Why we’re focused on product before growth and venture capital

We first stumbled on finding the right product for a good market 10 years ago in 2006 with our SaaS product Crazy Egg. The official launch happened on Digg. We had spent the earlier 3 months providing the product to our target audience as we watched closely, understood their reactions and constantly made product improvements.

Before Crazy Egg, we had created over a dozen different SaaS products in the span of about 2 years from 2004 to 2006. Back then we were just throwing SaaS products against the wall and seeing what stuck. Crazy Egg stuck and reached product/market fit in a matter of months after we publicly released it. Now that 10 years have past, the world is different and there’s more competition than ever so the bar is much higher for creating an awesome product that lots of people love.

Last week, we announced our new company called Quick Sprout and I wrote a bit about how we’re thinking about the business. We are starting by focusing on creating a product people love first and not our fundraise. Some people liked this, some wondered why…

Quick Sprout

Additionally, John Fazzolari ‏tweeted:

Sounds so much better than our goal is to raise as much $$$ as possible at the highest valuation possible.

And Chris Yeh wrote:

I especially love the fact that you’re self-funding. You guys can easily raise money, but doing so would lock you into your current idea; far better to prove the fit on your own (and let investors pay for the reduced risk!).

Many other folks sent both private messages and public congrats. Thank you all for the kind words and support! Now we’ve got to do the hard work to earn it.

Most repeat founders are hyper-efficient with whatever capital they have in the early days (self-funded or venture funded) until it’s time to step on the gas after they’ve found product/market fit. We’re doing the same thing with Quick Sprout. We’re personally investing in our business by discovering the right product for the market first before we raise a round of outside capital.

Throughout this process, we aren’t going to forget the culture of innovating that made us successful in the first place. You can’t just create a product and make it an over night success, it takes discipline and iteration, especially with the short attention span that customers have these days.

You have to start releasing your product while paying close attention to usage and customers. Try to find the signal from the noise of all the feedback, form an opinion and then iterate your product until it literally catches fire with customers. Then you have to make sure your company is always equipped to constantly make your product best-in-class at solving your customers’ evolving problems.

Interested in reading more articles like this about building successful SaaS businesses? You should sign up for my once a week SaaS email newsletter.

If you’re blogging personally or for your business and want to increase blog traffic and conversions, sign up for early access to Quick Sprout. You’ll get to watch us iterate our product until you love it!