How to Launch a SaaS Product: A Step-by-Step Guide

A Harvard Business School study revealed that 95% of new products fail annually , with McKinsey & Company finding only 8% of SaaS companies succeed after their first few years.

To maximise the chances of long-term success for your SaaS company, it’s essential to prioritise a well-thought out pre-launch and launch strategy.

Generate demand & anticipation for your product using my step-by-step 3 part SaaS launch strategy outlined below.

1. Pre-Launch Planning

Market Research & User Experience

• Carry out in-depth marketing research to identify what they are looking for in a SaaS tool, struggles with their current tool or way of working, desired features, and their wish list of product benefits.
• Organise marketing research calls with beta testers and people from your existing audience (if you have one!).
• This will not only inform product development but will be the foundation of your messaging hierarchy, segmentation of your audience, pain points, and desires.?
• Observe how your beta testers and/or people from your audience interact with your product, think about how are they intuitively navigating your product and note whether any features or colours are not clear.

Create Buyer Personas

• Define buyer personas by identifying trends and similarities in the research you have carried out. Spend time researching to understand their demographics, needs, and behaviours.
• Use insights from your marketing research calls with any beta testers and/or people from your audience. It’s key to note down any language they use when talking about their past experiences, the frustrations they have from previously trying to solve the specific problem and any tools they tried to solve the problem and their desired outcomes and goals.
• For instance, your SaaS product can support a solo business owner, a business owner with 1-3 team members, or someone using your SaaS tool for themselves. Each of those 3 categories will experience different challenges that your SaaS tool can solve. Understanding these pain points and desired outcomes will allow you to create targeted messaging & market specifically to these segments.????
• Identifying these campaigns can be implemented by adding a field on a waitlist sign-up form so you can identify them in your email marketing tool.

Competitor Research & Market Positioning

• Analyse competitor's tool strengths and weaknesses.
• Identifying gaps in the market and how your SaaS product fills them.
• Empathy Mapping and Porter’s Five Forces can be helpful frameworks to use when organising your market and competitor research into market positioning.?
• Your target audience needs to understand your competitive advantage to recommend to others or buy. Your competitive advantage could be your world-first features or innovative features for your target market.

Crafting Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

• Your SaaS product’s unique selling proposition will differentiate your SaaS in a crowded market.
• Your USP should be clear and concise and resonate with your target audience’s pain points.?
• Your SaaS product’s unique selling proposition will enable you to create marketing messaging to test. This can be the most challenging part of launching your SaaS tech platform.?
• Create messaging to highlight the benefits of your features to each buyer persona.

?Waitlist strategy for your SaaS product launch

• Launch your website with a waitlist landing page a minimum of 6 months before your scheduled launch date. Even if your full website isn’t developed, ensure you have an optimised waitlist page built that you can begin sharing on social media and driving paid ads traffic to.
• Waitlist landing page key elements to include: compelling headline, messaging informed from your market research, clear CTAs, visual product overview, email sign-up forms to capture interested prospect's data including a field that allows them to select a segment they identify with for eg, sole trader, 1-3 employees, 3+ team members, so you can start personalisation of your email marketing as early as possible.
• Set up an email sequence that is delivered to your waitlist sign-ups automatically which shows the SaaS product development journey, your origin story and why, unique features, and FAQs.
• Don’t forget to set up KPIs for your waitlist lead journey such as email open rate, click-through rate + sign-up rate to live demos, and launch webinars as you get closer to launch.
• 2 weeks before launch, start to build anticipation and buzz by communicating how excited your audience is for your launch and to sign up, think of the long waiting list you have to see before buying concert tickets for your favourite band, that is the demand we are looking to build!
• Offer waitlist exclusive launch offers and live demos to meet and interact with your founding, most loyal potential users.

Identifying Partners to Support Your Launch

Strategic partnerships are an incredible way of generating awareness of your SaaS tool. As partners have their own business operations to run and promotional calendar, it is best to identify partners to support your launch as early as possible.?

Sit down and note down any friends in the industry, brands, and platforms with a similar target audience to yours. Once you have your launch dates set, reach out to them and see if they’re interested in spreading the word about your SaaS tool.?

For partners with smaller audience sizes, you would offer the opportunity to share links to your upcoming live webinars and demos. For larger strategic partners, you may offer a live demo, especially for their audience.

Affiliate platforms such as FirstPromoter can help you pay partners commissions each time someone buys from their personal tracking link they use to share your SaaS tool, live demo, or webinar.

Partner promotion assets to create:

• Develop PDF guides to show how the partner program works and note any key dates for them to add to their calendar.?
• Graphics to share on social media or in their email communications.
• Swipe copy for them or their teams to access, edit, and share with their audience?

Set Launch Goals and KPIs

Set goals for your SaaS product launch and ensure everyone on your team is aware of them. Your goal could be hitting a certain number of new users or generating a certain number of waitlist leads for the SaaS product.?

Defining key performance indicators to track daily and weekly in a report will keep you and your team on track.

If your KPIs are not hitting the benchmark, you will need to form a plan to get them up to speed. Losing momentum in your pre-launch launch runway will have an impact on your launch - so keep an eye.

2. Developing a Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy

Schedule regular team meetings to review progress, discuss challenges, and plan for the future. This will ensure that everyone is up-to-date and on the same page. However, it's important these meetings are hosted efficiently as you are paying for people's time.

Identify and Share Your Founder Story As humans, we love to hear stories. Showcasing your founder's story has the power to evoke emotional connections with the people you want to connect with? - future users, strategic partners, and even investors.

• Identify your origin story?
• Leverage your origin story in key places such as your waitlist landing page, email nurture sequence, social media content, and sales page

Build Your Email List

• Creating anticipation and demand for your SaaS product with an audience is essential for launch success.
• Strategies to grow your email list (lead magnets, webinars, best launch offer waitlist incentive).
• Nurture leads through email newsletters and an email sequence that educates your audience and positions your SaaS product as the solution to their desired outcomes and challenges.

Content Marketing for Brand Awareness & Lead Generation

• Blog posts, guest blogging, and thought leadership pieces. Ensure each piece of content has a call to action to either join your waitlist or to download a free resource so you can convert your web traffic into email subscribers that you can nurture ahead of your launch.
• Using SEO to rank for key terms related to your SaaS.

Social Media Engagement & Community Building

• Choose the right platforms based on your audience (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).
• Create content targeted to your audience and share it on your chosen social media platforms.
• Add ad spend to your best-performing organic content to extend your reach and build up a warm audience to re-target later.
• Use social media to engage with potential users, industry influencers, and thought leaders. Build Buzz through Guest Podcasting & PR
• Collaborate with influencers or industry experts to generate excitement.
• Prepare press releases for media coverage and pitch for guest podcasting in your pre-launch runway.?
• Work with a PR agency like EAST VILLAGE to increase brand awareness in your SaaS tool.

Decide on the Sales Strategy + SaaS Offer Strategy

• Strategise limited-time offers to create urgency and encourage sign-ups to your platform.
• It is popular to offer Lifetime Deal offers at the time of your launch, they are a higher cost to generate revenue however, it is important to cap the number of lifetime deal users you onboard onto your SaaS product as they will have lifetime access to your customer service team.?
• Users won’t buy unless they need to. You can help your audience to make a buyer decision by communicating what’s waiting for them on the other side. For eg, for your early adopters and founding members, you may be offering onboarding calls to set them up for success, and first access to the world-first features.
• You can reward fast action takers by offering a limited-time offer on each live demo or webinar to communicate a sense of urgency, for eg, if they buy within 24 hours they will receive additional bonus resources or a discounted offer.?

3. Executing the Launch

Assign Responsibilities & Establish Effective Communication with Your Team

• Develop a detailed launch timeline, and a project plan for when each asset is expected to be delivered, assign responsibilities & ensure everyone on your team is fully aware of your expectations, and communicate effectively with all team members + all partners involved.

Schedule a series of Live Launch Webinars and Live Demos

• Schedule live webinars targeted to the desired outcomes of your audience across the month of your launch. Promote the live webinars to your email list and existing audience. Offer your waitlist audience exclusive access to join your live demo before you invite them to the webinars.
• Users tend to want to see inside a live product before buying, so live demos are key for sharing a preview and building credibility. You will likely find most of the live demo sign-ups are generated from your existing warm audience so ensure you consistently have a stream of leads and a new audience to promote your live demos for continued success after launch. Leveraging Paid Ads for Growing Your List + Re-Targeting for Sales
• Use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or LinkedIn Ads to reach your target audience and generate leads for your waitlist, live webinars, and live demos.
• Set up retargeting ads to capture waitlist sign-ups from your warm audience.
• Set up retargeting ads to capture people from your warm audience to sign up for a live demo of your SaaS product.

SaaS Launch Team Mistakes to Avoid + What To Do Instead

• Bad leadership and startup culture are cited as one of the top reasons why businesses fail - don’t allow this to happen in your launch!?
• Set your marketing and launch team up for success by providing them with everything - I mean everything - they need to create marketing assets for your launch. Don’t underestimate this. They need the support and tools to effectively promote your product.?
• Establish clear responsibilities for your team. Repeat things and be clear about your expectations, nothing is too obvious to say in your team onboarding.?
• Culture comes from the top. As a founder you’re incredibly busy but as the visionary of your SaaS tool and business. Your team needs to be fully aligned with your mission and any key insightful conversations you have been having that can inspire their work. Create a culture of sharing ideas. As your SaaS tool has never been launched into the market before, there is no data or feedback on what works which can be a challenge for your new team. Be compassionate with this!
• Prioritise loops of feedback. Fostering a culture of continuous feedback and brainstorming new ideas will empower your teams to do their best work and feel confident about the transparency in your team. Unfortunately, I have been on a handful of teams where feedback on the team’s work isn’t prioritised, it causes a bottleneck and the team loses out on time they could be working on the needle movers of your launch. It is an incredibly inefficient use of budget and can cause frustration in your team. Please ensure you and your management team have daily feedback time pencilled into their calendars and make sure your team members understand when these times are.?

With only 8% of SaaS companies surviving past the first few years, your go to market plan is key to your success.?

If you would like clarity over your SaaS launch strategy, send me an email at [email protected] or book a free consultation call with me here .?