Putting together a plan (part 2)

In the last post, I introduced Herodesk’s business plan and how and why I’ve used the Business Model Canvas framework. If you haven’t read that post, start there.

In this post, I’ll go through the last four elements of the business plan.

Ready? Let’s go!

Key partners

Building a B2B SaaS today is incredibly difficult on your own. That’s why partners and strategic partnerships are becoming increasingly important to “get out there” and either give you a competitive advantage or get your product in front of the customers.

Herodesk has three different types of strategic key partnerships that must be successful:

E-commerce platforms

One of our value propositions is direct integration with our customers' webshop platforms. There are basically three categories of these.

The first is the open source systems like Prestashop, Magento, WooCommerce, etc. They are open for everyone to build integrations to and don’t need a formal partnership.

The second is the “global leaders”: Shopify, Shopware, BigCommerce, etc... To integrate with them, you must be a registered partner/developer and build an app as part of their ecosystem. That’s, to some extent, easily accessible.

And then there are the local or niche platforms. It’s DanDomain, Ideal.shop, Shoporama, etc., in Denmark. QuickButikk, Abicart, 24Nettbutik, MyStore, etc. in Norway/Sweden - and so on.

For each of these, we will seek a strategic partnership and build native and “deep integrations”. By doing so, we can offer these webshops a helpdesk integration they cannot get anywhere else. On top, by doing a strategic partnership, these platforms will help us get the product and integration in front of the customers. Win-win-win.

Integration partners

Another of our value propositions is “all your customer service in one system”. To accomplish that, we must connect with the different channels our customers use to communicate with their customers. That’s things like e-mail, Facebook/Instagram messenger, WhatsApp, live chats, phone systems, etc. We need as close collaboration with these partners as possible to ensure a good connection with their products/channels for our customers to utilise.

Web agencies

Finally, there are all the independent web agencies that build websites and webshops for business owners. We will seek collaborations with these to have them refer their customers to use our helpdesk tool. This will work as a regular affiliate/kick-back partnership.

In a highly competitive space, getting the right stratic partnerships in place will be key to “get our product out there” and in front of the customers.

Customer segments

The Herodesk product is intentionally designed to support multiple languages, markets, currencies and verticals.

Basically, anyone who is supporting their customers via written digital media can use Herodesk.

However, instead of trying to be everything for everyone at once, we’ll niche ourselves to a few segments that we’ll try to capture initially by providing additional value for them (Know your ideal customer profile).

• Danish market: The vast majority of my professional network is in Denmark, so it only makes sense to “win on your home turf” before going abroad.
• Small/mid-sized webshops: I believe we’ve found an opening in the market for small/mid-sized webshops that lack a proper helpdesk tool that’s priced fairly. To support this segment we’ve already added multiple e-commerce platform integrations to both the market leaders (Shopify, etc.), but also the more local offerings (DanDomain, etc.).
• Digital businesses w. <10 agents: Even though we focus on webshops, about ⅓ of our customers today are different kinds of businesses — anything from SaaS to cleaning companies. The common denominator is that less than 10 people are working with customer support, and we can see they also benefit from using Herodesk.

Two things to keep in mind about the customer segments. 1) These are the ones we’ll initially target in our marketing. Once we feel we’ve established ourselves, we’ll broaden our reach (either in vertical or market - to be decided), and 2) having the above defined doesn’t mean we cannot or will not serve other segments. We will, as long as that doesn’t mean we have to pivot from the strategy.

Cost structure

Herodesk is bootstrapped and without external funding. We’ve made a budget for 2024 with the goal of being cash-flow positive at the end of the year. I’ve set aside the funds needed for the year to reach that goal.

There are three main areas of cost to keep an eye on:

• Fixed costs: The stuff that more or less costs the same every month. Server hosting, various subscriptions, accounting, salary, etc. Easy to get an overview of but important to keep an eye on, especially subscriptions.
• Variable costs: There are some costs associated with each customer, fx payment fees, AI usage (when we get to that), etc.. And marketing, which can be turned up and down depending on anything from performance to appetite.
• Freelancers: Instead of hiring a number of people full-time, we’ll largely be using freelancers to assist us in 2024, first and foremost on marketing.

To a large extent, money will have to be earned before it can be spent.

It’s a somewhat different approach than I’ve been used to for the past 6 years, but I think it’s a sensible way to build a healthy long-term business (if you have the patience and war chest to support it).

Revenue streams

Herodesk isn’t an NGO or other charitable organisation, so of course, it has to charge for its services and earn money.

We’ve chosen to adopt a subscription-based freemium business model highly inspired by Dinero, whom I think we can all easily agree are Nordic champions in implementing this.

We will only charge our customers and not seek revenue from other channels, such as kickbacks, distributors, etc.

This means there will be a version of Herodesk that is free to use, but has some limitations. In our case, it’s limited to one user, and some features are limited, too.

If you have more than one user or need to use some of the limited features, you must upgrade to our paid plans.

I believe it’s important to have a connection between your value proposition and your pricing strategy. At the same time, we want to keep our pricing model as simple as possible. To achieve this, we’ve gone with this model:

• One free plan (freemium), limited in scale (user) and features
• One paid plan, pay per user either per month or one year in advance (20% discount)

And that’s it.

We have intentionally priced our product well below the market and the value we bring our customers. We’ve done this because a) we believe helpdesk software, in general, has become way too expensive, and b) we want a strategic advantage in the “red ocean” competitive situation that we’re in.

Nothing is set in stone, however. In my previous job, we changed prices 4 times in 6 years. As Herodesk grows and we learn, we’ll probably adapt our model, too.

There are already things to start to consider, such as AI usage (that stuff isn’t free. We’ll be charged based on usage), future advanced functions (will that require a 3rd subscription plan?), etc…

You could easily write a whole blog about the revenue streams and pricing strategy (and I probably will in the future), but let’s keep it short for now and stay with the headlines above: Simple & cheap.

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That’s the plan for 2024H1. It'll probably stretch into 2024H2 before receiving a full overhaul going into 2025. It depends on how the business looks at that time.

If you took the time and managed to read your way through both posts on this, thank you! Please share your thoughts and comments. I’d love to hear from you and what you think.