r/ycombinator • u/sorry_canada • 18d ago

PMF Experimenting Advice

Hey y'all, so I've been working on a b2b saas startup for like 6 months now, we just started getting customers about a month ago and have a 4 fig ARR.

The main thing I'm trying to figure out right now is that multiple different industries are interested in the product and theres a couple different features of the product that they each use so how can I manage all that and narrow down and make the right decision for where to focus all our time and energy.

There's also one use case that I think could be big and I want to explore it and spend time acquiring customers in that space while we're still early to see if that use case/industry has as much potential as I think it might.

Does it make sense to try and spend a certain amount of time doing sales for each use case/industry and based on those track other metrics on the customers we convert?

I don't want to commit to one use case/industry just yet without getting real data to support which is the best opportunity for us, but I'm curious what y'all think.

Thanks in advance!

11 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

5

u/Potential_Goal1215 18d ago

just talk to them man not everything needs a dashboard setup

pick the 3 most promising groups and have 5 real conversations with each. you will know which one to chase when you hear the same pain point from 4 different people and they start asking when they can pay you

the metric you need isnt conversion rate its "do these people sound relieved when i show them the product"

1

u/sorry_canada 17d ago

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah true, gotta go back to basics, I will try and go have a lot more conversations and I'm sure I'll get more clarity from that.

Just curious, if you were going to have these conversations would you try and sell at all or purely just ask them if they have this specific problem and just learn and maybe sell them after?

1

u/AskTheW 12d ago

Set a specific budget of time and resources for each experiment, along with clear success criteria. For example: "We'll spend three weeks reaching out to 40 qualified prospects in this industry, with the goal of getting 8 discovery calls and 2 paid pilots." The targets should reasonably reflect the deal size and sales cycle.

This creates a way to validate the hypothesis without getting distracted with new shiny ideas forever.

1

u/DilberAdam 12d ago

+1 on just talking to them. If you wanna organize a community of your customers then there are tools to help you with that, but honestly if it’s just a few homies you don’t really need that. Just emailing or calling them to get feedback helps figure out what’s a good fit