Hey 👋

I’m Nicolas Mérouze and you’re receiving this email because you’ve subscribed to my newsletter either on my website, on Twitter, or on Customer Fitted.

I just took a vacation touring the national parks of the Colorado plateau and now I’m in Japan for a month to bootstrap a side project.

But thanks to the assistant I hired a month ago, I have content for this newsletter.

I made a list of 50 indie SaaS (all have >1000$ MRR) and 50 funded SaaS and tasked her with extracting data from homepages and pricing pages.

I’m in the process of analyzing all this data but I can already give you a few quick thoughts I had during the early analysis.

• Indie SaaS homepages seem to have a higher PageSpeed score than funded SaaS. It’s a bit of a meme in the indie community that they spend too much time optimizing the tech and not enough on marketing and it seems to be true on that point.
• Very few indie or funded SaaS still use stock photos or abstract illustrations. Good!
• Indie SaaS tend to have a lot more microcopy (free trial, credit card, etc) around the CTA than funded SaaS.
• Lots more “Book demo” button on funded SaaS than indie SaaS. I only chose B2B SaaS for my list so it should have been more balanced but I guess indie founders don’t want to be bothered by calls too much.
• I expected to see “simple” and “transparent” a lot more in pricing page headlines for indie SaaS but was surprised to barely see these words. The headlines were more benefit-oriented than I expected and that’s a good thing!
• A lot more pricing tables on homepages for indie SaaS. It goes along with the fact indie founders don’t expand their marketing sites and have relatively few pages.
• Indie SaaS rarely use social proof on pricing pages compared to funded SaaS.

I’ll go more in-depth in future newsletters so I don’t have anything to add for now based on these thoughts, but more insights are coming soon!

How to expand PMF

Any significant change to target markets or the product will disrupt product-market fit. And in turns require changes in positioning, messaging, and copy down the way.

Expanding PMF can’t be improvized and Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine, wrote a great article if you want to do it right.

​Adjacency Matrix: How to expand after PMF​

Strong positioning wins again

Tibo, successful founder of TweetHunter and Taplio, acquired an AI video editor and found a use case that was becoming popular so he forked the product to make a new one focused on this use case.

And it worked!

Comparing the homepages of Typeframes (old product) and Revid (new product) I think everything can see the latter has a much better copy.

Strong positioning leads to clear messaging.

Tibo @tibo_maker I am blown away 🤯 I acquired Typeframes last September, while trending down I noticed people were using it to create TikTok videos So I forked it and created revid .ai It's now becoming a must-have tool for short videos and just crossed $10k MRR (with TF) That was my goal… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1796478942812971266 6:48 PM • May 31, 2024 12 Retweets 400 Likes Read 65 replies

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Lifetime deals: good or bad?

I always warn founders who want to run LTDs about its downsides: you will have to support customers you may not want to focus on in the future and dropping them might give you negative press.

This tweet illustrates it:

Cody Schneider @codyschneiderxx this lifetime deal trend is dumb af is it a software with monthly infra costs the founder pays for yes then it is not sustainable to do a lifetime deal you get one finite payment but pay infinite costs into the future in the long run you will go out of business its not 1999… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1791483989166866934 12:0 AM • May 18, 2024 2 Retweets 59 Likes Read 16 replies

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It sparked a lot of discussion and I like this one highlighting the benefits:

Bryan McAnulty @BryanMcAnulty My startup generated over a million dollars from a lifetime deal more than 4 years ago, and here's what it got me: 1. Kickstarted word of mouth (we've now helped 10,000+ creators) 2. Allowed me to stay bootstrapped, no VCs 3. Early revenue to expand team I'll share how: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1791542211504410721 GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg selling "lifetime deals" is the new seed round for founders The playbook: 1. build a big audience on social 2. ask them their problems 3. sell lifetime deal to fund development 4. move to subscription or pay per outcome 5. don't have to give equity to VCs =) https://twitter.com/neilsuperduper/status/1791486085744255204 7:3 AM • May 18, 2024 0 Retweets 3 Likes Read 1 replies

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As always, it’s nuanced and it’s a good thing for some, a bad thing for others.

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