Kateryna Myroniuk - Build and Promote Profitable SaaS Business: Without investments or prior experience

BUILD AND PROMOTE PROFITABLE SAAS BUSINESS

Without investments or prior experience

Kateryna Myroniuk

Contents

S o, it happened. You want to start your own tech company but have close to zero experience in tech development or website promotion. This book is here to help you. But first, let me introduce myself.

My name is Katia Myroniuk, born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine. After getting my masters in marketing, I worked for several tech companies as an SEO and project manager. This experience helped broaden my expertise in online website promotion, yet, I always wanted to work for myself. You know that gut feeling when you are not comfortable with being where you are now? Well, I know. That is why I quit my nine to five high-paid job and went on a month-long trip to South America. My friend and I wanted to cross this continent from one coast to another, from Rio to Lima, in one month. But more than anything else from one life to another. That is the way I entered the self-employed world and have been happy with myself ever since.

Later after the trip, I started a boutique content marketing and SEO agency for SaaS companies. Throughout the years we have worked with a wide range of online businesses, starting with small food blogs with no ideas for monetization to big multimillion product companies, whose programs you might use right now. This experience resulted in the knowledge of what software companies need to succeed in a market, regardless of the type of niche.

Working with SaaS companies, I have always been curious to start something of my own. That is how I became a single non-technical founder at SaaS company and walked a journey from the search of the idea to product launch from the start. In this book, I combine my experience of high-quality business promotion, project management, and software development.

It is a guide that will walk you through all the steps of SaaS building and promotion from the search of an idea to its implementation and running a business. This book is for people who come from different backgrounds either you have a digital background but to technical experience; a developer who is not familiar with the marketing side of the business or simply interested in building a SaaS without revolutionary ideas or investors.

Also, this book assumes that you will often go to Google search and study in parallel with reading it. I use a lot of acronyms and industry slang, which I tried to explain as clearly as possible.

Sentiments apart, this is not another self-help book to believe in yourself and go. Neither is it about creating passive income so you dont have to work (and I dont believe you can achieve happiness by doing nothing). I wrote this book for those who have a burning desire to build an online company. Only desire can balance the absence of tech or marketing experience on the way to SaaS product creation and help overcome the obstacles that will arise.

NICHE ANALYSIS

1.1 Types of online businesses

There are many ways to generate money online, but if we talk about a white-label business with a website, there are five main business lines:

You dont need a lot of skills to start this type of business. Content writers, bookkeepers, developers, and other types of freelancers are in the service business. They sell their hours, which are hard to scale. Once they expand, they can hire assistants or trainees and grow into a service company.

It is a good cash cow that will generate income to create a cushion for future businesses.

The advantages are clear for both sides. Users dont have to pay for the service every time they use it. Creators get the scalable source of income with the ability to lower costs of the final product by distributing it between all customers.

Most online companies use this business model. The most famous is Netflix, which killed the VHS rental industry. You may not watch it every month, but you dont cancel the subscription.

With the decline of iPhone sales, Apple plans to switch to this model by offering paid iOS updates or by subscription. Amazon offers a Subscribe & Save model where you get a discount for choosing auto-delivery. It frees you from repetitive purchases, and Amazon collects ongoing payments.

If you want to consider this kind of online business, it is easy to approach it in the form of drop-shipping. This form has a low entry budget, and you are not responsible for transportation or warehousing. Nearly 33% of e-commerce stores use this method. It works in the following way: the merchant gets an order from the customer and sends it to the drop-shipper; the drop-shipper finds a seller, prepares an order, and dispatches it to the buyer.

The number of use cases for this online business is endless. The marketplace can operate in the market of goods and services, hiring, rental industries, and others. Even service companies are in some way marketplaces they find clients and implementers.

Marketplaces are giants of the online economy. Amazon, Upwork, and Etsy have various monetizing strategies, yet the idea is one you dont have to produce to be online. When launching a marketplace, the most difficult part, aside from customers, is finding sellers. That is problematic for a new, no-name business.

These online businesses may include various subtypes. Choosing which type of business to start depends on the budget, experience, and resources you have. One thing is for sure once the company is up and running, you will have other things to think about. In this book, we will cover the creation and promotion of a SaaS business and what to expect and focus on when running it.