Your goal for MVP defines how it will work, how much time it will take, and how much it will cost.

When you have a goal for MVP that not aligned with your business objectives, you’re risking to:

Spend time & money building the wrong things

Overspend on MVP and, as a result, have less money on marketing & iterations

You can end up with less money and time to figure out how to make your SaaS profitable.

Let’s get into how to set goals that help you ship MVP faster, on budget, and with fewer risks.

One of the biggest reasons for overspending on MVP is setting too high of plank for the first release.

Ambitions, what got you to start SaaS in the first place, can hold you back when launching MVP.

Inspired by the big vision for your SaaS it is too easy to set grand goals for MVP.

But the bigger the goal, the more money & time it will take to build an MVP that meets it.

Often it leads to the point when your first release isn’t MVP anymore. And it is the opposite of what you were trying to achieve with MVP in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with a goal to hit 7 figure ARR. That’s awesome.

But when it is a target within 2 weeks after the launch, it only puts more pressure on you. And it doesn’t give any wiggle room for a leaner product.

When you set too high expectations for the first release, you can end up with a product that is too far away in the wrong direction.

So let’s see what goals can contribute to shipping MVP:

Set small goals that aligned with the bigger picture

For entrepreneurs, it is difficult to ship a smaller version of MVP because it threatens their product vision.

But shipping a smaller MVP doesn’t mean you need to give up on your vision. It only means making 1st iteration smaller.

MVP isn’t your whole vision it is only a 1st step towards it.

Smaller goals for the first release let you adjust your course earlier.

When you release early and often, you gain momentum and keep team morale high. On the other hand, when you build for 4 months and never give it to users it can be very hard on the team 🙂.

MVP is for learning rather than getting revenue

When your goal for MVP is to make revenue, it will only hold you back from achieving it in the long run.

There is a big gap between launching the first version of a product and making it valuable enough to get paid users.

And there are very few chances to bridge the gap without showing it to users and making several iterations & pivots.

Of course, taking care of the financial side is must have to build a successful SaaS startup. But for the first release aim to learn rather than make money.

Because users will only pay you if it solves their painful problem. You have no idea whether it does solve a problem until you give it to a user.

And when revenue is the goal for MVP it only delays a moment when the product gets to users.

When your goal is to learn, you get rid of the pressure to ship the “perfect” first release, and you can get it faster to the market.

You don’t need all the bells and whistles on MVP to learn.

Here are some examples of goals for 1st release

See whether it will solve the problem of a user

See whether anyone would want to pay for it

Figure out what’s the cost of attracting users to sign up

Mesure conversion rate from the sign up to the sale

Mesure conversion rate from visitor to waiting list sign up

For example, Buffer’s founder Joel Gascoigne aimed to learn from MVP if anyone would be interested to use & pay for the product. It was only 3 pages:

“The result of this experiment was that people were still clicking through and giving me their email and a small number of people were clicking on paid plans.”

 — Joel Gascoigne from Idea to Paying Customers in 7 Weeks: How We Did It

Even though the only thing he got from MVP is learning, Buffer now is a $20m/year business.

Solve 1 problem for 1 potential user segment

Don’t try to solve ALL of the problems for ALL of the potential users. You’ll waste more time & effort trying to cover all the needs in 1st release than you’ll gain from it.

When it is for everyone, it is for no one.

You can end up stretching yourself too thin trying to cover all the needs. And get the product that solves many problems in a mediocre way.

Don’t half-assing 2 things. Whole ass 1 thing

Focus on the 1 problem for 1 target audience segment. It will let you build it faster, and getting the first users will be easier.

When you select the problem to focus on, pick the one that is burning enough and will give the biggest ROI from solving it.

You can always expand your product later to solve more problems and for more people. An active user base is a great asset to get feedback on new features.

Even Amazon started not as an “everything store”.

Amazon.com in 1995: one million book titles

Your goals should let you see through how to reach them.

The bigger an MVP, the more underwater stones will come up during the development that will knock you out of track.

You can’t make accurate plans about how much it will take to build a product unless you can see it through.

It is like estimating the weight of an iceberg by its pick.

Pull back on the goals for MVP till you can see what you need to do to launch it.

Don’t solve problems that you don’t face

When you are launching an MVP the last thing that you should spend your resources on — is solving problems that you don’t have.

Do you really need to worry about scaling to 100 000 users if it will take you 2 years to get there?

It is too easy to spend too much time upfront solving problems that you don’t have. It even can be a way to escape from facing current problems.

In the early stages don’t spend too much time on unnecessary bells and whistles. And focus on the problems that are in front of you:

Not knowing whether anyone will want to pay for the product

Not knowing whether the product solves the problem

Not having the product that you can give to users

Outcomes from increasing conversion rate by 50% for a landing page that gets 100 visits/mo are drastically different from the one that gets 100 000 visits/mo.

Investment the same outcomes are different.

For example, guys from Basecamp, a multi-million dollar project management tool, launched it without billing.

“Heck, we launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers! Since the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a 30-day gap to figure it out.

We used that time to solve more urgent problems and then, after launch, we tackled billing.

It worked out fine (and it forced us into a simple solution without unnecessary bells and whistles).”

The goals you set for MVP defines how it will work and how much it will cost.

How to get MVP to the market faster by setting the right goals

Launching a scalable SaaS business is a great investment to build a new revenue stream.

But do you know the process it takes to get from an idea to a profitable SaaS business?

When you don’t, you can’t properly judge whether it worth building a SaaS product in the first place.

You are risking to stuck in the middle and run out of resources. Or give up on the idea because you’re overwhelmed and have no idea where to start.

Let’s take a look at how looks like the roadmap from SaaS Idea to Profitable SaaS Business. I hope it can help you make an informed decision and know where to start.

There is no one-size-fits-all roadmap from idea to profit.

For sure some startups followed the exact process and failed. And some start-ups haven’t followed any of them and succeeded.

Below is a common roadmap that I derived from my observations of start-ups & the learnings I got when building products for my clients.

To make the process easier to understand I simplified a lot of things. The goal of the roadmap is to give you a better mental model to rely on when you are planning your SaaS Business.

The SaaS business journey starts with an Idea and advances toward Profit.

Here are 4 stages that a SaaS startup goes through:

2️⃣ You have a product but no paid users

3️⃣ You have paid users but no profit

Usually skipping any of the steps leads to frustration and results into:

Getting overwhelmed and not even starting

Running out of money & energy before you ever get on the market

Building thing that nobody needs for too long

In the first 2 stages, you are conserving money. After 3d one, you actively invest money into the product.

During the first 2 stages, you don’t know yet if anybody would pay for your product. To reduce the stakes, aim to reach the 3d point with the least time & money invested.

After 3d stage, you have a product people ready to pay for. So no you can invest more money to rump up your speed of getting profitable.

Let’s get in-depth about what you need to do at each stage.

It is the very beginning of the journey to a profitable SaaS business. You have some idea & vision for your SaaS Product but no product that is ready for users.

The goal is to get from the idea to the tangible product that you can give to the user as soon as possible.

There is no point in aiming to get revenue from the first version. The first version shouldn’t necessarily be able to handle even 100 users.

MVP should be the very least you can give to your first user to get feedback.

Here are 3 stages you’ll need to get through to launch an MVP:

Chances are the first version of the Product will be shiny no matter how much time you spend on it. The product will get better only after you iterate it based on the user feedback.

Since you don’t have yet anything to get feedback on, there is no much sense in iterating before release. The goal is to ship MVP to the market as soon as possible.

The first step in building an MVP is picking the right problem to solve.

The goal is to understand whether the problem you are trying to solve is worth pursuing.

At the end of the step you should be able to answer questions like:

Is it burning enough that people are ready to pay for it

Are there any existing solutions that solve the problem good enough

Once the problem is clear you need to design a solution for it.

The goal is to design a solution and make sure that it solves the problem. You should validate your assumptions before you invest money into building a solution.

Test prototypes with your target audience

Validate technical feasibility of the product

The goal is to build the solution you designed and get it to the market.

2️⃣ You have a product but no paid users

After you launch the MVP your situation looks as following:

Iitterate product to being valuable enough for users to pay for it

You don’t need to aim for profitability & scale yet. There is no much sense in it till you figure out how to make it valuable enough for 1 user to pay for it.

Your quest for the first paid user comes down to the following cycle:

By the end of each iteration, you ship a product increment that should get you closer to getting a paid user.

The goal is to get a person from your target audience to use your product.

Experiment with marketing & drive traffic

You don’t need to spend lots of money on building marketing funnels yet. You need only a few people to pinpoint problems in the product.

Reach out to your network to get the first users. If you don’t know anyone with the problem you are solving, probably that’s not the right problem for you to solve.

Once you made a few iterations you can move to paid ads or other marketing channels to drive more traffic and accelerate learnings.

The goal is to get data about how your product performs and whether you are moving closer to getting a paid user.

Set up & track conversion metrics within your app

You need to get data about how users use your product. So you could answer questions like:

4 stage roadmap for SaaS startup to help you make better decisions 

Launching SaaS Product is a game against a clock. You gotta make it work before you run out of money and energy.

The faster you launch & get feedback from users the lower the risk. Even if you fail, it is better to do it fast while still having a roof above your head.

The longer you are building without launching the higher risks of:

Running out of patience, energy, and money before you ever launch.

Spending months or even years building the wrong thing that nobody needs.

Missing an opportunity because you aren’t sure whether you’ll have the resources to make it through.

 How is that sound to you? Building a product for 9 months, spending sh*t load of money, and never launching. Exciting! Isn’t? :)

So let’s try to figure how you can launch SaaS Products faster and minimize the risks.

The reason why products take so long to ship to the market is that you build a lot.

As disappointing as it is, unfortunately, there is no magic pill. To build a 10-floor building you need to invest time and money as for a 10-floor building.

To launch faster you need to build a smaller version of the product.

The challenge is that making your product work with less, not that straightforward:

Your entrepreneurial heart shrinks every time you decide to leave the feature from the release.

The launch requires more planning to make sure that a leaner version of the product still aligned with your goals.

You’ll need to make lots of decisions & compromises first release.

So let see what can help you to figure out how to make it work with less.

Get ok with launching not “completed”

I know launching not perfect makes you uncomfortable. Often the reason for this is the fear of negative feedback.

Getting negative feedback fast, processing it and through several iterations build a product that people want.

Spending a year and all of your money building the product, launching it, and realizing that nobody needs it.

If you’ll wait to launch till the product is “perfect”, you are risking never launch.

Because there is no such thing as a completed product. You can always do better. You’ll always have something to improve.

Often founders run out of motivation and money way earlier than the product is “perfect” and ready to the market.

Product work is finished only when it is shut down.

To help yourself bear launching not “completed” product remember that:

Launching earlier and getting feedback will result in a better product long term. It is because your decisions would be driven by the feedback from real users, not guesses.

You can always limit first releases to be invite-only to set for early adopters upfront expectations and avoid negative impact on a brand.

You can always add more features and improve your product. While you can’t return the time spent building the wrong thing. (Time sometimes is annoying that way)

So try to launch the product for the first user as soon as it can demonstrate your value proposition.

Set the right goals for the first launch

Aiming to get a 7 figure recurring revenue stream right off the bat, doesn’t give you any wiggle room to build a simpler version of the product. 

It only puts high expectations on your first release and as a result lots of stress.

There is nothing bad in 7 figure RR stream goal. That’s awesome.

The only thing there is a big gap between launching the first version of a product and making it valuable enough to get paid users.

So by setting too high expectations for the first release, you can end up with a product that is too far away in the wrong direction.

On the other hand, when your expectations for the first release are “just to see whether anyone needs it” gives you room to launch a leaner version faster.

Smaller goals for the first release lets you adjust your course earlier

Goals for the first launch that helps you ship products faster:

See whether anybody would be able to use it

See whether anyone will purchase a paid plan

Goals for the first launch that makes you ship slower:

Build 7 figure RR stream within 2 weeks after the launch

Launch and retire on the Maldives in 2 months

You can read more in-depth on how goals help ship MVP to the market faster here.

Clearly define the problem you are solving

Get crystal clear on what problem you are solving.

I guess, I already annoyed you with this. But to launch SaaS Products faster you need to build less.

To build less you need to cut out everything that doesn’t matter.

To know what doesn’t matter you need to know what matters.

So research, analyze and define exactly what problem you are trying to solve to know what matters and what doesn’t.

There is no much value in a solution if it doesn’t solve a problem.

Still, we are so fast to stick to our original solution that any change to it threatens our image of a perfect world. When in your dreams you see a smoothly working product that changes the lives of its user, no doubt cutting out the feature feels like torture.

But till the solution is only a picture in your head, how well it will solve the problem is only a guess.

What will let you figure out a leaner version of the product is fixing the target audience & problem and being open to the different solutions.

It is very improbable to accurately predict how much time will take to build x.

 As you build, the scope will grow, and if you don’t have a set-in-the-stone deadline and budget, it is super easy to get out of the scope.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.

— Fred Brooks, software engineer, and computer scientist

The way to stay within time & budget is to fix them and flex the scope.

Define how much time & money you’d be happy to spend to get a product launched. And how much time & money wouldn’t already make sense.

If you can’t fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don’t expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There’s always time to add stuff later — later is eternal, now is fleeting.

With mental models above in your toolkit plan & launch an MVP. To figure out that someone/no one needs your product you don’t need to spend a fortune and 12 months of life.

Aim to prove your riskiest assumption with the least time and money possible.

Usually when you have a goal like “See whether the product would be valuable for the user?” or “See whether anyone would be able to use it?” allows you to let go of the burden of all the nice-to-have features.

Once you have planed an MVP that you think is the absolute minimum — cut it in a half.

Launching SaaS Product is a game against a clock. The faster you launch the fewer risks you have.

There is no magic pill to dramatically launch a SaaS Product faster.

The way to launch faster is to build less.

Even though how to make it work with less isn’t obvious, with proper prioritization & thought you can figure that out.

Often it is the matter of changing the way you think about the launch that helps you to see opportunities how to build less and get more.

Launching SaaS Product is a game against a clock. How to make it work before you run out of money and energy?

Our blog

Here we share insights and lessons on how to plan, build and grow SaaS Products

How to get MVP to the market faster by setting the right goals

Your goal for MVP defines how it will work, how much time it will take, and how much it will cost.

Roadmap from SaaS Idea to Profit

4 stage roadmap for SaaS startup to help you make better decisions

How to launch SaaS Product Faster

Launching SaaS Product is a game against a clock. How to make it work before you run out of money and energy?

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