lean-startup, target-market, saasWhile some of the other questions address converting to a Saas model for their business, I have a business that started as a Saas.
I have been building my product out for a few small clients and would like to start selling to other potential clients, but I am constantly pulled back into develop and expand features to meet needs.
How do you know when you have enough marketable features and should hold off expansion to build up customer base?
You tagged your question with the tag “lean-startup”, so your aim is to follow these concepts. Usually a SaaS product is developed further in strong involvement of the customers. And you already got customer who pay for the - minimal - set of features you already got. So your product has enough marketable features. So keep your software/service open for changes and sell the given set to customers. Over the time you can help your customers by enabling new features or sell them upgrades. In your sales process you’ll see which features are missing or the crucial differentiation from your competitors.
In short: you already got paying customers, you already got enough marktable features in my point of view.
The process would involve gathering market size for each feature set, calculating the conversion ratios and then seeing if the resulting sales revenue would be sufficient to offset costs and offer a decent profit that allows you to grow. If you have market established competitors, an easier way would be to compare yourself to your competitor and see how you stack against them since you would be targeting the same customer base and they have had a good response from the market to make them established.
A key concept and term applicable to this question is “Minimum Viable Product” or MVP. The MVP concept would be the best way to think about and answer your question, I think.
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