The Year of The Product
I regularly listen to podcasts. One of them is Lenny’s Podcast.
In February, he had Jason M. Lemkin on to talk about “Building a world-class sales team”. For those of you who don’t know Jason, he was the founder of EchoSign, which was sold to Adobe in 2011, and he’s the man behind the SaaStr community and conferences. If you’re in any way into software as a service, you should follow Jason and SaaStr.
Anyway, during this podcast, Lenny and Jason naturally drift into different discussions about starting, building, running and scaling a business-to-business (B2B) software company.
When they talked about how sales and product should work together and how different incentives and external circumstances influence everything from strategic decisions on product development and pricing to how that flows into motivating the different teams, Jason said something that stuck with me:
2024 should be the year of the product.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses, and especially B2B SaaS businesses, have had some crazy last few years.
2020: Insane valuations on everything. Money was basically for free, and all everyone was focusing on was topline growth.
2021: Covid – instantly boosting most B2B SaaS
2022 and ‘23: Harvesting - almost everybody increased the prices “because they could”.
I was part of this journey myself at DanDomain, and we saw the same pattern across the board.
But what about 2024? What about now?
You can’t just blindly keep increasing your prices without delivering a better product or service to your customers (and no, inflation cannot continue to be your excuse!). The customers won’t accept that.
Now, it seems like things have “settled down” a bit, or at least gone somewhat back to normal. So now is the time to WOW your customers.
We’ve had the crazy times when the customers came to you, all by themselves, and bought your product.
We’ve had the time of price increases.
Now is the time to really wow your customers. And in what better way to do that than with an exceptional product?
Commit 2024 to implement three awesome features that will impress your customers and lift your product to the next level—not only for your customers' sake but also for your own!
I will do the same!
Herodesk.io is at a stage where it would make sense to focus full force on growth. Marketing, sales, customer acquisition – growth! The product works. We have happy, paying customers who are sending hundreds of customer support messages to their customers every day. So you could easily justify that decision.
But no, we’re not done. The product is our most important asset, and we’ll never stop making it better. We’ll commit to these two wow-features:
- Live chat widget
- AI integrations
They will lift the whole experience of using Herodesk and the value it adds to our customers and their customers. And when you combine the two, you can really start to imagine all kinds of awesome things they can do!
They speak directly to the heart of what we’re doing: Helping our customers turn their customer service from a burden into a profit centre that delivers happy, returning customers and ambassadors.
Let’s go!
