Don’t Make This Common SaaS Founder Mistake with Vishal Sunak of LinkSquares

Most B2B SaaS founders start their businesses with the desire to solve some problems. Great products come from those who have experienced these problems themselves. And many opportunities arise from unexpected places or situations. 

That is how Vishal Sunak and his business partner, Chris Combs, came up with the idea of LinkSquares, an AI-powered contract management platform for legal teams. Their experience should become a playbook for SaaS entrepreneurs, and Vishal shares every step of their journey.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How does AI make an impact in the SaaS space?
• Why should you do proper market research before building your SaaS product?
• How to choose the right technology
• How to market your SaaS product

Research Before Building

Building a SaaS product might be exciting, especially if you're a builder. But many start creating their products too quickly. Then they are afraid to show the product to anybody because they don't know if they are creating something people want. Before building the product, ensure you're solving a problem multiple people face and would like to use your solution.

We will not build the software until we talk to 100 general counsels and ensure we make the customer discovery, which is important in understanding the problem we're solving - Vishal Sunak

Don't Overthink the Technology

When you start a SaaS company, you have to decide if it will be product-led, technology-led, or sales-led. If you decide on the product-led, find the technology that will allow you to focus on the product and not on the technology. One mistake many founders make is that they want to build their product and look for the most complex technology. Instead, use a stack framework platform that allows you to launch your product to market, like Ruby on Rails.

I didn't want to pick any weird MEAN or LAMP stack, like a flash-in-the-pan technology in which only sixteen people on earth are experts. But how do we make it easy to hire people who know how to code in Rails, React front ends, and PostgreSQL back ends, like standard stuff? Not get obsessed with technology - Vishal Sunak

Make it Look Expensive.

Your product should look and feel modern so that customers would pay the full price. Deliver that modern experience by getting a top UX designer to make your product look great, investing in your branding, delivering trendy features, and thinking about high-level usability.

Make it look expensive, so your sales team can sell it at a decent price. If it looks like a 1990s Toyota Corolla with rust on the bumper, it will get priced like a 1990 Toyota Corolla with rust on the bumper. If it looks like a Rolls Royce phantom, that's the answer - Vishal Sunak

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