"Don't find customers for your products. Find products for your customers." — Seth Godin
I worked with a law firm that also operated a real estate and property management company serving high-net-worth clients. They were not the only firm in this niche, but they had something the others didn't: an internal SaaS platform that made client communication, document management, and multi-stakeholder coordination dramatically more efficient.
Working with NewspaperClips.com, we built a feature that allowed trade associations to share curated news clips with their membership via email. In 2002, this was genuinely cutting-edge. The key was identifying the right market vertical before building the feature, not after. We then recognized that state agencies had similar internal distribution needs. Those two verticals became our focus, and we deliberately declined to pursue PR firms and advertising agencies.
Our subscribers experienced us as a service that uniquely understood their needs, which was only true because we had committed to understanding them specifically.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ Commit to a narrow SaaS target market before launch. Broadening it later is always possible; discovering you had no market at all is not recoverable. ◆ Find the specific need within the target market where your service is not just good, but irreplaceable. ◆ Map the demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics of your target market in detail. ◆ Assess the accessibility and loyalty potential of the target market. Some markets are easy to reach but churn fast; others are hard to reach but stay forever.