Shobit null

How much of SaaS sales depends on how good the product is?

I've been leading GTM for a GenAI SaaS startup in Alternative Investment space; now the founder is a 2nd time SaaS founder he already did a successful exit in his last venture; I've been an Investment Banker before so i joined him seeing the potential of what AI can do in the Investment field.

We started an year ago; founder has no Finance / Investment experience or background to understand deeper nuances of this business, he's more of a COO and CPO; all our competitors have been founded by folks from Industry.

I've had over 500 conversations, 100 good demos, 20-30 good pilots of our Software, but no one is willing to take the software on SaaS as they still find delta features that could help.

In my honest opinion, given I have the same background as our customers, their software is shit and half baked; founder doesn't still understands the space clearly from the product point of view but keeps on chasing me to sell the product.

Wanted to know from the community, have you come across similar experiences where a Founder was building a software that no one is willing to pay for, suprising thing is i joined the founder because of his previous success in SaaS space, but his previous venture was in HRTech.

What do people suggest, can help in closing a sale, i've tried getting IT projects where I've promised funds that we'll build what your need is, but that is where we lost on pricing because founder thinks what they are building should be worth more, this is also one reason for no customers.

How much do you think SaaS sales is based on the Product that is being built, whether it solves a real need; has anyone sold a software which had no need?

👑 Sales Strategy

😤 Conflict Resolution

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19 comments

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Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

6

Bad MFer

Why the hell would you build a software that had no need?

If you’ve gone through hundreds of conversations and no one is interested there is 1 of 2 problems. Either you are just really bad at explaining what you built or you’ve wasted time and built something no one wants or needs.

jefe

Arsonist

5

🍁

This is not a good or sustainable place to be in.

As everyone else is saying:

3

Problem is he got $4mm seed raise because of his success in previous SaaS venture; what these folks want to build has a need; problem is that the product is not even reaching to the MVP stage in terms of quality; problem can be it's an AI software where we remove a lot of manual work of Investment guys; but if the system is not stable and reliable enough, no one's going to pay for it.

braintank

Politicker

3

Enterprise Account Executive

There is no hope here. $4m is peanuts

Gasty

Notable Contributor

4

War Room Community Manager

If you're selling a software that has no need then that's basically stealing. If there is no PMF, it may be a dead end. The product needs to solve some problem that exists, or should be better than others in competition in some aspect.

Have you tried to understand "why" exactly people won't buy?

2

It does only the 50% job, but the cost it's taking for us to do that 50% job is 10x what people will be willing to pay for it. Problem is that it's a pure AI software, we are removing manual work in the investment field - reading balance sheets, P&L and all; but even after an year of development our software is not stable; i have lost 5 Enterprise deals on Pilot stage where customer was super interested, tested our product, and didn't find it intuitive enough or there were too much bugs. The answer to why is that the software still does half baked work and not solves fully for an end use case.

Gasty

Notable Contributor

2

War Room Community Manager

What does that tell you?

You either need to invest more to make it a 85% working model at minimum or need to reduce cost that it just makes sense for your customers. Ultimately have a perfect balance between product and price.

Do you see either of that happening in the near future?

2

We've recently hired a new CTO, making hiring in tech to do the former, but it's 8 months of efforts till now in GTM and exhaustion that is killing. Cost cannot be reduced as a lot of 3rd party costs are involved from other LLMs. I'm getting these folks in front of $50-100bn size fund decision makers using all GTM initiatives, but most conversations are just good to have because of product not upto mark. I'll give these folks 2 more months, given the founder's pedigree and history, i though he knows what he's doing but i've got to learn in SaaS game people are just way too optimistic about what they are building without even understanding the real problem. And i can say that because i used to be an Investment Banker before so I have been one of the users of the software these folks are trying to build.

braintank

Politicker

2

Enterprise Account Executive

The founder has no pedigree dawg. They're a charlatan riding the AI hype train with no product or relevant experience.

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

2

Bad MFer

Who was the moron that gave your founder $4M?!? They have no experience in the industry. It’s no wonder they can’t build a viable product. I’m guessing they are relaying on Claude or ChatGPT to do everything, but without a foundation of core knowledge this is simply fraud.

braintank

Politicker

3

Enterprise Account Executive

Leave

Pachacuti

Politicker

3

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

I think you answered your question in the first couple lines - no one wants it. It’s time to pack it up and go find another gig.

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

2

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Your last line: we saw this ONLY before the dotcom bust. Nice to have rather than need to have. It's the first thing on the chopping block when things get tough. Avoid working for or selling solutions that have no need.

oldcloser

Arsonist

1

💀

There's much of this in the wild. AI wave-riders creating solutions that look for problems.

oldcloser

Arsonist

1

💀

All of it.

DataWrangler

Fire Starter

0

Sr. Account Executive

I'm in a similar situation. I sell an AI technology to Data Science & Analytics teams. I've had a couple of successes, but with the advent of LLM's in the past year and a half no one is investing in traditional ML.

Have you tried proposing a discounted Pilot Year?

Land them on a 2-3 year contract with an opt out clause after year one if they aren't able to achieve ROI. Promise to be a partner and extend free consulting hours.

Maybe this approach would appease your CEO's stubbornness on pricing.

Then again... leaving might be the right move too. I'm considering that myself in my situation.

0

I have tried all sorts of discounting to customers, problem is the current system will have to be used instead of Excels where the Analysts currently work in; and even if i give it for free, they wouldn't take it as they would want their all work either to be done on Excels manually or on our system in a manual or automated way. Otherwise it will just increase the operational load instead of decreasing it.
Major issue is on the Product side, our Tech and AI folks are really good, Product function which is led by the founder himself don't come with a background in Investment funds space, so they don't have real world experience of how this things are done; Tech and AI folks will just build what the Product says and Product is too stubborn to learn anything.

LegacySales

Politicker

0

Account Executive

Dude, I'm in a similar situation.

They offered me a life-changing signing bonus to get me away from my old gig and I took it. We've closed 3 new customers and by every business metric the company is doing OK.

However, this space is clearly starting to generate a clear winner and we're not it.

We went head to head against this competitor and offered our software to them for free.
They came back and sent this dagger of an email: "It's not about the price, it's about this list of features that are critical to our business and what we're looking for in an LLM provider. 1- XXX
2- BBB
3- Live track for SDLC production data, etc

When can your team deliver these features?"
Our reply: "3 months"
They signed with the competitor the next day... We're working on PMF but it is so competitive

FoodForSales

Politicker

0

AE

get out

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