The SaaS Playbook

I read this in early 2024 when beginning to build SiteCurve. It's a solid book that educates aspiring SaaS founders on the basics of building a SaaS business. It was written by Rob Walling, the guy who founded and eventually sold Drip, an email marketing SaaS.

To be totally honest, there weren't a ton of takeaways for me from this book. Given that I've launched multiple businesses already, a lot of the material covered things I already had experience with.

The pricing section was probably the most helpful, as I've never priced software before. It definitely influenced my approach to pricing SiteCurve in that I wanted each tier to be clearly for a specific avatar (one of the concepts taught).

For example, the 'Starter' tier in SiteCurve is my freemium tier for people still testing the product, the 'Business' tier is for paying customers who get full access to SiteCurve features, and 'Enterprise' is for 1:1 onboarding and account management support.

Some other chapters cover concepts like

• Focusing on building an MVP of the SaaS to validate the market need
• How SEO works and building an email list to promote your SaaS
• SaaS KPIs like churn, customer acquisition costs (CAC), and customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Using virtual assistants to get more capacity

I'd say it's a better read for people with little or no business experience and people who have never founded a business before.