Week 28: Pivoting to Early-Stage SaaS Development

Week 28 of Shipping Every Week.

I'm pivoting to a new offer: I help early-stage SaaS become AI-native. That means I won't just build your product, I'll build the agentic systems that will develop, market, and sell your SaaS, so a small team can focus on the decisions that move the needle.

For the last 3 months I've focused hard on selling to marketing agencies, but I realized SaaS has always been the market I want to serve. It's the world I've lived in for the last 3 years, through my career, the podcasts I listen to, the social media I consume. I understand the goals, the pains, the work that must be done.

That knowledge of the market turned out to be a boon in my sales calls. Marketing agency owners could always smell my lack of confidence, because I didn't truly understand their needs the way I do with SaaS. My understanding of SaaS gives me the confidence to dig into a prospect's needs: I know what questions to ask, and I know what they need to hear about myself to gain their trust.

It's my eventual goal to run a successful SaaS business, and the agency has always been a stepping stone to getting there. My excitement about the market means that I'm excited to be in this business for the long haul.

I still have a full-time engineering job, and I'm still going to ship every week and post about it.

Here's a list of the things that changed this week for the pivot:

• Updated the homepage to describe the new offer and niche
• Started rewriting my content automations for SaaS founders instead of marketing agencies
• Started purging every reference to the old niche and offer from my codebase
• Decided on boundaries between what my agency owns vs what a client owns
• Drafted legal templates for agreements
• Wrote down the positioning and the content pillars for the new line
• Pointed my knowledge base at a second repo, so one search covers both

If you're an early-stage SaaS founder being pulled in every direction trying to keep the business afloat, let's chat.