Does your SaaS actually save your customers from doing more work?

A recent conversation on Twitter with a colleague has reminded of this dilemma that we faced in our early days of launching my SaaS.

You see, In 25 years of consulting to small businesses, I had learned that business owners and managers were faced with the challenge of recording and maintaining a LOT of information about their staff. Things would often get forgotten or lost, being recorded on multiple spreadsheets, word documents and paper notes all over the place.

I thought that if we could build a system to aggregate all that data in the one place, then we would be solving a real issue. As a bonus, we would add reminders into our system so that important renewals and anniversaries would not be forgotten.

Well, that is exactly what we built with version 1 of HR Partner. It was essentially a huge database that would contain all ancillary data related to your employees, such as training they had done, their past education history, a history of their absences from work, contracts and documents relating to them, and much more.

As we didn’t get any eager customers. At all.

You see, we weren’t really solving any issue. Our customers would be recording just as much data as they would have been doing before in Excel, or a notepad, or on a whiteboard, except now we were just asking them to do it in a system that was unfamiliar to them. No wonder we didn’t have any takers.

We weren’t providing a huge amount of value to them for all this work (sometimes a little extra work) that they would have to do to store all that data in our app. Sure we had automated reminders, but this wasn’t compelling enough for them to make the switch and pay for our service.

It wasn’t until we added the ability for their employees to submit leave requests for approval by upper management. NOW we were on to something. The managers didn’t have to do as much work, as that was now delegated to their employees.

It was up to the employees to submit a leave request with their leave type they wanted, their start/end dates etc. and then all the manager had to do was to literally click one button and the process was completed. Any approved leave would be automatically added to the company calendar so that everyone had a ‘helicopter view’ of who would be away and when.

This was the turning point where we started to see traction in the market. Just by focusing on one niche area that actually cut down on work that the business stakeholders had to do. Also, we were repurposing all that collected data to give different perspectives on team movement and activity. Finally, our customers were seeing real value in our system.

Incidentally, we have since added many more features in our HR app, but the leave requests module is still our most popular and widely used feature - 7 years later!

Hitting 1000

Every morning, one of the first things I do when I sit down in front of my PC is to check out the dashboard on my HR SaaS app to see what the overnight activity is. A couple of days ago, I noticed this in the top right of the dashboard:

I won’t lie, I actually had tears of emotion well up when I looked at that. It says “1000 subscribed companies”. That means ONE THOUSAND companies out there that have actually paid money to subscribe to my app.

That is something that I find surreal and have to pinch myself often. This is an app that was formulated entirely out of my head. I have written 99.9% of all the lines of code in it. Designed up almost every screen and field and prompt in the system. I find it hard to grasp that something that literally was just ideas floating around in my head is now in use by thousands of people around the world to help them to manage their teams.

Later on that day, Sarah from our team also posted this in our Slack channel:

And that is another thing that also astounds me. That we are now a growing team, with people working in the team who are also passionate and excited about getting our app to the world.

What started as ‘me’, is now bigger than just me.

I am eternally grateful to my family for their constant, untiring support. I am also grateful to my co-founder for sharing the load with me and for her great marketing skills that have got us to this level. I am grateful for my team and colleagues and friends who have been avid supporters and have stuck with me through tough times.

Onwards and upwards.

When your SaaS UX design doesn't scale

I can clearly remember the first ever sign up to my HR SaaS project - it was a small company in the UK with about 10 employees. What a thrill that was. Over the next couple of years, we signed up more companies of even greater size, until we got a pretty good base of customer companies that were around the 100 employee mark each, on average.

Until this month, when we landed a deal for a major UK manufacturer with over 1000 employees! That was a 10x jump on our average customer size. Yikes!

Now, initially, I wasn’t at all worried. I am a tech guy by nature, and had designed my SaaS from the ground up to be scalable. We have multiple load balanced servers, replicated data stores, separate queueing services for background tasks etc. This wouldn’t even have caused a small sweat on our hardware infrastructure.

However, a designer I am not, and I quickly realised that our actual user interface would struggle under such a vast amount of user data.

Let me give you an example. On the main dashboard of our HR app, when the user first signs in, there is a little widget which show all the upcoming birthdays for your staff. It actually shows you all birthdays for the past 7 days, and the next 14 days coming up. This helps the HR manager to plan for office parties etc. or to send greetings out to the team.

Now, in a company of about 100 employees, this list really never grows to more than about 7 or 8 people on the list at any one time. This makes the widget a nice sized box on the page that stays ‘above the fold’ on a single page. Everything else on the dashboard fits around that quite well.

However, after we finished assisting the new company to upload all 1000+ employees into our system, I was horrified to notice that the birthday list was about 60 employees deep. In fact, the law of averages say that in the 3 week time span that the widget shows birthdays for, there will be an average of about 58 employees on it at any one time, in a 1000 employee company.

This made the widget overly tall, and pushed everything down the page. Users would have to scroll down quite a way on the page to see other critical dashboard data. Oops.

I learned the hard way that test data and expectations of low to medium data volumes had dictated some pretty serious limitations as to how I designed the widgets and most of the interface in general.

Thankfully, we have some great designers on my team now, and we put our heads together to work out how to best resolve this issue. We could

• Dynamically reduce the number of weeks spread for the birthday list depending on the volume of employees in a particular company

• Let the customer specify the date spread to show the birthdays for, or

• Set a hard limit on the number of birthday that we would show on the widget and show only those close to today’s date

All of these were discussed and dismissed as being a bit too limiting. After all, our other users loved this widget and frequently told us how it helped them to relate to their staff better.

In the end, we went with - incorporating a mini scroll bar within the widget. Anything up to 10 birthdays on the list and it would show like it always did (so therefore no difference to nearly all our other customers). More than 10 on the list and the widget would peg itself to 500px in height (which still fits on most screens), and a little scroll bar would appear on the right of the widget allowing the user to scroll down the list of birthdays.

My rule #1 for interface design is “Don’t change anything that customers would be already used to unless it is absolutely necessary”, and I think this design choice fits that well.

So far so good with this new customer, as they seem to be loving the system. We will be working closely with them over the next few weeks to ensure that all other elements of our interface are capable of handling 10x the data presentation that we are used to.

How are things with your SaaS? Have you come across similar situations? Or were you smart enough to design ‘defensively’ and cater for these sorts of edge cases?

SaaS Startup Founders: Are you talking to the right audience?

I have a confession to make. I am a developer, not a marketer, and in the nearly 4 years that I have been running my startup HR Partner, I have made a ton of mistakes in my ‘go to market’ strategy, and I hope to share a couple of them here with you.

I always naively thought that the coding of my SaaS product would be the hard part, and that the selling part would happen naturally and effortlessly. How wrong I was. In today’s noisy world, with a ton of competitive offerings, getting heard is nearly impossible, and finding people who will like, and more importantly, pay for your offering is painfully difficult.

Probably the biggest mistake we’ve made with our marketing was simply talking and selling to the wrong people. We never really stopped to look at who would be using our product but instead went for the scattergun approach to throw everything at the wall and see what would stick. Let me give you a brief history of what we did.

When I first built HR Partner back around 2016, I decided to release our Beta version to the world via a fanfare splash on the very popular ProductHunt website. It seemed to work, and we actually got hundreds of sign ups out of this one source. “Great!”, I thought - success and endless bags of cash shall now rain down on me.

Wrong. Pretty much 0% of those early signups stuck around. You see, ProductHunt is comprised mainly of programmers, designers and other small startup founders. They are very interested in tech, but have little or no interest in setting up HR policies and procedures, or managing a large team. They signed up purely out of interest sake, but had no reason to actually implement our system at their workplace.

Nevertheless, we doubled down on our failure to learn, and I embarked on a campaign of listing my HR system on various Beta announcement sites such as BetaList. Same results. A flurry of sign ups by curious people, but very little stickiness.

Of course, this spike in signups both times was great for my ego, but I couldn’t see that this was just a vanity metric that did nothing to help us get any real traction.

Next, we went completely broad based, by spending a ton of money on Google Ads. We even worked with a Google consultant to get our keywords and campaign ‘just so’. But while we saw a massive increase in traffic to our website, it didn’t result in many trial signups, and in fact, we got a TON of calls and emails from various employees asking us HR policy and payroll legislation questions! We quickly pulled the plug on this avenue.

At this point, and for the first time in over 6 months of trying, I actually sat down to think about where I was going wrong. It was pretty obvious actually. ProductHunt and BetaList are great sites, but really, they are ideally suited if you have early stage products that are geared to the programmers or designers of this world. Business owners are not renown for adopting concept stage or beta stage software - they want something proven and reliable. Coders and creative people however, are different and can’t wait to try the next shiny thing! We were talking to totally the wrong people.

So I began to think. Who would need HR systems? Well, the obvious answer is “HR Managers”, duh!

Thus began our next marketing push - cold outreach to anyone with the title “HR Manager” on LinkedIn. Initial observations were a mixed bag. We were having some great conversations with a lot of HR Managers on that platform, but very few would actually take the next step and sign up for a trial of HR Partner. It turns out that while these were the right people to talk to, they already had established systems they were happy with, and were not looking to buy.

We were getting closer - the right people, just in the wrong place & time. So how do we get them at the right time? Well, we’ve recently put some marketing effort on business software directories, such as Capterra or G2 Crowd. These are vast directories of SaaS offering that people can go to when, you guessed it, they are evaluating business software that they are thinking of buying.

Now we were getting somewhere. By promoting our offering on these platforms, we started to see a steady uptick of trial sign ups, and more importantly, paying customers.

This is all good news, but there is still so much more learning to be done here. For instance, we are finding that while it is the HR or Operations Managers we are mainly talking to, the actual buying decision is usually made by a different person in the chain.

HR Managers are coming to us with a specific set of problems - for example they may be drowning in paperwork or having trouble keeping employee qualifications and training up to date. Whereas the business owner may have a different set of issues they want solved, such as high turnover, or the high cost of recruiting new employees.

This means that we needed to address both areas. When talking to the HR Manager, we would focus on the problems they were experiencing, but when the decision went back up the line to the person who would sign off on the new software, we had to start from scratch and provide solutions for a whole different set of problems. We essentially had to sell our system twice, to practically two different audiences.

Did I say two? We actually discovered that we had a third audience that we had to sell to. These were the actual employees themselves within the organisations who bought HR Partner. Any great HR software is just going to languish if the employees don’t feel comfortable using it. All that the employees wanted to know was - how do I find out how many days leave I have available? How can I request some time off expediently? How can I find the contact email of another employee in a remote office? etc. A totally different set of problems and expectations than the other two audiences we had been dealing with!

Thus we refined our sales and marketing processes to deal with these three distinct audiences that our product had. Sure it is a lot harder to do, and is time consuming, but it has resulted in a far more effective and predictable process now - just by understanding who our audience was, and in our case, who our multiple audiences were that we had to talk to, understand, and solve problems for.

We are still learning and improving, and I am interested in hearing more from other startup founders and business owners out there. How did you find your real audience?

This article was originally written for the Catalysr Blog. I was a member of the Catalysr C18 cohort for migrapreneurs, an experience which was awesome and extremely beneficial to me and my startup. Find out more about them at catalysr.com.au.