SaaS Success in App Stores (Slack & Teams)

Hello and welcome to 1,2,3 Product Weekly - read by startup founders, creators, and product marketers looking to constantly learn. Support on Patreon and get weekly resources directly in your inbox.

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Here is what to expect in this Saturday’s newsletter:

• The success in SaaS marketplaces (Slack & Teams)

• Collaborative Product Roadmap

• BRITech, Audio Writer, SmartSuite

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The success in SaaS marketplaces (Slack & Teams)

Whenever I look at the success of Shopify one particular app comes to mind - Klaviyo.

Klaviyo can attribute most of its success to the Shopify Marketplace. In fact, before the Shopify IPO, the e-commerce software invested $110m - $115m. The partnership has ensured the email marketing software steady clients with revenues at $638 million as of 2023.

However, not much is talked about SaaS marketplaces powering successful apps in the B2B space.

I did a deep dive into Slack and Microsoft Teams to bring you two examples worth noting.

Karmabot scaling into $600k ARR on Slack and Teams

The collaborative Slack for remote teams launched as an internal tool for Stas Kuesh (Founder)’s agency.

First, forward, the app has scaled to over $50k MRR on the back of Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Here are the marketing strategies that worked for them;

Product Hunt - The launch on PH generated their first 100 users with 10 teams

Slack store - This was by far and continues to be a huge revenue avenue for them. Before the pandemic, the launch of the Slack store brought in 120 teams, and later Slack itself approached them and brought in 200 corporate teams.

Microsoft Teams - Launching Karmabot in Teams brought them 300 more teams.

One key insight for product marketers that I took from the conversation is to understand where the product provides immense value and double on that.

For Karmabot it's providing performance reports for managers, and team leaders, not just making work more engaging for employees.

As a startup founder targeting B2B, focus on the decision-makers and not users only.

Product success; How Perfect Wiki scaled to $200k/ARR on Microsoft Teams

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Lessons from hitting $1k MRR & Ideas to scale beyond $10k MRR.

These days, if am not completing client tasks, you will find me in the rabbit hole of Reddit and Indie Hackers reading about successful product launches.

Some have taken unconventional paths to marketing their SaaS product and won.

I came across this founder sharing their lessons on scaling to $1k MRR and was seeking advice on hitting the next milestone. From the discussions, here are takes;

Customers will only pay if they hit a paywall or limits. If you are giving too many features for free instead of acquiring customers, please consider that these customers may never pay for your services.

Don't keep your pricing too low. The founder kept reducing our prices to get customers but it didn't work. ($59 -> $9). What worked was refining the product and then keeping the starting price at $39.

Writing a lot of content (articles) for bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. This one is subjective in my opinion, it depends on the product and target audience's buying stage analysis.

Getting listed on established marketplaces that fit your domain. For the founder, it was Heroku and DigitalOcean.

As have covered above on the power of B2B software marketplaces, there are a lot of companies that offer integrations where you can list yourself and drive leads.

On scaling to $10k MRR - my advice would be to add an affiliate program and double down on what works.

Collaborative Product Roadmap - ( Pixels for Humans)

Heather Oneal of Pixels for Humans took the stage on SaaSOpen to share how teams ( product and customer success) create a compelling product roadmap.

Here is how to think about it;

Avoid the shiny feature bias, they don’t build the business, and customers do.

When doing a product roadmap, be very intentional about looping in the Customer Success team. The reason is simple - they speak to customers more than anyone in the business. Hence they have more qualitative data on the pain points the roadmap should aim to solve.

Better yet, reverse the product roadmap creation and have the Customer Success team part of the process on the go.

Get the full LinkedIn post I shared a couple of days ago.

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SmartSuite 

What do you get when you put Notion, Clickup, and Airtable into one package? - you get SmartSuite. CEO Jon Darbyshire, hopped on Nathan Latka's channel’ to share how they launched the startup from $0 to $100k in 4 weeks.

Here are the four ways they launched the startup;

• Had a waitlist where they shared the launch

• Leveraged LinkedIn following ( 80k followers among the co-founders

• Launched Product Hunt with a 25% discount code.

• Launched on comparison sites like Capterra.

BRITech

Yuryi, the founder of BRITech (SaaS investment management) shared insights on scaling the company to $20.7 ARR. On either building, buying, or partnership in order to scale from a single to a multi-product, Yuryi recommends partnerships. F

For obvious reasons, it is less risky, for the existing audience to test your product in a two way and determine if it’s a good fit before probably considering to acquire them.

Audio Writer

Get the full LinkedIn post on how Deepu ranked top 5 on iOS. Here are my main take;

For an app, focus on the Appstore traffic for conversions and not try to drive it to the sites. Also, experiment more on app discovery outside the Appstore.

Join the Product Letter

Become a member on Patreon, and get all the archives and deep dives like this; Product Positioning; Why 95% Miss the Mark.

Also, let's work on your startup - from product positioning, launch and even scaling. Send me a message on LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading!

God’s speed.

Okerosi