Need direction to launch a SAAS marketing product for small service businesses. entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

Good morning /r/Entrepreneur,

My entrepreneurial background (feel free to skip).

Fed up after only a couple months into my first job at $8/hr, I started an computer repair/IT business 9 years ago. I had no business plan, no financing and no business experience to guide me. I stumbled my way to sustainability and eventually employees after significant trial and error. For half this journey, I was simply self-employed which meant working twice as hard for no significant benefit.

The biggest challenge by far was marketing to attract new customers. I spent a small fortune on a dozen digital marketing specialists that never delivered results. This forced me to keep researching more and more about SEO and PPC to the point where it sounded like I had a better idea of what to do than some of these agencies. I focused on digital marketing because 100% of our clients find us online and our web presence/reputation is strong.

We never really managed to attract customers offline. We tried mailer campaigns, flyers, local community boards, contests... Nothing worked at all. Certainly, I didn't know enough about marketing to make it work. But I was also advertising an on-demand service to people who probably didn't need it at that moment.

The most frustrating thing about building this business was learning that it isn't enough to be great at what you do. "Build it and they will come" is the biggest myth in the small business world as far as I'm concerned. As a result, my first concern with any new venture is how we are going to attract customers.

One of the things I really thought would come more naturally was word of mouth. We have a lot of repeat customers but we haven't had success pushing referrals. I looked for some simple referral software online but everything seemed to be part of a much larger marketing package. I've read on this sub time and time again that you should solve a problem that you are having so I decided to make a referral web-app.

The SAAS

The idea is for small service businesses to enter their transactions in my app by providing their client's email address and how much they spent. The app sends the client an e-mail with their unique referral link to share with friends and a list of rewards available to them. I wanted to keep this simple so each business offers the following:

• A small reward for simply making a referral.

• A significant reward for both the referrer and referee of the new referral makes their first purchase.

• A reward for spending X amount at the business to promote customer loyalty.

• A "hidden" inactivity reward to send after no new interactions for 3 months with the customer.

The app keeps track of the transactions and referrals and issues the rewards automatically. It's a rewards program to stimulate referrals.

I just finished building the MVP and am looking for feedback to prepare for my next steps. Right now, I am planning to:

1. Use the app with my own business for a couple months and see how it feels from a user's perspective.
2. Invite a few businesses to use it for free to get their feedback and catch technical issues they face.
3. Place a footer link in each e-mail to invite new businesses to join with a discreet message "ReferralAppName - Grow Your Business" or "Reward your customers".
4. Use the exact same referral scheme for the businesses using the app: offer them a free month for each business they convert for us.

From there, I'm not sure how to move forward. I don't use facebook/twitter but I have a feeling it could be successful in business communities there. I have no idea how to even start using social media to grow as I'm not part of any entrepreneurial groups there and would want to become a contributing member before advertising my product.

I need to make a 6 month SEO plan. Do link-back badges even work anymore? I could ask our business members to display our badge to advertise that they offer rewards. I need to research PPC costs and plan for that.

Thanks for any feedback you can give me about the app and launching a successful SAAS. Let me know if you have any questions!

submitted by /u/Azphael
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