Q & A With Leandro: How To Build a SaaS Product
Leandro is a British-Caribbean who has lived in 10 countries, and as a result, considers himself a citizen of the world. He currently resides in Spain. He has worked in IT for 20 years, and after having had enough of corporate life, he spent the last 4 years trying to do my own thing and building Unubo. I asked him his thoughts on building a SaaS product in the tech industry. Check it out now.
What is Unubo?
Unubo makes it easier for you to track progress in your startup, by bringing metrics from different SaaS tools into one place.
How did you go about deciding to build this product?
During my time working on several projects as a founder and throughout my career, I’ve always found it cumbersome to log into different tools to check metrics:
- Stripe for revenue information
- Mixpanel or Google Analytics for traffic
- Mailchimp to check on the latest campaign numbers
- And so on...
Getting a complete picture on how I was progressing involved me logging into all the relevant apps manually, get the latest numbers, and put them onto a slide, Google Sheet, shared doc, or similar. It wasn't particularly elegant, so I always thought: “Isn’t there something that does this automatically?” Through speaking with founders, I discovered that I'm not alone in doing tasks like this manually. From then on I had a spark that just wouldn't go away. That was the birth of Unubo.
Within the SaaS tech, what trends have you seen? Do you feel the need to follow those trends or go against them?
SaaS is so mature now, and access to create solutions is way more accessible. This means that there are apps launched every day, so it can be incredibly difficult to stand out. A big trend I'm seeing is how there are very niche, specific solutions for all kinds of things. Whether you look into the unbundling of the spreadsheet or Craigslist we end up in a situation where there is almost too much choice, where work and life, from a digital perspective, happens over several different tools.
My bet is on going against the trend, because that way it's easier to stand out. This is why with Unubo we're not offering a solution that is in the forefront, solving a specific problem. Instead it sits in the background, connecting to all of these SaaS applications, unifying the metrics data from them, so it can be useful to customers tracking progress. The sheer choice of solutions directly benefits us.
What challenges have you seen building Unubo?
The most difficult thing is to build an audience that will follow and support you. It's very slow because it requires connecting with people in a way that is genuine. It's taken almost 4 years to get to the point now, where I am not speaking into a void.
How do you factor in human behavior when building Unubo?what changes have you had to make due to your understanding of human behavior?
We built solutions before that were technically interesting, but there wasn't a need for them, they didn't solve a big enough problem. This time around, before us writing a line of code I went and spoke to founders, to try and prove my hypothesis. I interviewed them asking them how they worked, why they did certain things, where the problems were. It was only at the end of the discovery where I presented the solution, and asked if they would pay for it. Once I heard "yes" enough times, we got to work.
How do you think about pricing as well as increasing adoption when building Unubo?
First thing I did is to look at the competition, to see what they charge. I put the figures into a spreadsheet and looked at highest prices, lowest, and averages. I also compared features. This was an exercise for me to get a feel for the market.
Next was a price sensitivity questionnaire. I used the Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter to discover what people would be willing to pay for Unubo. Once I had a feel for the market, and armed with the answers from my price sensitivity questionnaire, I came up with a number.
The way we'll increase adoption starts with having a great product that elegantly solves a commonly occurring problem for people. We'll listen to customers and iterate based on their feedback. With that in place word of mouth should be a natural progression. Other than that, I am already sharing my journey on Twitter, which I'll continue to do post launch. I'll also experiment with some content marketing, and want to create a referral program.
Do you have any advice for those who want to build their own SaaS product?
It all takes time. A lot longer than you probably think, so make sure you're really interested in the problem you're solving. If you're excited about working on the same thing for 5 - 10 years, get going.
Thank you Unubo for sharing your experience and offering you insight. If you want to connect with him, you can connect on Twitter and be sure to follow Unubo on Product Hunt for updates. If you would like to be featured you can fill out this form here.