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Put the product in front of a small, well-defined group of people who have the problem it is meant to solve. Watch what they do, ask what gets in their way, and use that evidence to improve the product and its route to customers. A finished SaaS is a starting point for learning—not proof that customers want it.
Start with a specific group of potential customers
Choose a narrow customer group with a meaningful problem your product addresses. Talk with people in that group and invite early users to try the product. The goal is to learn whether it helps them achieve an outcome they care about, not simply to collect launch-day sign-ups.
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Y Combinator’s guidance is that an MVP can bring initial customers into the product, where their interactions and feedback can inform later versions. As it puts it, “In a good market, an MVP is all you need to get your initial customers in the door, interacting with you, and offering the feedback that will inform your v2, v3, and v4.” Read Y Combinator’s article, “The Real Product Market Fit.”
Find out what users actually do
Look beyond whether someone created an account. Trace the path from first visit to the product’s intended outcome: where do users stop, what do they return to, and what are they trying to accomplish? Ask early users about confusing steps and missing help, then check product analytics to see whether those observations match behavior.
Stripe recommends using customer feedback and analytics to investigate retention and understand which features provide value. Treat retention as ongoing work: a launch or an initial burst of interest cannot tell you on its own whether customers continue to get value.
Choose a sales approach that fits the product
Your route to customers depends on the product and the way buyers make decisions. Stripe distinguishes low-touch models, where marketing carries more of acquisition, from high-touch models, where personal interaction plays a larger role. These are different operating choices, not a universal ranking.
- Low-touch: A self-serve buying path may fit when a customer can understand the offer, try the product, and get started without extensive personal assistance.
- High-touch: More personal sales interaction may be appropriate when the buyer needs a conversation to assess the product or make a decision.
Before investing heavily in a channel, learn which customers respond, what message makes the product understandable, and how much help they need to buy and use it. There is no universal channel, launch schedule, or budget established for every SaaS founder.
Review pricing and billing with customer evidence
Revisit what you charge, how plans differ, and how customers are billed. Stripe’s SaaS guidance treats pricing as a business lever and discusses refining pricing tiers and billing models; neither implies one price or plan structure works for every product. Use customer conversations and observed buying behavior to understand what people value and where the purchasing process creates friction.
Trial conversion figures need to be read in context. Stripe’s SaaS scaling article (published approximately 2023) describes the following conditional benchmarks for low-touch free trials:
| Trial design | Figure Stripe describes | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| No card required | Below 1% | Stripe describes this as evidence of poor product-market fit; 2% or higher as extremely successful. |
| Card required | Substantially below 40%; 40%; 60% | Stripe describes substantially below 40% as poor fit, 40% as competent execution, and 60% as a strong indicator of customer fit during the trial. |
These are figures Stripe published for specific trial designs, not universal targets or a current cross-industry average. Compare your results only with care: whether a card is required changes what a conversion figure means. See Stripe’s SaaS scaling guide and its guide to SaaS businesses for its discussion of pricing and billing.
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Review the first-use experience from a new customer’s perspective. Remove avoidable steps, explain what to do next, and make help easy to find when someone gets stuck. Stripe identifies onboarding as an important early step in retention and notes that difficulty using a product or getting help can contribute to customers leaving.
Pay attention to where users fail to reach the product’s intended outcome. A clearer setup path, useful guidance, or more accessible support may address that friction more directly than adding another feature.
Decide what to improve next
Turn what you learn into a short sequence of decisions rather than an ever-growing feature list:
- Identify the problem and audience. Define which customers the product is for and the outcome it promises.
- Observe real use. Talk to early users and use product analytics to find where they get stuck, return, or fail to reach value.
- Address the biggest obstacle. Improve the product, onboarding, or support where evidence points to friction.
- Test the route to customers. Match low-touch or high-touch selling to the way your buyers evaluate and purchase.
- Revisit the commercial model. Use what customers value and how they buy to review pricing, plans, and billing.
Only then decide which growth investments deserve more time or money. If few or no customers arrive at first, that is a reason to investigate the audience, problem, message, and buying path—not automatic proof that the product needs more features. Keep the next step small enough that you can learn from the result.
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