Melissa Kwan

10 things I didn’t know before that make bootstrapping a SaaS startup incredibly hard: 😰 1. The less they pay, the higher the churn. We learned that the lower the price, the more price-sensitive and demanding the user. Low prices made it easier for people to try us but they needed the most support and left faster. 2. Support is a b*tch. When you spend years working your a$$ off only to have strangers be unnecessarily condescending, rude, and even cruel - all your effort feels like a thankless job. Digital aggression is real. 3. Scaling problems are unpredictable. We couldn't have known that 1k attendees joining a webinar would crash the system. Or that chat would lag when 2k attendees sent messages at the same time. We only knew where to improve as problems surfaced. 4. Content is the root of all success. All demand generation starts with content. But nobody on our team had marketing experience before. We had to learn everything from scratch, from SEO to social selling. Now, outside of the dev team, 90% of our time is spent creating content. 5. Most marketing doesn’t move the needle. Things we thought would make a huge impact did not. Even though 9/10 things we do probably won’t work very well, we do them anyway because one thing might and collectively, everything helps a little. 6. Best customers can churn for things out of our control. Product champions leaving without a successor, change in corporate strategy, end of a launch - these things have caused our highest paying customers to cancel even when they loved our product. 7. Problem solving never stops. I once thought if only we had $40k MRR, we’d be able to afford everyone we need. As the business grew, new problems arose which required new expertise. I upped that number to $60k, then $80k, and now it’s $150k. We're always making concessions because we’re never at the “comfortable number”. 8. ICPs can love your solution but not feel the pain. This was the biggest shock and disappointment of all. Ideal customers we designed our product for can understand the problem we’re solving, love how we’re solving it, but still not feel the pain enough to sign up. 9. Compliance is $ but necessary. As we grew, bigger companies with compliance requirements like GDPR/SOC2 started to find us. We were delaying this because it's expensive and require significant work. After getting requests over and over, we realized it was an obstacle for revenue. 10. First $1M is not the hardest. You may have heard that the first million is the hardest. For us, it's not. Growth started to stagnate just after we hit that goal. Conversions decreased, churn increased. For the first time, we feel stuck and need to come up with new tricks. I finally understand why SaaS companies are worth 10x multiple. Mine of course, is worth at least 100x. 😂 If you're interested, we’re offering 10% discount at 90x revenue. DM me. ___ I'm Melissa Kwan, 3x bootstrapper sharing lessons weekly. Follow me + hit 🔔 to stay tuned