Having a powerful and clear business plan will maximise your chances of raising capital from potential investors. In this article we walk you through the 14 sections you must have in your SaaS business plan. No te: If you are looking for a pitch deck instead, read our guide here. Although business plans and pitch decks are similar, they are also very different in their format. If you are creating a business plan for your SaaS startup, we recommend you follow the following structure:. The executive summary is the introduction of your SaaS business plan.
The executive summary should fit in 2 pages maximum. Make it to the point, concise, and make sure to answer the following questions:. Explain in this section what is the problem you are trying to solve. For instance, if your SaaS startup aims to solve the pain points of HR administrative tasks human errors, low digitalisation, time-consuming, etc.
For instance, digitalisation usually fixes multiple problems at once: it is fast, seamless and accessible vs. This section should not explain in detail your product nor how it works. Instead, it should focus on the benefits for your customers. Ideally, you should compare the pain points explained on section 2 the Problem to the benefits your solution brings to your customers.
That way, it is crystal clear to investors your solution really adds value to potential customers. If you are operating in a niche market, chances are that you will face some challenges: the information might not be publicly available.
If you can use your own savings or get a small bank loan, or even fund yourself via a third-party platform, you can avoid taking on too much risk.
Bringing in investors too early, before proof of concept is hard and may be unnecessary. You might also be giving investors too much equity early on, as the risk is extremely high for them in the beginning stages of growing a SaaS company. Taking the slow and careful approach can also save you from making some costly mistakes, says David Batchelor, President, and co-founder of DialMyCalls. Even though Konstantinos Bratanis, co-founder and CTO of Goodvidio, and his partner started the business with their own hard-earned money, they were able to eventually raise VC funding.
What encouraged us, was learning that at such an early stage VCs are more interested in the people behind the new company and their potential to build a viable business. They have modest expectations when it comes to cold hard sales and revenue numbers, so they want to see that there is a healthy team spirit behind the wheel that has the potential to reach growth. They want to see commitment, drive, vision, and hard work.
Thanks to a combination of these traits we were able to secure a first-round of six-figure VC funding, which gave us a jump-start to start developing our sales and marketing channels. Just be sure that when you approach investors that you have your updated business plan, financial documents , and a refined pitch deck ready to go. These will help you prepare and give investors more holistic documentation to reference as you pitch your business.
Develop a landing page, do some lightweight advertising, and generally reach out to as many potential customers as you can. As we went through development, we began to accumulate many other ideas for features—both internally and through users who were testing our app. However, if you have the option of working and hiring remotely not necessarily freelancing or outsourcing , do it. For example, Buffer, a successful social media company, just closed their only office.
There are benefits to in-person collaboration, but unless you can get space very inexpensively, focus on developing your product first. Offices can be very expensive and add little value. At Palo Alto Software, we rely on tools like Slack, Trello, Basecamp, and Jira to keep us all abreast of what is going on in the company. There are many ways to market a SaaS product — from paid advertising and affiliate partnerships, through active outreach to media outlets, and content marketing.
Experimenting with a combination of these methods is a good idea. Pay attention to what works and be aware that it may change over time. After all, who knows your business better than you?
We sent press releases to all of the cities that we launched in and easily got press in all of them. You can also spend some time participating in relevant online communities. Start participating in relevant discussion groups, comment on relevant blog posts, and start your own blog. You can get a little initial lift through sites like ProductHunt.
Otherwise, it really depends on your industry. Figure out where your prospective customers hang out online and work to get coverage in those locations. Konstantinos Bratanis, co-founder of Goodvidio, offers much the same advice. So, your first task is to get your name out there. For Goodvidio, this meant starting with a local community. We asked for feedback about our software and our growth ideas and took part in the conversation. Taking part in the daily life of the community and learning how the ecosystem worked paid off because we started getting referrals, word-of-mouth, and endorsement from community leaders.
This helped us get traction in the first year of business. Use content marketing to share your knowledge on a topic and attract prospects that way. It is also useful to get listed on all the big SaaS directories early on in order to get websites linking to your product and to receive initial product feedback. Be sure to check it out. How will you know what works for you, unless you try it? You have to try them, see how they go, and then pick the best performing of the lot. Our example templates are designed to be efficient and effective and are written specifically for SaaS companies.
With just a few modifications, you can customize this SaaS business plan for your exact needs. You will receive our page Software as a Service Hybrid fusion business plan template which contains the following sections:. SaaS excel template available separately recommended to calculate your finances.
This template will allow you to enter financial data specific to your business and will produce proforma financial statements for use in your business plan. Our Hybrid Fusion Business Plan Templates save you time as most portions are already completed for you, including the general narrative, market research, format, charts and financials are already researched and written for the SaaS industry.
This is NOT a complete Turn-key business plan. Modify and use this Hybrid business plan template as a foundation to create your own plan. To give all businesses the ability and resources to enhance customer relationships. STRENGTHS- Getting competent talent on our team has always been a major focus for us, at Stack we have a strong and competent engineering and Marketing team with deep sector knowledge in software development industries.
THREATS- Most of the threats we anticipate as a software development company are low barriers to entry and economic crises that reduce the purchasing power of our customers. Daniel Balmun- A full-stack software engineer with over 6 years of demonstrated working experience in technology industries and fast-growth start-up markets, as he serial founder who has succeeded at other technology companies, he will serve as the product design and engineering lead on the erstwhile team.
Dayo Adetiloye- B. Agric, MBA, PMP Has over 15 years of experience in business management, business start-up dynamics, financial management of the business, and overall business growth and development, he is an alumnus of the enterprise development centre EDC of the Lagos business school LBS pan African university PAU he is our business development strategist and a strategic partner.
Lilian Mfon- Lilian is the head of our marketing team, most of our marketing strategies are online-based and she is the best personnel for the job she has a well-established digital marketer with proficiency in content management social media marketing, search engine optimization, and marketing. Our target demographic covers a large spectrum of customers including big data and analytics is a niche area in information technology that meets the needs of.
Our cloud-based application provides more storage for business and enables us to reduce costs of physical storage equipment to also reduce the cost of our products. For the remaining part of this business plan, including the detailed financial analysis, call any of our business plan consultants on or , or send an email to dayohub gmail.
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