Transitioning from Product Manager to SaaS Founder

Episode Summary:

In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Janna Bastow, CEO and Co-Founder of ProdPad, joins host Phil Alves. She shares how the idea for ProdPad had its roots in her frustrations from her product management days and how her bootstrapped startup provides workflow solutions for product teams and operations.  

She shares her insights on five strategies that led to ProdPads success and gives her must-dos for all startups. She also advises on how to bootstrap your idea, develop a product market fit, and market positioning, and ramp the revenue pipeline. 

Guest at a Glance:

Name: Janna Bastow

What She Does: Janna is the Co-Founder and CEO of ProdPad, a prioritization, and workflow solution for project management teams. 

Connect with Janna on LinkedIn 

Topics we cover:

• Factors to consider when bootstrapping
• Finding a good product market fit
• The Now, Next, Later framework for painless and efficient prioritization
• How to position your product in the market
• Ramping your revenue stream

Key Takeaways:

Tick These Boxes Before Deciding to Bootstrap 

Janna has successfully bootstrapped her start-up by ticking the yes box on several critical points. First, your savings should cover your monthly expenses for at least 6-9 months before you quit your job. Next, always keep a secondary revenue stream going. Even after leaving your job, utilize your skillset and make time to do consulting gigs to maintain a parallel revenue stream.

Make a timeline for go-to-market and a budget for expenses. It helps if the co-founders can cover the development tasks between them so that external and paid help is not required.

“I counted up and calculated that if I quit my job and kept spending as I did, I had nine months cash in the bank”.

Finding a Good Product Market Fit

How do you ensure the ideal product-market fit? By solving a core and endemic problem faced by your audience. Identifying this problem is the crux of the discovery process. The real problem may differ from what you first think, so you need feedback from plenty of potential customers. However, there’s a twist here. Customer feedback often pivots around the symptom and not the malaise, so to get to the real problem, you have to continuously ask the five ‘why’ questions until you get to the core.

“I would have saved myself a lot of heartache if I had spent more time in discovery than I did”. 

The Now, Next, Later Prioritization of Tasks

Any project manager will tell you that their biggest challenge is the rigidity of workflow timelines. No matter how well designed, real-world events always affect timelines, impacting on-time delivery. The Now, Next, and Later prioritizes tasks based on a broad timeline, providing much-needed flexibility at the task level. 

“Don’t penalize yourself by having a timeline roadmap when you can have a flexible one”.

How to Create a Winning Position in the Market

The SaaS market is highly competitive, and whatever your idea, chances are someone bigger than you has been doing it for longer. How do you create a niche for yourself in this market? One way is not competing head-to-head and instead following a complementary positioning strategy. All legacy stacks like Jira, Atlassian, and Confluence have unique blindspots that create pain areas for project managers. Janna positioned ProdPad to work with these legacy systems while covering the blind spots giving ProdPad a winning and complementary positioning. 

“We never set out to replace Jira; we just wanted to sit really well alongside of it”.

Focus on Ramping Your Revenue Pipeline After Implementing GTM

Once you’ve launched your product, you need to focus on building revenue for your startup. Most acquisition strategies hinge around offering a free trial and then converting a percentage of the leads to customers. So the two things you need to do is to ramp the number of leads and the conversion percentage. Janna shares how to iterate onboarding to achieve both goals. The other must-do is tracking the retention percentage and amplifying it.

“We kept reiterating the onboarding process to get higher conversions, and we never lost sight of the retention number”.