Specificity, SaaS, and SEO
I highly recommend reading “Specificity: Your Brain’s Superpower” on the LessWrong blog. The series of posts of makes a strong case that specificity is an extremely underrated tool in many domains. For example, using specificity will let anyone win against a bad argument.
In the realm of SaaS startups, the tool of specificity is also highly underrated. While struggling SaaS startups might not say “we need more specificity” - a SaaS product that’s struggling to achieve product-market-fit likely has a large specificity deficit. That is, the product needs more specificity so as to address a key job-to-be-done of a target user persona.
Here’s where SEO is specificity’s best friend.
Any knowledge worker with an important problem will go to Google to search for answers. There are over 8.5 billion Google searches a day. The landscape of search keywords is an encyclopedia of the specific needs of every potential user. If a product’s value proposition can’t map to search queries, there’s a fair1 chance that it’s not solving a specific user problem.
Tackling SEO is tackling the problem of specificity. If a SaaS company generates meaningful SEO traffic, it’s built a muscle that solves specificity.2 This doesn’t happen overnight, but every SaaS startup that prioritizes SEO is likely to be successful.3 Here is a good primer - with plenty of specific examples!
The small group of SaaS startups that have invested in SEO early (Canva, Zapier, Retool, to name a few of the notables) have a remarkably high hit rate. In fact, I don’t know of a single SaaS startup that prioritized SEO early that hasn’t been successful.4
While it’s not the only way, in my experience having an SEO strategy is the most reliable way for SaaS startups to solve the problem of specificity.
This is not at odds with the idea of category creation. A company that’s trying to create a category must be addressing specific user problems. An SEO strategy will attract the users who have this problem. Then, the category-creating company can define the problem in its own way, with its own language, to create the category.
Note that different rules apply for SEO in SaaS vs consumer. For a SaaS startup, the key product priority is finding an early niche. Then, by building great software, the startup goes wider and wider. By definition, that initial niche is a narrow segment that is underserved by existing solutions. This niche is will not be overly competitive in SEO - because if the SEO is very competitive, it’s not underserved! In contrast, consumer startups typically try to target a wider audience in their early stages. SEO is much more competitive. It might be a viable channel, but it’s not systematically overlooked like SEO for SaaS startups.
Just like almost everyone who prioritizes going to the gym will get a lot stronger.
Granted, my data set is limited, but I find a focus on SEO prior to PMF in SaaS produces a 100% hit rate in finding PMF. I would love to hear of counter-examples of this. I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t seen them.
One of the most interesting things about SEO is the way you can reverse engineer customer demand. Using tools you can seek out common phrasings for queries in the vein you're interested in, find ones with mid- to high-usage, and make content that specifically puts your stuff in the bullseye. Nothing rocket science here — it's SEO 101! But lots of marketers I've worked with are too hesitant to make content experimentally. We need more marketers with a scientific method approach to content.
I've learned tons about the way our customers describe their problems and the sorts of solutions they're attracted to from observing how they find our product via SEO! And this is knowledge is feedback for the product development process.
The key to good SEO is finding the low competition keywords that have decent volume. Perhaps SaaS founders could actually launch companies based on this research.