Issue #9: Interview with Sai Krishna, best team structure for growth, how to write a convincing use-case story for your SaaS
Every week, I send bite-sized ideas, news and recommendations focusing on SaaS growth, sales and product management.
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🧠 Bite-sized news and thoughts
Figuring out the best team structure dedicated for growth. An interesting read for teams going from zero to MVP to PMF to scale & traction.
How investors secretly tell founders they're not interested. Read this so you don’t have to make a guesswork.
Step by step guide to writing a case study for your SaaS.
Key takeaways from how to write a use-case story article: 1. Don't use a template, 2. Treat yourself with respect, 3. Support with data and 4. Ditch the boring stuff.
8 best marketing channels for SaaS companies:
Founder’s guide to B2B sales: written specifically for founders and CEOs of early- and growth-stage startups.
Are you planning to support a cause but not sure the outcome? This article will convince you.
How SaaS companies can win big with the ‘last comment wins’ tactic.
Status of startup compensation for 2022 H2 (reflects last year’s status, but it is still a great read).
📈 Chart of the week
1/ A typical private software company valuation journey, including when Series A to F is generally obtained and corresponding valuations.
2/ Profitwell industry analysis shows that B2B and B2C SaaS company growth has plummeted in 2023, and it doesn’t show any strength in the future.
Starting this week, we are going to make interviews with successful people in SaaS industry. Our first interview is with Sai, who builds Superblog, a blogging platform, in public.
What inspired you to start Superblog?
I have been optimizing WordPress for quite sometime. Switched to a GatsbyJS, and then to custom JAMStack solution for my own high-traffic blogging needs. I published a short article on Medium about this in 2019. Finally realised I can make my stack into a SaaS blogging platform. This is how Superblog was born.
How is Superblog different from other blogging platforms like Ghost, WordPress and Medium?
WordPress and Ghost (open-source) require too much server setup to start a blog. Even the cloud versions require a lot of setup, optimization, UX tuning. And Medium is purely for publication purposes. Business can’t really hide the Medium branding nor collect leads. Finally, getting the Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals scores is a manual task with these platforms. By using Superblog, you can always be sure that your technical-SEO, and on-page SEO is optimised automatically. CWV in particular will be 95+.
Each platform is meant to have different purposes. Feature set, UI and UX are defined based on the purpose. Superblog is purely for SEO focused businesses
What is your vision for Superblog in the next 5 years?
There is a much larger vision which I don’t want to reveal in public. But the 1 year plan is to hit $100K ARR.
Can you tell us about your experience as a solo developer and entrepreneur?
Building a startup as a one person company is exhausting - mentally and physically. But that’s the fun! To be honest, I’ve been building and scaling (to millions of users) products solo for more than a decade. So, it doesn’t really stress me out anymore because I have clear goals and expectations. The only challenging factor is time. Running a startup like a typical entrepreneur with a team is easier. A lot easier. Because you have other minds solving their parts.
How did you approach developing Superblog and what were some of the challenges you faced during the development process?
As I mentioned earlier, Superblog was kinda in the making for 10 years - as an internal product for my own products. They had a clear roadmap of features, very clear idea of UI/UX. One major dilemma I faced was how to setup the JAMStack deployment workflow. Not in terms of tech but in terms of UX for end users.
How do you ensure that Superblog stays up-to-date with the latest SEO and speed optimization trends?
That’d just be me being up to date with Google’s algorithm. Think of it this way, if a customer needs to constantly keep innovating on a blog, it doesn’t make sense because blog is not their core product. For me, Superblog is the core product.
How has Superblog evolved since its launch?
Superblog is going almost exactly how I wanted it to evolve. It started as a super simple blogging platform but now it has more complex features than I envisioned at this point of time. For example, I had to build the ability for users to easily customize the look and feel of their superblogs.
What sets Superblog apart from other blogging platforms in terms of user experience?
Superblog is really beautiful. Not just the front-end blog but even the dashboard is built beautifully with simplicity in mind. Where WordPress is Android, Superblog is iOS.
What advice do you have for aspiring solo developers and entrepreneurs looking to create their own tech startups?
Do not overengineer. Always solve for the majority.
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📢 Heads up: Starting this week, I will send out SaaS Bites newsletter on Mondays, instead of mid-weeek. Till today average open rate was 49% - let’s see how it goes after the change. I’ll inform you as well with data.
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