How to Recession-Proof Your SaaS

Are we in a recession?

Not…technically.

That would require the US to have “Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth” according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

If you’re in Europe, well, it depends.

I, for one, tend to keep one side-eye on the horizon saying “storms abrewin’” to myself.

Call it FOBB (fear of being burned) but I’ve long kept a little list of strategies I’ve seen work and put in place for SaaS products (and services) that did more than ‘just make it’ when the market was frothy.

Especially during that COVID recession (which is when I started Ignore No More, funny enough).

This week’s newsletter is (part of) that list.

Most of this advice can be boiled down to: be an empathetic, understanding human, not a profit-obsessed product mico-manager.

Recessions and general market jitteryness is the time to do more, not less.
Because everyone else is doing less and asking for more.

Grab your rain slick, it's time to prep (but not hunker down!)

Make sure your talking-to-people foundations are solid

Namely;

• Know your customers

• Have a CRM setup with reminders

• Have your email sending on lock (more on that in a sec)

Attribution matters less in a recession because deals slow and there’s more touchpoints before someone is willing to part with their money.

So whatever it says was the last thing before they bought might not have been the convincing thing. Or it’s a bunch of direct traffic without a clear trail.

Direct relationships are where your product sticks in hearts (and stays in the budget as a line-item).

Say the quiet part out loud when you ask for money

Your customers are probably scared to part with their cash. Tell them you know and help calm their fears about purchasing.

One of my favorite pricing pages said “We know, it’s crazy out there. Here’s pricing that won’t make you cry.”.

Be very clear on what they’re getting for their money and why it’s worth it to them.

Better than a large, well-known competitor? Say it.

Have customer support that gives a crap? Now’s the time to brag.

I really like how Refgrow did the competitor callout on their landing page (so much so that I went with them and now recommend them regularly to clients).

Email more

I fricking love email (obvi). It’s usually the only direct line you have to your customers.

If you’re not already sending:

• a newsletter that helps them practically run their business better in whatever your product/services area of expertise is

• an onboarding sequence that shows them how to use the tool best in the least amount of time

• a periodic email asking them what they wish the product did for them

Then you’re missing a chance to connect with your core customers and build a product that people don’t want to leave and love to talk about.

Draft 2-4 issues in advance so that you’re not stressing each week for newsletters and schedule send.

Build to help them cut out other tools

If customers are asking for you to add a few features so that they can cut another platform that’s expensive, now is the time to start shipping.

Not every tool can (or should) become an “all in one” tool. But if you can add on some functionality to your product and save your customers $16/mo they were spending on another tool that was doing the same thing that makes you that much more invaluable.

You can use this form template to help get that kind of feedback. Link the form in your periodic feedback request emails to get it on autopilot.

Don’t raise prices

I say this for SaaS co’s serving small businesses (which i know is what a lot of you are running). Most tools are going to raise prices. It’s going to price out a lot of customers. It’s not a good look.

Plus raising prices when everyone is panicking is like putting out 5 lifeboats when you’re the Titanic. Come on. That's just mean. And customers remember.

Case in point - a year ago Markup quintupled their prices overnight for their lowest tier. Workflow’s first 80 (!) customers were all previous Markup users. Markup is now regarded with suspicion and more-than-mild eyerolling.

For Service Providers, keep your prices, maybe even raise them, but have a lower-tier option that requires less of you.

Maybe it’s a a self-paced course. A simple, loveable, complete course. Do a live cohort once, get feedback, tweak, and sell at will.

Maybe it’s a microservice. or a service add-on to your SaaS (white glove onboarding kind of thing)

For us, it’s this Newsletter OS that we sell on Gumroad.
It doesn’t fit into our typical service menu, but a few people purchase it a quarter and that adds up. It shows that we want to help where we can when a full engagement isn’t a great fit.

Which leads right into…

Be your core customers best (work) friend

What do they need help and better information on to make crucial business decisions in these turbulent times?

Be that bright spot to help their decision making.

In that customer feedback form there’s a section for “What’s the biggest struggle in your company right now?”. Use those responses to influence how you write content.

Or you can post a question in a community and ask what people are afraid of in your area of subject matter expertise. Then write on those topics. Reddit is great for this too.

These are the kinds of AI-couldn’t-have-written-that content that gets read, shared, bookmarked, and referenced back to.

Deel (back in 2020) wrote an article on PPP that was so good that the IRS linked back to it from their official site as a resource.

Sure, Deel had a crap ton of money behind them, but writing an article that thorough and useful didn’t cost a lot of money.

Speaking of AI in content…

Aelia is taking over Not My Job for the whole month of March with a very special guest to break down the nittiest of gritty details on what it means to make great, useful, clickable content in the age of AI.

She’s covering:

• The big boring basics of actually writing content

• Content planning so you can get to publish as fast as possible

• How to use AI for writing without turning into a bot

• How to repurpose your content

I am so pumped to read it - the two of them have written more words than anyone else I know. If you have a content question, hit reply. You might get a callout in an upcoming issue.

Aelia will see you and your inbox next week!
Cheers!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻

Powered by: late night lattes paired with KAYTRANADA and eagerly looking forward to Ep. 2 of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.