From paper to product: How I plan SaaS products that solve real problems

Like every major project in life, the first step is always the hardest. So let me tell you how I start every new SaaS project I do.

New project ideas usually come from a pain you are experiencing, for example, my friend Willie told me the other day that he is paying 3$ per month for Spotify subscriptions while I am paying 13$, this is because he is on an Indonesian Spotify account. I immediately suggested that start sharing the account on a family plan, which involved setting up an automatic bank transfer to his account to reimburse him for the monthly subscription.

Whenever I think about repetitive tasks that can be scaled to other cases, It automatically triggers my Indie Maker mode 🧑‍💻 

“What if I create an app to track my subscriptions and allow me to automatically share the cost with friends and family?”

That’s worth investigating.

Research

My research stage is quite simple. I quickly Google my pain and try to find competitors, I visit reddit.com and its specific subreddits.

If I find an existing product, I try to see how I can make it better or at least make it my own.

This is exactly what I did with Lightningrails.com, I visited shipfa.st and saw that the tech stack was Next.js, a good opportunity to launch with a different tech stack.

Now in the case of the subscription-sharing app, it already exists, so I list them and try to find what I can do better:

• sharesub.com → Sharing with strangers, they can go to your profile and mess up your feed.

• togetherprice.com → Also sharing with strangers

• Etc…

After I am done Researching the market, I jump into my value proposition

Identifying Pains

Finding online Pains is not much different than offline ones. I like to imagine myself in the Information stall at a mall. They are the ultimate pain solvers, you come with a problem and their only job is to solve it.

So I’m sitting in my information help desk ℹ️

This is how a conversation would go with a user on pain:

User: “Help Help I need to manage my subscriptions”

Dani: “Sure, I can help you with that, what’s wrong with you current subscription system?”

User: “I am Tired of overpaying for all my subscriptions”

Dani: “I see, what else?”

User: “I can’t keep track of all the subscriptions I have 🤯”

Dani: “Understood, so you need an app to help you save money on subscriptions but also an app that allows you to keep track of your subscription spending?“

User: “Exactly!”

This mental exercise helps me demystify the pain/solution process. I can now easily turn this into a pitch. I learned this method while teaching at lewagon.com.

Pitch

The Target

I first need to find the target for my pitch. For this, I like to imagine:

“If I had to do an Instagram ad, what would the person in the ad picture look like?”

Well… it would be a young and active person watching Netflix alone in an average-looking apartment. That person would be around 25-30 years old, old enough to have a job and pay for their own subscriptions but also young enough to need to share subscriptions for lack of means.

Now, this doesn’t mean that my app won’t address other buyer personas, but at least I have a good place to start for the angle of my copy, pictures and target audience in my ads.

The need

What is their core need? A need is the master of pains, without it, you cannot survive or live your life comfortably.

• I need to eat

• I need to sleep

• I need to have sex (Tinder’s pitch)

In here we don’t specify how we are going to solve the need or any specific, it should be one or two words.

In our example: I need to manage my subscriptions 😫

The Pains

Okay, you need to eat, sleep, have s*x, manage your subscriptions… How do you want to do it?

• I want it in the cheapest way possible

• I want it close to my place

• I want it without the hassle of dating

• etc…

In this part of the pitch, we will work on the details of that need, which will later define the features of our app.

Why you?

What will your app do that will make them choose your app over the competition or the existing alternatives?

This is the moment to speak about the “core features” of your app. For Tinder, the core feature is a fun UI that connects you to hundreds of singles in your area.

For our subscription management app, our core features will be spending analytics to keep track of the subscriptions, and an in-app payment gateway to easily connect to your friends and family's bank accounts, this should help our users save money while keeping track of their expenses.

What are you disrupting?

Before your app, what were the alternatives?

Having to pay subscriptions individually, or having to share subscriptions with strangers.

That’s cool but not much of a short pitch, let’s transform this into a 5 sentence pitch:

Et voila, with this pitch I have plenty of material to start writing the copywriter of my landing page instantly built with lightningrails.com.

Having a pitch ready makes writing the copy easy and to not lose track of what are the pillars of your value proposition.

After completing the landing page my next step would be to validate the idea by connecting it to a waiting list and sharing it on social media.

This will be the topic of my next article, stay tuned!

If you liked this article, please let me know by commenting or sharing it with your network. This is the first article I ever write, so please don’t hesitate to give me feedback.

Happy Building Peeps! 🏗️