Do you know which SaaS product this is?

Come on… you’re technical right? Surely you can tell which SaaS business wrote this code:

No, obviously you can’t… because this is what every SaaS business sells: code and servers.

Code and servers.

That’s it.

OK, maybe with a little
thrown in. But you get my point.

All these SaaS business are building incredible SaaS brands. But they aren’t doing it by talking about their product, code and servers.




This post explains…

Yuval Noah Harari of
fame states that humans are only able to rule the world due to their ability to create “mass cooperation networks” that allow millions of strangers to collaborate on common goals.

Stories are the glue that enables these cooperation networks to form. E.g. it’s our ability to believe that has fueled our global domination more than having “special genes”.

He believes that without these things that don’t actually exist:

The human race would not be much further forward than our primate cousins.

You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee Heaven.

Yuval believes that the human race lives simultaneously in two different worlds: the objective physical world of houses, parks and cutlery and the imagined world of the government, corporations and gods.

Bear that in mind…

Donald Miller also talks about the human drive to believe something in a marketing context within his book:
.

He states that to become attractive to buyers, a product must solve an external problem. For example, a drill resolves the external problem of needing more storage space by helping you construct a shelf.

But to really get your conversion rates pumping, you can start to weave an internal problem and its solutions into your marketing messages.

The drill company could produce a YouTube ad showing a frustrated father in a chaotic home attempting to put up some shelves with mediocre equipment. It switches to showing him in domestic bliss after completing the shelf task with the branded drill, lying back on the sofa with his partner, children and super cute dog.

You can usually find the internal problem your product solves by asking your customer an imaginary question: “do you have what it takes?”

(In relation to your product or service.)




It’s time to add a third layer of persuasion into the story of your SaaS. They address the age old human challenge of good vs evil.




In the case of the drill, the philosophical problem could be that the family unit is crucial in order for the human race to perpetuate… and without great overhead storage space the family unit would fight over the cupboards, leading to almost certain divorce.

Donald believes that the power behind combining all three problem types is that humans communicate most effectively in stories and the best stories show characters resolving all three problem types.

For example, when Luke Skywalker presses the button on his laser blaster to shoot the unprotected part of the Death Star he resolves three problems:

In a business context, Tesla does this incredibly well:

Make sense?

OK, so how are three of the biggest SaaS brands in the world using Nava Yoari’s belief theory and Donald Miller’s philosophical problems to magnetize prospects, customers, employees, partners and investors?

Drift believe that the internet should be a conversation:

They preach that the internet is a force for good… but it is also pulling us apart:

Externally, Drift will put live chat on your site, internally their brand makes you feel hip and urban and philosophically, using Drift makes you feel like you are bringing people together in a world of impersonal email chains.

that software is incredibly good for the world… but did not use to be easily accessible:

Their legacy competitors sold software along with on premise servers and an army of technicians required to get a customer started – this was the norm.

Salesforce pioneered the business model now know as SaaS.

This was their core innovation and differentiator. However, when Marc Benioff first suggested the “No Software” campaign to the team, they all hated it.

They thought it was negative and confusing. As he writes in
, Marc persevered and wore his “No Software” badge everyday until the rest of the team did the same.

Marc took things a step further and produced a full television commercial showing the modern Salesforce jet fighter shoot down their old fashioned software burdened competitors:

This was their war cry that CEO, Marc Benioff used to shout at the first Dreamforce events.This was their philosophical problem that they existed to solve.

believe in bootstrapping. Their business 37Signals sustained itself with consulting, info products and even events that their founders Jason and David hustled through whilst building Basecamp.

They espouse the typical software business lifecycle of multiple funding rounds leading to a grow or die mentality and have grown Basecamp at a modest rate from 45 accounts in 2004 to 3 million in 2019.

Though interestingly both founders sold a chunk of their shares to Jeff Bezos in 2007. Bootstrapping is definitely better when you have multiple millions of dollars in your bank account 😉

This is the philosophical problem that they exist to solve for the thousands of bootstrappers around the world inspired by their story.

What did we learn?

Well, that SaaS businesses are really just selling code and servers. And…

That to grow your SaaS brand into something your prospects, customers and employees care about… you need something to believe.

What does your SaaS believe?