How to Build SaaS in Public: A Step-by-Step Guide

To build your SaaS in public, you need to carefully share your journey, from ideation to launch and beyond, with your target audience. Transparency and trust might play a key role in attracting early adopters. This guide lays out a series of steps for implementing the strategy, including insights on common oversights to anticipate.

Before sharing your journey, determine your objectives. Think about what you hope to achieve by building in public. Are you aiming to:

• attract investors? Communicate your progress and traction to potential investors..
• win early adopters and build a community? Generate interest and collect insight on your product.
• establish thought leadership? Establishing yourself as a domain expert requires demonstrating extensive knowledge and experience in your field.
• validate your idea? Test market interest and refine your product based on feedback.

When you define your goals, you create a framework for developing your content strategy and assessing its effectiveness.

Next, identify your ideal customer profile. Consider their:

• Demographics (age, location, occupation)
• Pain points and needs
• Preferred communication methods

Having a clear understanding of your target audience is important for crafting personalized communication and selecting the most effective platforms to reach them.

Select platforms where your target audience is present. Consider the following channels:

• Twitter: Tweets can be utilized to disseminate quick updates and engage in discussions through the use of relevant hashtags such as #buildinpublic and #SaaS. Copy AI, launched in 2020 by Paul Yacoubian and Chris Lu, focused on leveraging Twitter to engage with potential users and build an engaged community. This strategy, along with other factors, contributed to the company achieving a monthly recurring revenue of over $157,000.
• Blogs: Publishing in-depth articles, tutorials, and detailed updates. Founded in 2013 by Nathan Barry, ConvertKit saw a monthly recurring revenue of $2,464,976, which accompanied their blogging strategy for dissemination.
• Community Forums: Connect with your target audience on platforms like Indie Hackers, Hacker News, or niche communities relevant to your SaaS.
• LinkedIn function is to provide a space for professionals to engage in networking, industry knowledge exchange, and professional development.
• YouTube: Develop video content highlighting your product, tutorials, or behind-the-scenes glimpses of your development process.

Use channels that align with your style and where you feel most comfortable interacting with your audience. We suggest focusing on a few key platforms.

Communicate your progress openly using authentic stories of your experiences. Instead of just making simple updates and announcements, focus on creating content with a strong connection to your target audience.

• Document your journey: Share regular updates on your progress, milestones, and challenges. Pieter Levels, founder of Nomad List, openly documented his process, including revenue numbers and challenges. The formation of a dedicated user base may have been influenced by the establishment of trust.
• Solicit feedback: Engage with your audience and seek their input on product features, design, and overall direction. Buffer, under the leadership of Joel Gascoigne, implemented a strategy of gathering user input through regular feedback requests and sharing insights into their product direction.
• Share insights with clients: Provide information related to your SaaS expertise. Consider creating tutorials or instructional videos to help address real concerns or questions of your target audience.
• Give people a look at what you do: Let your audience see how you develop your product or service. Show your design iterations, code snippets (without revealing sensitive information), and decision-making frameworks.

Building in public can be a long-term journey, like a marathon. Maintaining a consistent content publication schedule could contribute to audience engagement and information dissemination.

• Create a content calendar: Plan your content in advance to ensure regular updates.
• Set realistic goals: Start with a posting schedule and gradually increase frequency.
• Transparency requires sharing successes and setbacks. Handling mistakes, whether intentional or not, relates to user trust and reflects the importance of efficiently solving problems for the user.
• Respond to comments and questions: Engage with your audience and foster a sense of community.

Consistency and transparency are key to building credibility and trust with your audience.

Transparency is valuable, but prioritize the protection of sensitive information that could threaten your market advantage.

• Focus on the process: Share your journey without revealing your core intellectual property or trade secrets.
• Focus on conceptual aspects of your technical decisions without disclosing source code.
• Information dissemination: Distribute knowledge strategically, focusing on customer needs and avoiding the disclosure of sensitive proprietary information.

For example, instead of: “Our microservices architecture uses this specific message queue and data serialization format.”, share: “We adopted a microservices architecture to enhance modularity and scalability. The setup allows for independent development and deployment of features, potentially affecting agility.”

This gives an idea of your overall system design without disclosing specific details.

Also, answering the following questions will help you find the balance between transparency and protecting your intellectual property:

– Does this information offer value to my audience without compromising my competitive advantage?

– Am I sharing too much detail that could be replicated by competitors?

– Is this information valuabe for my audience to understand my journey and progress?

Building in public is most effective during the initial stages of your SaaS journey. As your product matures and your business grows, you may need to adjust your strategy.

• Shift your focus: Transition from building in public to content marketing or community building.
• Maintain transparency: Continue sharing updates and engaging with your audience, but adjust the level of detail and frequency.
• Focus on customer success: Share case studies, testimonials, and success stories to demonstrate the value of your product.