Here’s the biggest mistake we made trying to build Scoops, a B2B SaaS product...

TL;DR: We chose to bootstrap a product that was difficult to sell.

From the start I was adamant that we should bootstrap Scoops. We were in a period where funding was hard to secure, we were two first-time tech founders and we were keen to build and get something out there rather than sink a ton of time into pitching. We also knew that many Angels and VCs wanted to see traction first. So we figured let’s worry about traction and maybe we won’t ever need them.

Our personal situations meant that we had to build Scoops on the side of our individual freelance practices, we toyed about with ideas of combining forces to form an agency to get us going but decided that would be a ton of effort that wasn’t focused enough in the right direction. The point is, we were trying to bootstrap whilst maintaining our paying client work. Which is an important detail when considering the next issue.

Scoops was hard to sell. I’d probably go as far as to say ALL research tools are hard to sell. Research simply falls into that category of “nice to have” as opposed to “need”. And boy did we scratch our heads about how we could shift the perception of the tool from a want to a need. But no matter what bow you put on top of a research tool it will always be one step removed from the actual value (which is the action you take based on the research which leads to increase revenue etc.) Please please please, show me a tool that proves me wrong here. I genuinely want to see it.

What do I mean by ‘hard to sell’. We over estimated what our sales success rate would be. We got excited about every customer we started talking to, tailoring our decks to speak to their needs and pouring our energy into trying to secure a contract with them. We set a realistic target of 10 customers and set the pricing such that we would be able to afford to bring our developer on full time. We defined our ICP etc, etc.

We didn’t get far enough to report our actual sales success rate but the industry average for B2B SaaS is between 2–5%. So let’s take the optimistic 5% for some quick maths. If we need 10 customers at a rate of 5% we need to be in conversation with 200 companies—**Enter one of the 1000s of SaaS bros who has filled my inbox with spam over the last several months claiming they can get me 200 pre-qualified leads in 45 seconds.** Yawn. We simply didn’t have time to be juggling 200 leads with the hope of securing 10.

But success rate is only one side of the sales equation. The length of the sales cycle was something we also came up against. With our two most successful conversations we were entering months two and three and on to our third and fourth calls with them. On each call we were really putting our best foot forward and trying to get that sale. We got super positive signals but never truly got the green light. As I said before research is always perceived as a “nice to have”. And in a struggling economic climate it’s often the first thing that gets cut.

Based on our experience, and from other folks we spoke to in the research SaaS space, I estimate our sales cycle would have been between 6–12 months. With a need to speak to 200 companies across 6–12 months, our goal of securing our first 10 customers just to get us going seemed like a impossible equation.

This, we realised, is why funding is important. To buy yourselves a bubble of time to do all of this stuff without needing to juggle a whole other full-time job. You can get just one sale and you already have a full team working full time on it. That said, I still don’t like the idea of getting investment. Having a bunch of cash to play with wouldn’t have changed any of the above factors, we’d have likely been quite stressed about needing prove traction to investors and watching our pot of money go down and before we know it we’re back out pitching again.

But there’s another way I hear you scream. Product Led Growth! Ahh yes, I love it. One day I will do a full PLG startup but not with a research tool. Needless to say we couldn’t figure that our either. With PLG you make the product free to try, reduce the time to value, lower the price point so that a junior on the team can start a subscription without needing to get sign-off. Do all of that and ... crickets ... You need to market it. The Linked In influencers reckon founder-led marketing is the way here. Dunno about you but I didn’t fancy my chances as a Linked In guru. I tried (you might have seen).

I burned through my free trial of Sales Navigator trying to muster up a following of our target audience. I learned one thing. Most of our target audience were too busy working and showed very little activity on Linked In. Who knew people actually worked and didn’t just mindlessly scroll their feed all day. Perhaps we could have done some nifty growth-hack-y marketing to get traction on a PLG approach. But the numbers for PLG are different again. People expected VERY low costs. Let’s say £50 per month, which is honestly higher than what some people said. How many £50 subs do we need to get our dev on board? And how are we going to pay him to build and maintain the platform whilst we slowly climb to that figure? I won’t bore you with more maths. Needless to say, despite our best excel wizardry, we couldn’t see a clear path with PLG either.

So there you have it, an excruciatingly honest account of the biggest lesson I learned trying to make a B2B SaaS product. No need for tiny violins though, getting this lesson first-hand and truly sweating the details about how to figure it out means I get to shortcut this process next time around, and there will be several next times over the years to come.