The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders

SaaS Go-to-Market: Why Selling to Startups Failed

Oct 5, 2023

Josh Ma, Co-founder and CEO of Airplane, discusses the importance of founder-market fit in the SaaS industry. They also cover topics like customer acquisition, word-of-mouth in startups, iterating on the product, content marketing, intentional design of Airplane for developers, and insights for entrepreneurs.

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Episode notes

Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Founder-Market Fit in the SaaS Industry

02:44 • 21min

Timeline and Customer Acquisition

23:17 • 5min

The Significance of Word-of-Mouth in Customer Acquisition

28:27 • 2min

Collecting Feedback and Iterating on the Product

30:29 • 2min

Approach to Content Marketing and Acquiring Customers

32:41 • 15min

The Intentional Design of Airplane for Developer Workflow

47:48 • 2min

Quick-fire Questions and Insights for Entrepreneurs

49:27 • 3min

Josh Ma and his co-founder interviewed 46 engineers before writing a single line of code for Airplane. Their SaaS go-to-market strategy started strong - but selling to tech startups stopped working when budgets tightened in 2022.

In this episode, Josh reveals how Airplane pivoted its SaaS go-to-market from Silicon Valley startups to fintech and healthcare verticals, reaching 7-figure ARR. You will learn why founder-market fit matters more than TAM, how Google Ads landed their first five largest customers, and why cold outbound emails produced zero traction.

Airplane is a platform for engineers to build internal tools. The company has raised over $40M from Benchmark and has a team of 20 people. Josh credits their go-to-market strategy shift to vertical targeting and word-of-mouth growth.

🔑 Key Lessons

🎯 Founder-market fit filters out bad ideas early: Josh used two tests - "Can I spend 10 years on this?" and "Do customer conversations give me energy?" - to select Airplane's SaaS go-to-market direction.
🤝 Interview 40+ prospects before writing code: Airplane talked to 46 engineers about frustrations and workflow gaps, which led them to the script-running problem that became their core product.
📉 The startup-selling SaaS go-to-market playbook broke in 2022: A $30K contract negotiation took six months with a startup, forcing Airplane to pivot to non-tech verticals with less constrained budgets.
🏢 Target specific verticals for a horizontal go-to-market strategy: Fintech and healthcare companies had regulation and compliance needs that created stronger demand for internal tooling.
💰 Google Ads can bootstrap early enterprise deals: Airplane used paid search to land its first five largest customers at $20K ACV, making acquisition break-even at one deal per month.

Chapters

Introduction
Josh's motivation and what Airplane does
How the Airplane product experience differs from competitors
Business size - 7-figure ARR, $40M raised, 20 people
Josh's background as CTO at Benchling
How the Airplane idea came about through exploration
Idea filters and founder-market fit
Why founder-market fit matters more than TAM
How to run pre-build customer interviews
Entering a crowded market and why competition is overrated
Build versus buy - selling to developers
Shipping the MVP in four months
Getting the first 10 paying customers
Why Josh wishes he shipped the MVP sooner
Word of mouth as the primary growth driver
Content marketing strategy for developer tools
Why Google Ads worked despite common wisdom
Why cold outbound emails failed
Shifting from startups to fintech and healthcare verticals
Messaging a horizontal product for specific verticals
Lightning round

Resources

Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/370
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