On Launching A XaaS Pricing Intelligence Platform [With 50+ Beta Users]
My name is Bryan Belanger, and I founded a business called XaaS Pricing. I am a market research team leader, management team member, and part-owner of a business called Technology Business Research (TBR). TBR has been in business since 1996, providing market research and consulting services to large technology companies. In late 2021, we founded XaaS Pricing as an offshoot of TBR.
Our product is data, and lots of it. We looked at the internet and said - there’s tons and tons of information on how SaaS products are priced out there, living on company websites. What if we could pull it all into the same place, normalize it, and enrich it with non-public data?
We intend to do just that and make the data available as a subscription service to founders, product marketers, pricing strategists, and intelligence professionals at SaaS companies. Our goal is to help these companies make better, faster pricing decisions, enabled by our data and insights.
We’re currently pre-revenue but have onboarded ~50 beta users. We’ve been making XaaS Pricing data available to our TBR clients, and we’ve seen the platform accessed over 500 times since being launched.
What's your backstory, and how did you come up with the idea?
I’ve been doing market research for TBR since I got out of college. So going on 12 years now (yikes). I’ve done almost everything you can do at a market research agency during that time. But the thing I’ve done the most is pricing research.
As an analyst, I started doing these projects in our Professional Services practice. After a few years, our firm created a separate group to lead custom research. I was moved into that team to conduct our pricing research, and I now lead that group overall.
At TBR, we do a lot of traditional market research and pricing advisory projects. These projects carry a six-figure plus cost on average, require 3 to 4 months to complete, and involve lots of intensive primary research. Interviews, surveys, and web scraping. They are usually hard, often fun, and deliver valuable results for most clients.
After doing 100s of these projects, I got a little tired, and I wanted to try something new. So my co-founder and I looked across our body of work with those projects and started to think, that there has to be some way to make a product out of this.
If you have an idea, and you’ve outlined the next ten steps you need to take, take steps 1 to 2 first, pour everything into that, and do it as fast as you can.
Something that we can bring to anyone struggling with pricing, founders, and up, not just large companies with big budgets and timelines to do this type of work. We landed on covering the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) market because of the trajectory of the market and its sub-markets (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.), and because the availability of public data is much greater in that space than in other tech sectors.
We started by manually collecting data - lots of data. We created a data taxonomy in a simple CSV and then started collecting data from the web. We ended up covering 100 companies and then loaded that into the free plan version of GoodData, an embedded analytics tool. We then started signing up users to that tool to give us feedback. We targeted a mix of family and friends in the industry, cold connections, and existing users we knew well from TBR.
We undertook discovery interviews with those users to get their feedback and impressions on what we’d started to build and to understand where we’d need to evolve the platform to get them to pay for it. The feedback generally said “keep going”, so we then found a development partner to help us build the first commercial version, which we’re expected to launch in July 2022. That’s where we’re at now - we’re off and running!
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
This was the fun part. We pretty much just got started. We had a decent idea of the types of data and information content that customers would want to see from our consulting work. We met in a conference room one afternoon and outlined probably 100 data fields that would be relevant for our database and then prioritized them into ones we could cover today versus ones that would have to be covered in the future.
We transferred that brainstorming effort to a data template in a simple CSV, and created definitions for everything we were going to collect - primarily metrics, and market segments/categories.
The next step was figuring out what companies to cover in our database. There are 10s of thousands of companies we could cover, so we decided to just start with the Forbes Cloud 100. That’s always an interesting, high-profile cohort that we felt could prove the viability of our process and the data outputs.
We then just started collecting the data. Manually, in project downtime or at night. Our process has improved considerably since then, but those were the early days. We ended up with a dataset of 5,000 lines of proprietary pricing data. We then hunted around, looking at maybe 50 analytics and dashboarding tools, and landed on GoodData because it was relatively easy to use and free.
I spent some time learning GoodData, and then eventually was able to load our full dataset into GoodData and create an initial crude version of the product. Our cost of these efforts was zero - just our labor effort to design and gather all the data.
Describe the process of launching the business.
This part was a bit different for us because of where we’re at in our launch and because we’re attached to TBR, a more established company. Our launch started internally, with TBR’s existing customers. The results there have been great - lots of downloads, calls, and interest in the product. There’s a simple lesson there - if you have an established relationship or channel, always start there.
Launching more broadly has been a bit of a challenge. While we’re not newcomers to B2B tech and certainly not to pricing research, we are new to the world of SaaS for most people that we come across. We’ve been doing a lot to build trust through social interactions, content, and a small number of partnerships. These efforts are slow and manual, but we believe they are yielding results in terms of building relationships and brand reputation.
I’d say that as a person that’s always been focused on content, research, and products, my blindspot is marketing, and there’s probably a lot more that we can be doing on marketing ourselves. I recently read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, and it helped to clarify and focus our marketing efforts. I’d recommend it to anyone coming from a “product out” perspective and trying to learn startup marketing.
The First Version of XaaS Pricing: A Big CSV
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Our customer efforts fall into two big buckets - (1) existing relationships and (2) new customers. Because we were an offshoot of TBR, there are several existing clients and users within those clients that are potential XaaS Pricing customers. So many of our initial efforts have been focused on getting the data and the beta product in their hands to test the value of the data and better understand the types of insights.
We started this effort by creating an “analog” version of our product in Excel and PowerPoint that existing users can download under a free trial to access the data. This has gone well, and we’re seeing 100s of downloads per month for everything we publish.
We’ve been able to move a power user subset of this group over to the SaaS version of the beta tool. The moral of the story on this channel is an obvious one - if you have access to a trusted audience and/or distribution avenues to access an existing customer base, it’s always best to start there.
The tougher nut to crack has been building our awareness with new target customers. We started with a scattershot approach to marketing and tried a little bit of everything. This left us with a few new contacts, but otherwise, still pretty much an unknown entity. After going through the steps outlined in Traction, we decided to prioritize marketing efforts on content marketing, SEO, and “engineering as marketing”.
I’ve learned just how little I know about marketing, and now see the hurdles ahead of us because of it. Being a sponge about effective startup marketing is the most valuable thing that I think a startup can do.
To do this, we created a weekly content production schedule with pre-planned topics, including a mix of blogs and templates for download. We’ve been running this schedule for about a month now, and promoting content on social media (primarily LinkedIn) once we publish. We’re just now dipping our toes into learning how to layer SEO optimization on top of our content efforts, beyond simple keyword research and selection.
Here’s how things look in terms of our Google Analytics results based on our efforts so far. This is for the period from April 1st to May 16th. We’re still not seeing a ton of active users, although we are seeing some spikes that are correlated to our content publishing dates.
Most of our traffic is coming direct and/or through organic social currently. We are early to the game still with our content marketing strategy, so we certainly need to keep on top of publishing, but just as importantly, we need to get better about distribution. One priority there is building backlinks to our site to increase organic traffic and improve our search rankings.
Our newest effort is what we’re loosely categorizing as “engineering as marketing”, based on how Traction defines it. Ours is more like “consulting as marketing”. We are offering a “Grade My Pricing Page” service, in which we’ll assess a SaaS vendor’s pricing page and provide some recommendations on how it can be improved.
In time, we’d like to evolve this into a SaaS offering of its own, but currently, we’re using it to engage with startup founders and other SaaS companies with pricing challenges. It’s off to a great start so far; we’ve graded about 10 pages within the first week of using it, and we look forward to doing a lot more.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We’re still getting our feet underneath us. We don’t formally launch until July of 2022, so we’ll have better reporting on customer metrics at the time. The downloads and beta user subscriptions tell us we’re heading in the right direction, however, and the engagement with our content and the Grade My Pricing Page service supports that as well.
If you’re interested in entrepreneurship or have an idea, don’t discount opportunities that might exist to launch that within your existing role.
What I like about the future of XaaS pricing is that our options as far as what the product ultimately becomes, and how we distribute it, are pretty open-ended. I think we went into this knowing that we’ll be pivoting endlessly based on what we learn.
Our goals when starting were to (1) gather data that has value, in an area that has value; and (2) produce it in a way that makes it highly accessible. There are several avenues for how we might take that data and translate it into value for customers, and that’s the journey that we’re on now.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
We started XaaS Pricing as researchers and consultants, and so we faced huge gaps on the technical and marketing sides. If you’re starting out, I’d advise never underestimating these skill sets. I think most would maybe say that regarding technical skills, but for me, it’s been marketing.
I’ve learned just how little I know about marketing, and now see the hurdles ahead of us because of it. Being a sponge about effective startup marketing is the most valuable thing that I think a startup can do.
The other is to just start building. When we came up with the idea, we decided to just start collecting data. Manually, some each day, drop it into Excel and post it for our existing audience. This helped things start to snowball. We didn’t have to wait for the software to be built or this or that to be integrated. So if you have an idea, and you’ve outlined the next ten steps you need to take, take steps 1 to 2 first, pour everything into that, and do it as fast as you can.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use HubSpot for all things marketing and CRM and Stripe for payments. We’re building the product ourselves with a development partner. One of the key decisions of the day is how we choose to serve up our data to our end customers - do we build? Do we buy?
So far, we’ve used GoodData as our embedded BI/analytics tool. We’re evaluating GoodData and several others such as Power BI and AWS QuickSight as we look to take the platform to the next level.
As part of that effort, we’re also transitioning our data from Excel to a SQL database environment.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I mentioned before Traction - that’s been a really helpful resource in sorting through and prioritizing our marketing efforts.
A podcast I love that generally keeps me motivated and inspired is My First Million. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri (the hosts) are engaging, funny, and also a source of endless ideas and innovative thinking on starting and scaling businesses.
One of the best other resources has been an informal cohort of 2 or 3 partners that we’ve been working within various ways. These are builders that are creating similar SaaS platforms in our space. We are all at different stages of the journey but can share common challenges, things we’ve learned, and ways of doing things better. It’s been really helpful to bounce ideas off of these colleagues.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
The first I’d say is that if you’re interested in entrepreneurship or have an idea, don’t discount opportunities that might exist to launch that within your existing role. XaaS Pricing sprung out of existing work we do at TBR, and TBR has supported and accelerated the effort at every turn.
We’ve been able to do things that other startups likely can’t because we’re attached to a well-established company. I’d recommend that anyone starting out explore whether there are opportunities to jump on or create a new initiative within their current company or role.
The second one - and I may be biased here since XaaS Pricing is a data company - is that if you’re thinking about building a SaaS business, perhaps think about starting by building a content or data business. Content and data are great ways to build trust and awareness in your niche. Data can be the foundation of a SaaS, and if the SaaS tool ends up not being the right vehicle for consumption? Well, you could iterate back to being a data company.
Let’s take a completely hypothetical example, borrowed from a recent episode of My First Million. On the podcast, Shaan had the idea of a business called something like “Take My Trip”, where prospective vacationers could buy the same vacation an influencer took as a package, without having to plan the trip step-by-step.
You could start by building this as a SaaS; or perhaps, you could start by building a content blog or a database of information about popular influencers’ vacations. This content blog and/or database could help build your reputation in the niche, and could also serve as the data foundation for a tool you might build.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re not actively hiring but we’re always looking for potential contractors to help accelerate our product. If there’s anyone out there that knows how to build website graders like HubSpot’s and wants to come to take a crack at creating one for pricing, send me an email at [email protected].
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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