelance and consulting work

SaaS, and software more generally, has been stealing work from freelancers since the beginning. Nobody wants to be in the business of reinventing wheels, so if you see a specific type of job that businesses are paying contractors to do over and over again from scratch, there may be an opportunity to build a SaaS solution. This was the method that generated the idea for Storemapper. There was no good plug-and-play solution for a store locator app on the market and several of my own clients asked me to build them one. I could have made something from scratch and sent them a bill for $1,000 – $2,000 each but it was a broad enough need to warrant investigation as a Micro-SaaS. Another thing to look for is a big change in complexity. I did some research into other store locators and found that companies with a store locator would have a relatively simple site, something easily built without a developer on Squarespace, WordPress or Shopify, but the store locator would be a big step change in complexity. So I reasoned that you might have a lot of customers who could launch their entire site without a developer, except for the store locator. Great opportunity.

The best way to sniff out these kinds of opportunities is to actually become a consultant in a particular field and really learn what customers need.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

Pour aller plus loin

Quels sont les KPI à suivre pour votre startup ? : une masterclass de Jean de la Rochebrochard, sur les KPI’s pour les startups web.

Les métriques en mode SaaS partie 1 et partie 2: une masterclass d’Oussama Ammar sur les KPI’s pour les entreprises en mode SaaS.