Brutal Lessons

Learned Building

In-house Products@kyleracki

A little about me.

A little about me.

- Designer since 2003

- Started Headspace in 2008

- Built 4 SaaS products

- Sold Headspace in 2014

- Currently CEO of @Proposify

1.Site Tea

2. Social Gopher

3. Extrify

4. Proposify

LESSON 1 Market validation

is everything.

“If you can't find 15 people

to talk to, well, imagine how

hard it's going to be to sell to

them. So suck it up and get

out of the office. Otherwise,

you're wasting time and

money building something

nobody wants.”Lean Analytics

Anybody will say your idea

is great if you annoy them

for long enough.

Do we

understand

this industry?

Are we

building the

right product?

Will they

pay for it?

Does

anybody

care at all?

More on market research

LESSON 2 Hire a dedicated

developer.

‘How’s

the

product

coming

along?

“Project managers have targets to invoice each month. Because Get Sign Off wasn’t a paying client it was pushed down the priority list. It wasn’t going to help the project managers meet their targets.”We say a sad goodbye to Get Sign

Off

LESSON 3 You’ll probably

need to raise

money.

Equity

Investment

Borrow

money

Government

grant

Options

LESSON 4 Eventually you’ll

need to shit or

get off the pot.

What investors want.

LESSON 5 Launching

something is

only the first step

“If you build it, they will come.”

Dream

Reality

“Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required.”

Marc Andreessen

LESSON 6 The SaaS isn’t

always greener

on the other side.

SaaS Metrics

SaaS Metrics

CAC

SaaS Metrics

LTV

SaaS Metrics

MRR

SaaS Metrics

Churn

More on SaaS metrics

Thanks.@kyleracki