OKR Software for Startups

[arguino]

Hey John here,

I've been working on this project for about a month and half, it is a OKR software for Startups, the goal being of letting entrepreneurs set clear goals to grow their business and take their business to its next step. It's a SAAS, when you register you're presented with a wizard that helps you set your first OKR. An OKR consists of a central Objective and related Key Results. There's still a lot of work to do on the software, but I know I can fix all the quirks (software engineer background), the real challenge for me is gonna be marketing and sales which is why I'm doing the execution thread today.

I'm back from my a week of vacation and I told myself I'd attack marketing, sales, product-market fit right now, so here I am.

I'm currently hesitating between two very different segment, I'm probably gonna test both waters at first to see which one has better fishes.
1. SAAS Entrepreneurs/Bootstrappers
I feel like this segment would be harder to reach, as of now I only know about two forums where I could find my customers, Fastlane forum and IndieHackers, otherwise it'd be a lot of cold emailing.
2. SME
I'm lucky because I happen to have a very good connection in this market, I could get my access to clients a lot faster but it will be harder to scale with SEO, it will be a lot of B2B and sales.

I might just attack SME first, grow some confidence, get my first sales and pivot to SAAS later on when I have more experience and I'm trying to scale harder.

I'm doing this thread to keep myself accountable and I'll do progress posts. Here's my app, if you have any comments or feedback, please feel free to DM me or leave a comment here!

Home · OKR-One

 

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[arguino]

You are very good and it was interesting to read about your activities. When I urgently needed to develop software for my company I used saas development services because I understood that experts like you know it much better than me and my team. I was very surprised with the results, lower cost, seamless upgrades and wide implementation, which increased my profitability as a service provider.

Do you an example of what they ended up building for you, how much did it cost?

 

[arguino]

Progress Update # 1 - May 19th 2022

Got into a bit of a slump Monday as I was doubting the whole thing. Parents visited Tuesday and Wednesday so I had to take care of them.

Brain stormed a bit with my father on Wednesday night on what I should do next, we talked mentorship, I might get a mentor soon but for now I feel like I can attack and try to get sales without one. It will help me build experience and face my fears. I also decided on the market segment I will be attacking, I will be targeting SMEs with 10 to 50 employees (mainly in the IT sector because that is what I know). Pricing is going to be 20$ fixed rate for companies from 1 to 10 employees and then 3$ per additional employee.

Tonight I started looking through LinkedIn for small sized companies, there's lots in my local area so I'm going to start contacting with them early next week.

I'll spend the weekend tweaking my landing page for the target audience and preparing my pitch!

 

[arguino]

Weekly update​

Tuesday​

Sent my first InMail messages on LinkedIn, I think the current sales pitch is pretty weak and needs a lot of work. I'll probably use all my InMail free messages from the LinkedIn trial in the hopes of landing a sales but I'll pivot to AdWords and content creation after.

Wednesday​

Implemented Email Confirmation for my SaaS and changed a couple user pages to make them prettier

Thurdsay​

Implemented weekly emails to inform the user of the progress of the currently active OKR.

Next Week and this Weekend​

Implementing a payment and subscription system for the SaaS. Then I'll look into tweaking the pitch and I'm gonna start adversiting the website.

 

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[arguino]

Weekly update​

Payment System​

Done implementing a recurring payment system using Stripe, it was a pretty easy process once I wrapped my head around how the Stripe Subscription process worked. I ended up using a Stripe Payment Links for the initial subscription payment, I then let the user manage their subscription using the Stripe Billing Portal. I had to implement a couple of Webhooks to keep my app in-sync with Stripe, it wasn't anything too complicated.

Pivoting​

I started reading $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi this week, amazing book, it really got me back to the drawing board and to reevaluating what I should offer clients. After reevaluating my offer, something like a SaaS is not what I want to do, I want to have a few clients and charge them a lot for my services. I'll be offering a fully managed OKR software and KPI tracking software to SMEs who do not have a the budget to hire consultants or a full time developper to do the work. All of this at a flat fee per month. The reasoning behind this is that tracking OKR manually is a real pain, I want to automate the process for the client and let them have information on their business easily.

Plans for the week​

1. Rethink how I do Integrations and rework my backend to be more efficient on that end. (right now making all my HTTP calls to Stripe to get the KPIs make the page load painfully slowly, I'll be storing the KPIs and updating the results every 15 minutes instead)
2. Finish reading $100M Offers and rework my offer.
3. Plan sales pitch

 

[Mad Scientist]

I love this idea.

I've been looking for a solution to host our OKRs and this seems like a good fit. You might have a new potential client!

Looking forward to following your progress.

 

[Jeannen]

How do you plan to make it different from the dozen of OKRs software available in the market?

 

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[arguino]

I love this idea.

I've been looking for a solution to host our OKRs and this seems like a good fit. You might have a new potential client!

Looking forward to following your progress.

Hey Mad Scientist,

I'd love to show you the solution and go through it together whenever you have time on your schedule.

How do you plan to make it different from the dozen of OKRs software available in the market?

Excellent questions, two things, price and ease of use, being usually well funded, OKR software suffer from feature creep and poor use interface that are hard to understand. I'm proposing just as robust with every core features you might need for a lower price.

Another way I'm planning to differentiate is by not competing at all with the VC backed OKR companies by targeting clients they don't have any way of reaching. I'm planning on including the software as a part of an offer I'm going to be selling to SMEs with little IT budget, I'll be pitching them a fully managed OKR, KPI tracking and BI solution to them for a flat monthly fee, the monthly fee will include my time integrating with their software (to track OKRs, KPIs and generate BI reports automatically) and a couple other things.
I'm meeting someone very well connected in the SMEs landscape of my region next Friday, he should be able to then introduce me to some companies that might need my help! I'm still working on finding ways I can generate more value/money for these companies with my offer, suggestions are very welcome.

 

[arguino]

Haven't posted in a while but I've definitely kept up the work.

Meeting with the well connected person went okay, he didn't really get the whole OKR thing which I can understand if you spent your whole life working at big company. Anyway it was my first "business" meeting, I'm glad I've had it, it got me out of my comfort zone for sure and I handled the pressure well. He told me about another company in the region which does ERPs for local companies, he thought I might be able to integrate with them, I met a shareholder of the company over there and the meeting went well but I don't see any potential for us to work together in the future since we're more competitors than partners.

Had a meeting with @Mad Scientist, he helped me understand what an OKR software would need to be/have for it to work inside his company. It helped me figure out what I should work on next and I've potentially identified a niche I could target.

Anyway other things I've worked on since the last post:

• Add user management for an organization in the SaaS
• Add the possibility for a user to be assigned to an OKR
• Start working on a personalized dashboard for a user to see what OKR he's assigned to.
• Setup Multilingual support for the SaaS
• Started implementing a blog portion for the SaaS, gonna be working on content creation soon.
• Established a roadmap on future features that will be developed

 

[Mad Scientist]

I'm glad my team and I could help with your vision for the app. Can't wait to see how it improves over time!

 

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[arguino]

Been 2 months since my last post,

I've been working on the app a lot, making tons of changes based on @Mad Scientist and his team's feedback. Been adding a lot of QoL throughout the app, feedback has been key at making the usability of the app better. I'll be focusing on bigger features in the next quarter, I have a couple of "big" one in mind, I have to prioritize the most important ones.

I had a meeting with a potential client last week, went very well, my presentation skills are improving as well as my pitch, got them to agree to a free trial. Hopefully, they keep using the app and give me feedback, I'll make sure to follow-up to gently push them to use it.

I need to find new clients this month as this is one of my goal for the quarter and a very important one, I've delved a bit into AdWords and it's been a great learning experience, @Mad Scientist also helped me with this, giving me feedback on my home and landing page. Followed @Andy Black course which I thought was great although a bit short.

However, I don't think AdWords is the way to gain new customers/users at this stage and I'll be focusing on building a network on LinkedIn and cold emailing/messaging companies practicing OKRs which need a software for it. I'll be targeting Small Tech Companies (IT services, product based startups, ECommerce) as they are my target niche.

 

[Andy Black]

Followed @Andy Black course which I thought was great although a bit short.

It's supposed to be short. Get up and running and then get learning.

 

[Mad Scientist]

We've been using this app for just about a year now and I couldn't recommend it more!

 

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[Saad Khan]

Quick question. How would you convince a weekdone.com user to switch over to your OKR software?

 

[arguino]

@Saad Khan What pain points are you experiencing with weekdone?