Finding New Audiences
I wouldn't say we pivoted... that's too strong of a word. But refocusing our marketing efforts on a new target market dramatically accelerated our growth.
When we first started building Outseta, without question we were building product for technical founders of SaaS companies. Our target audience was developers.
About 3 years into our journey, I started hearing about no-code and Webflow and mostly ignored it. The common advice is to focus your product on a specific niche, and bootstrapped founders of SaaS companies was a niche we knew well. I stayed the course, kept our focus, and in retrospect probably cost us quite a bit of growth.
Before long we had a slew of inbound inquiries coming from no-code builders using products like Webflow and Circle. I ponied up $2500 to become a Makerpad partner—the biggest marketing expenditure we’d made at the time—and also reached out to Webflow about becoming an integration partner. The doors basically blew in.
It became very clear, very quickly that in no-code builders we’d found an audience that our product was simply that much more valuable to. Same product, more value.
When I was selling to developers, I was always trying to change their predominant behavior. They had the technical skill set to assemble the perfect tech stack at an early stage, and even when they acknowledged that doing so probably wasn’t the best use of their time they mostly chose to do it anyways.
No-code builders simply don’t have the same degree of technical know-how; it was much tougher for them to build a perfectly integrated tech stack, which Outseta could give them out of the box.
The lesson here is simple—founders tend to have a vision for what their product is and who it’s for that they hold onto very tightly. I’m not saying don’t niche down, but I am saying be open to other use cases and customer types that maybe you didn’t plan on supporting.
In the case of no-code builders, why they would be drawn to Outseta and would get more value out of the product makes perfectly logical sense. Use your rational brain over your emotional brain as you try to assess new and untapped markets.
Key Takeaways
- Niching down is well intentioned advice, but can lead to missed opportunities.
- Think rationally when considering new audiences—does your product obviously serve a new audience better than your existing ones?
- Changes that are made to benefit less technical users generally benefit all users.
