"People do not buy goods and services. They buy relationships, stories, and magic." — Seth Godin
One of the most frequently overlooked parties in SaaS development is the Influencer — the individual or group that isn't a paying customer but whose goodwill and endorsement can make or break the platform's early adoption. Understanding who these people are, and designing for them, is one of the highest-leverage decisions you can make early in the process.
When we started GalleryWatch, our goal was to give legislative professionals — lawyers, trade associations, lobbyists, and government affairs departments — access to data they had always wanted but found nearly impossible to obtain. At the time, committee substitutes were the Holy Grail. A committee substitute replaced the text of the original bill in committee, often substantially different and sometimes hundreds of pages longer. Politicos needed to see these substitutes in advance, but they weren't officially part of the public record and therefore weren't available through open records requests.
In our first session, GalleryWatch got doors slammed in our faces through official channels. So we tried something different: old-fashioned bartering. We developed a tool inside our SaaS platform that assisted committee clerks with their own workflows and made their jobs meaningfully easier. We offered it to them for free. And we brought donuts in the mornings and pizza in the evenings.
Word spread among the committee clerks faster than legislation. Soon they were using our SaaS service more than our paying subscribers were. The more access we gave them, the more cooperative they became with the committee substitutes. Our ability to provide this data led to a doubling of our user base in three months and secured our path to profitability.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ Who are the influencers in your target ecosystem — the people whose adoption accelerates everyone else's? ◆ How can influencers be meaningfully incentivized to become advocates of your platform? ◆ Are there third-party applications or integrations that, if incorporated, would make you indispensable to this influencer group?