In a digitally-transformed world, your digital presence makes your company’s first impression on potential customers.
Because of this, it’s more important than ever for your website to be your company’s most effective and hardest-working round-the-clock salesperson -- that never needs a day off!
In this article, you’re going to learn about crucial website planning considerations for B2B SaaS and Fintech startups.
Planning Your Website Investment
Let’s cut right to the case. Every B2B SaaS and Fintech startup needs a website.
It's really a matter of what job the website needs to do and for whom. (Jobs Theory/Job to Be Done)
That said, several factors determine the recommended investment level for a new website:
- Ideal Clients and Unit Economics
- Team Resources
- Differentiators
- Categories of Competitors
- Goals, Plans, and Challenges
- Timelines
- Aligning Investments to Goals and Timelines
For example, the core kind of client I work with is a small business CEO/owner/founder focused on selling technology to mid-market and enterprise clients. Why?
Because mid-market and enterprise clients tend to have much higher average client lifetime values (LTVs) -- often $50K+ -- so it becomes much easier to break even on digital investments.
Accelerating the Discovery of Product/Market Fit for B2B SaaS and Fintech Startups
That said, for small businesses that are in their first few years of existence, until the company gets to product/market fit and knows its true unit economics, much of the goal early on should be to generate revenue while simultaneously accelerating the learning cycle to figure out
- ideal clients
- what they purchase
- what price points
- how often.
Prioritizing Humility, Self-Awareness, and Customer Discovery Over Short-Term ROI
It's so important early on to be humble and open to change. You don't know what you don't know. Projecting return on investment (ROI) without knowing the sales cycle length or even what kinds of clients will be most successful with your product/service diverts resources away from where they're most important.
In a hyper-competitive global marketplace, website strategy needs to be contextualized for your company size, target market, and business model.
The Value of a Startup-Experienced Team
Yes, “logos” can be great -- landing brand name clients you can brag about on your website.
But be super careful to avoid making the same assumption about your early hires' resumes or LinkedIn profiles.
Building a team, especially among your first 10-20 hires, of people who’ve only worked in companies with hundreds or thousands of employees can be a recipe for disaster.
It's super-important for small businesses to build their team with startup-minded experts -- where they've worked in environments of extreme uncertainty and created the playbook as they learned more each month/quarter.
Small business owners obsessed with ROI that need immediate gratification often make the absolute wrong hire: the brand name hire from their much larger competitor.
The problem, however, is that hire likely wasn't there when it was a five - or ten-person company. And walked in one day one without a reasonably established brand and playbook to build on top of.
When a company is new, you first need to build the brand and the playbook.
What have you learned when planning the website for your B2B SaaS or Fintech startup? And what kinds of hires have been most successful working the inbound leads generated from your website? Let me know in the comments.
And if you want to follow through on the website considerations introduced in this post, be sure to also enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.
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