There’s pros and cons to both. We built LeadDragon using a horizontal approach but it was very painful and we had to use niche-specific landing pages for certain markets. Overall, if you’re going horizontal… Here’s what we think.
Our judgment: Go in a niche.
However, we’re going to be 100% upfront and let you know that we were highly successful with LeadDragon, and we positioned our SAAS in a horizontal fashion. In this article, we’re going to walk you through the reasons why we believe a niche is better and the reasons why horizontally positioning your SAAS may be difficult for you if you don’t fit the context (and have enormous patience).
With a niche, you can build and ACTUAL content marketing plan
Content marketing is king and will always be as long as human beings have the attention span of squirrels and are led by their emotions and pain points online. Do you have any idea how hard it is to position and create content for a SAAS that serves ANY small business? It’s freaking hard. The content has to be direct, digestible, and very well made for practically anymore to consume. The unfortunate part is that you won’t be able to easily hit the pain points that each and every business owner has that drives them to sign up, purchase, or take action.
We built out evergreen demos, masterclasses, eBooks, a generic “FastTrack” course for our SAAS, and so much more and even then, after all of that effort… a ton of users still needed babying and help. So much so that we started offering weekly office hours training via zoom for any users that needed additional help. Hey. Anything to prevent churn right?
Not to mention the support. It was a pain in the *ss to help people who had different goals with the platform. We had some people only use it for database reactivation and others use the memberships and others use everything. That brings us to…
You can’t set measures of success for your users
How are you currently or planning to measure success for your users? No, we really mean it. What does user activation mean for your business? What makes someone a successful and engaged user? This is a metric you’ll need to know to address churn challenges and diagnosing it properly. Here’s an example. Say your niche is dentistry.
Decision Maker: Dentist Owner
End User: Receptionist & Admin Team
Measure Of Success: Receptionist actively communicating via the conversations, one email blast a month, 10 appointments a month on calendar, content is scheduled months in advance in the social planner feature.
Now, imagine having tons of metrics of success for each type of user. Yikes.
It’s 1000000x harder to sell (Unless you’re superhuman)
Imagine hoping on a live demo, selling to a loan officer and then you hop on another one, selling to a roofer, and then the next one is a cosmetic surgeon. As agency owners, it’s extremely easy for us to switch gears as long as everything is a service based business and we have the business acumen to give solid advice. But wait a minute, you signed up with GoHighLevel to be a saasprenuer, not an agency owner… How are you going to duplicate yourself and train someone to do live demos for your potential users?
The sad reality is that you absolutely can’t. It’s easy to train closers and sales people in one niche or vertical. All they have to do is follow a script and a SOP for that specific objection or decision. You can’t easily do that if you’re selling or demoing horizontally. Showing a dentist and then a personal coach how GoHighLevel’s features can transform their business is easy for you, but it won’t be so easy for your team. They don’t have YOUR brain that knows a lot of stuff about a lot of business models.
We hope this article helped you make a strong informed decision before you jump in the deep end of the pool. Maybe you do fit the context going horizontally or maybe you’re just afraid to say “no” to business. We get it. It’s hard but it’s a bullet you’ll have to bite sooner or later. Do it now rather than later. Trust us!