My playbook for building $4mil bootstrapped SaaS product

For the last 10 years, I'm building internet businesses. In 2016, I exited my previous business (small 20 people LA-based advertising agency) and decided to explore SaaS for my next gig. In late 2016, I started working on JustCall.io (a cloud phone system). In the last 3 years, I bootstrapped my way to $4 million annual recurring revenue and learned a lot about building and growing SaaS businesses.

The last 3 years were not easy at all because I didn't have any set playbook to build such a business. So, I made 100s of mistakes read a lot of books, watched almost all the videos by Jason Lemkin or other SaaS gurus to learn the art of building a profitable bootstrapped SaaS business. And, eventually built my own playbook to build, launch, grow, and automate such businesses with a higher probability of success while making less (relatively) mistakes.

I'm sharing this playbook with the community in the hope that some of the entrepreneurs who wish to start a business or struggling with their current business will get some pointers or help.

20-point Simple Playbook To Bootstrap & Grow Your SaaS Product

1. Pick a multi-billion dollar industry growing double-digit y-o-y. The benefit of this is that you are entering into a market with proven demand and every year a substantial amount of new revenue is coming into the market. Eg. CRMs, Pet Insurance or Pet Care, Digital Signatures etc.

2. Learn to code/get someone to write code for you. This was very important probably 3-4 years back but nowadays, you can also get started without learning to code. There are so many no-code solutions available like Webflow, Zapier that you can build your minimal viable product without knowing to code at all.

3. Build a good product -awesome product takes time so let's start with good MVP (minimum viable product) - a product that does at least one key thing well.

4. Figure out early distribution channels (integrations, co-marketing, podcast, youtube, Reddit, Quora, Linkedin connections, twitter or any industry-specific forum or event)

5. Bring in 10 unknown customers (not friend/family) by becoming a shameless salesperson

6. Offer THE BEST EVER customer experience to your early customers. Impress them with your care and love. To provide 24/7 support from very early on, I hired an experienced chat support rep from Upwork.

7. Give product demos to each & every new customer and learn about their use case during this process

8. Ship new updates & features on a daily basis based on the feedback

9. Write help guides and create videos for every single feature and account setup

10. Create process around sales (email templates, onboarding checklist) and customer support

11. Hire 1 for sales and 1 for support to start following these processes

12. Coach new hires every day and enable them to take decisions on their own. Put together few docs around processes, FAQs, expectations, etc really help with decentralizing decision making

13. Start working on customer success (proactive customer support) - ensure every new customer is getting the most out of the product. In the early days, track all the basic actions you expect customers to take and send emails if the customer is not taking those expected steps. This really helps in customer onboarding, conversion and also, UX improvement.

14. Setup NPS (Net Promoter Score) collection and measure NPS every month. There are 100s of NPS tools available in the market. It is basically asking your customer about how likely on the scale of 0 to 10, he or she will share your product with others.

15. Create a process around handling 0 - 3, 3 - 8 and 9 - 10 ratings eg. send emails, schedule calls or send in-app messages

16. Once some basic process is built, hire someone to handle customer success

17. When someone gives you 9/10 on NPS, it is the best time to ask for a review on G2, etc. Make sure to make most of this time-bound opportunity

18. Starting to get some +ve reviews? Add those on your website

19. Start generating some paid traffic via Google Ads/Facebook. Sales, Support & Customer Success processes will take care of the new traffic

20. Once you start getting some new paid customers via these paid channels, it is time to hire someone for product marketing (you can do this earlier as well). Scale paid marketing & content marketing.

Every success story is different but if you have a playbook to refer, it helps you in planning some of your next steps and budgeting for the same. So, I hope this playbook will give you some useful pointers to plan your SaaS business.

By the way, I used the same playbook for a new product Helpwise.io and it has helped us grow to $100K ARR in the last 4-5 months. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas. Feel free to add if I missed something important.

Note: I originally tweeted this as a Twitter thread. As people found this useful, I decided to share this here.

You can follow me on Twitter @sharmag88 - I usually tweet about my learnings from building and investing in multiple SaaS businesses over the last 4 years.