It's December 1st 2017 in Coimbatore, India and forty two people from a software business are coming together to spend fourteen days trying to build a brand new product.
5,880 people hours later and Document360 is born:
The first customers are onboarded eighteen months later and within nine months, Document360 hits the 100 customer milestone.
Five months later they hit 200...
This post explains...
I remember something that Elon Musk said when being interviewed during a tour of the newly opened Gigafactory:
We consider [the factory] to be a product. The factory itself is the machine that builds the machine.
As an aside, he also said that you could fit 50 billion hamsters in the Gigafactory so not sure how much weight we can give to this quote ;)
That said, the point still stands... Elon and his very intelligent friends spent a lot of time thinking about how to hone
.
In their case, they focussed on the car factory that would build the cars, in Saravana and Document360's case, it's the product factory that would build the products.
Before Document360 existed, Saravana had spent 7 years building out two enterprise software products:
These two, together with Document360 form parent company Kovai.co:
That's seven years of:
Prior to Document360, Saravana and the team were using Freshdesk as their knowledge base software for their other two products but it didn't provide version control or workflow management. So as shared above, Saravana pulled the whole business out of their day to day roles for fourteen days to build a knowledge base SaaS MVP.
From there, he moved 5-6 people onto the project full time and within twelve months their product reached feature parity with a core set of competitors.
This wasn't some fresh out of school, college grad looking to build their first SaaS project... this was a crack team of highly trained development ninjas getting stuck into their third B2B SaaS product.
Check out this timeline:
It shows Document360's organic traffic along with significant company milestones.
Can you guess which part of the graph that I find most interesting?
Go on.
Try...
Ok, it's this part:
That squiggly blue line represents a twelve month period before launch where Saravana and the team were pumping out documentation related, keyword infused content onto their domain.
They were clear on their market and had their heads down building the product so why not start educating the community?
Let's take this post for example:
It was one of the first posts published at the start of their SaaS SEO campaign and targets a highly relevant, top of the funnel keyword for their niche:
.
It now:
And I don't have the stats but I'm pretty sure this post is converting a couple of visitors into free trials each day:
In a similar way to how
, Document360 are highlighting their product's functionality natively within the content to drive conversions.
There are a core set of twenty keywords and a further sixty supporting keywords that Document360 have been targeting ever since they set out to build a better knowledge base product back at the start of 2018.
Here's Saravana sharing more on their SEO strategy in his own words:
LEARNING: It's never too early to start your SaaS SEO strategy.
That is the amount of cash each of these SaaS businesses has raised, and guess what? They all offer a knowledge base as part of their product.
Saravana himself said that before launch they would have invested approximately $1m into product development - a small fraction of the amount that any of those competitors have invested.
This is a tried and true SaaS growth strategy: take a growing market and solve the problem of a smaller niche of this market. For example,
a number of small niches within the growing market of email autoresponders: authors, bloggers and now creators.
Document360 are taking on a smaller niche within the growing market: SaaS businesses.
Not gaming companies, not on-premise enterprise software businesses, not B2C online marketplaces... but SaaS businesses.
That's how you can compete with bigger players with much more funding that by definition, are forced to broaden their product and marketing to target a larger market as if they don't... their investors won't get the return they were promised.
I used to work in management consulting.
And I remember heading back to my hometown after I just picked up this sweet graduate role at Accenture. One of my old friends asked me a question that I just could not provide a good answer for:
Why do businesses need consultants? Why don't they just do everything themselves?
You know that feeling you have when you wish you could go back in time to answer a tricky question?
Well I have that now, because I understand that for any business to thrive, they need to get REALLY good at one thing...
Jim Collins discusses this in his seminal business book
. He calls this The Hedgehog Concept as when a hedgehog is protecting itself from a fox...
A fox may be cunning and will be able to run many different strategies to try and eat the hedgehog, but if the hedgehog simply curls up into a ball, this nullifies all of the fox's strategies.
To know what the one thing is that you should get really at, you really have to know yourself.
Saravana and Document360 know themselves.
Because they outsource the things they aren't good at to specialists.
Saravana knows that his core talent pool in India specialise in building awesome software... not necessarily in SaaS marketing. He therefore chooses to focus the majority of internal talent on building awesome software products.
And outsources the rest...
And not even to general agencies... Saravana outsources to specialists.
For example, Document360 don't work with one big marketing agency for all of their marketing needs. They work with "special purpose", smaller agencies...
Here the same rationale applies:
Exactly.
Now obviously when you sign up new customers it's imperative that you get them to see the value of your product as soon as possible. With every minute that passes post signup before value is realised, your risk of churn increases.
This metric is commonly known as "time to value".
But few SaaS business also optimise onboarding for "time to virality", the amount of time it takes before a new user can expose your brand to their employees, partners or customers.
Now I have no evidence that Document360 are optimising for this metric, but let's jump into the product and take a look:
First of all, I'm seeing nine social proof elements on their sign up page... which I estimate must be reducing their drop off here by a high single digit percentage.
And then as you jump in you're guided by an easy set up wizard:
You then add basic details in a very intuitive interface and then choose you Document360 subdomain:
Once complete, you move through to a very clear, clickable feature checklist. Each feature is automatically marked off once it's been viewed and customised:
When you jump into the main user interface you have clear options to request a demo, chat, access tutorials and of course, select your plan:
And my favourite, Saravana also includes Document360's story inside of the main dashboard, within the product itself, this is:
You can then push your knowledge base live with a couple of clicks and of course, you're providing Document360 with a little brand exposure ;)
An if you move your knowledge base over to a custom subdomain, you also provide a "Dofollow" backlink back to Document360:
A brief analysis of Document360's 284 "Dofollow" referring domains shows that approx. 40% of them come from customers linking back from the "Powered by Document360" link.
There is a formula for getting famous.
It's simple.
You just need to do two things over an extended period of time:
Take Taylor Swift for example (I am definitely not listening to her now ;)).
Tay Tay has honed her craft over ten years, releasing:
She has nailed her niche: teenage girls and has ben extremely consistent with releasing really good content during that time.
She has also been strategic about being seen around other famous people:
This transfer's their authority over to Taylor and also exposes her to their audience as I'm pretty sure Ed Sheeran would have promoted this content to his social and email lists.
In exactly the same way:
Introducing Knowledgebase Ninjas, now the most downloaded podcast in the knowledge base niche:
Take Tom Johnson for example, he's a Technical Writer for Amazon and runs a blog in the technical writing space called
.
It would be reasonable to assume that Tom Johnson is a celebrity in the technical writing space... he jumped onto the Knowledgebase Ninja's podcast to be interviewed.
And as discussed above, when you create content with celebrities, more often than not, they will expose you to their audience:
This post Tom created on his blog to showcase the interview has
to the Document360 site.
And then we have the social exposure:
Document360 are currently releasing one of these each week, building relationships with these celebrities and reaping the benefit from their audience, expertise and authority.
FULL DISCLOSURE: We have set up and run this process for Document360, if you are interested in having us do this for your SaaS or B2B business, you can find more details here.
The best way to get your target customer to understand the value of your product is to get them to use it.
We all know that - it's called a free trial.
And yes, of course Document360 have a free trial:
But there is something else that Document360 are doing that is a little more sneaky.
If you were to Google "SaaS conference notes" on the first page you would stumble across:
You click through:
The Document360 team have been writing up notes from the talks at SaaS conferences, within their product under a separate domain. Well to be accurate, of course it wasn't the Document360 team doing this, see Growth Lever 4 ;)
So instead of paying thousands to go and see top speakers in SaaS share their wisdom... you can find curated notes from the best talks organised simply within a knowledge base.
Kind of like a honey trap for a bear, eager SaaS enthusiasts may search for an answer to a specific SaaS question or even for a specific talk at a conference they missed...
They find the result as Document360's knowledge base product is highly optimised for SEO.
They consume the content as Document360's knowledge base product is very easy to navigate through.
And then they may think, as you do:
Wow that was a wonderful experience, what CMS is this website using?
They look up to the top right of the page and BOOM:
That's a new trial for Document360.
Now as we know from Growth Lever 4, it's unlikely that Document360 would be running their own PPC campaigns. Remember, they know where their core skills lie...
So we reached out to their current PPC and landing page provider
to understand how they've been optimising Google Ad spend.
The core driver of increased ROI has been relatively simple: ensuring that you are giving the right message to the right prospect at the right time in their buying journey.
Just as you wouldn't ask someone out for dinner after you just met them, you may not drive someone directly through to buying as they browse general keywords in your category.
Well maybe you would, but at least the copy would change...
In the world of Google Ads, this means that a keyword like:
.
Would not be in the same campaign as keywords with a greater buyer intent, such as
.
This means that ad and landing page copy can be tailored to the buyer, leading down a slippery slope towards the free trial.
When implemented by Dylan and the team, click through rate increased from 0.11 t0 8% in some cases.
If it weren't for recent events, Saravana and his team at Kovai (the parent company that contains Document360, BizTalk360 and Serverless360) would have moved into a new 400 person office in Coimbatore, India:
The office houses 400 people... which is great, but the whole business now has a total of 250 employees, surely that's a waste of cash?
Nope - this is a symptom of Saravana's long term thinking.
We've already seen that Saravana and the team started pumping out SEO optimised content over 12 months prior to bringing on their first customer.
Again, a symptom of long term thinking.
Saravana has a vision for 2030 in which Kovai will spin off one to two more products into the SaaS Market, bringing them to a total of 4-5 products in the market. And next time, he won't be the product owner as he has been grooming people within his team to take on that role.
Saravana is not looking to scale Document360 to $1m ARR and then flip it to a competitor or random PE firm.
You can tell through these long term behaviours that he truly loves the process of building and marketing great software products and that he isn't just in this for a "quick buck".
this bleeds through Document360's product and marketing efforts and I'm sure re-assures customers and partners that this SaaS is here to stay.
What did we learn?
Which was your favourite Growth Lever, please leave a comment on Twitter or on the post below...
We spent a week studying how
grew from a hackathon to 200 customers in just over two years...
Here's what we found 👇👇👇
— SaaS Marketer (@SaaS_Marketer)
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