Does your SaaS actually save your customers from doing more work?

A recent conversation on Twitter with a colleague has reminded of this dilemma that we faced in our early days of launching my SaaS.

You see, In 25 years of consulting to small businesses, I had learned that business owners and managers were faced with the challenge of recording and maintaining a LOT of information about their staff. Things would often get forgotten or lost, being recorded on multiple spreadsheets, word documents and paper notes all over the place.

I thought that if we could build a system to aggregate all that data in the one place, then we would be solving a real issue. As a bonus, we would add reminders into our system so that important renewals and anniversaries would not be forgotten.

Well, that is exactly what we built with version 1 of HR Partner. It was essentially a huge database that would contain all ancillary data related to your employees, such as training they had done, their past education history, a history of their absences from work, contracts and documents relating to them, and much more.

As we didn’t get any eager customers. At all.

You see, we weren’t really solving any issue. Our customers would be recording just as much data as they would have been doing before in Excel, or a notepad, or on a whiteboard, except now we were just asking them to do it in a system that was unfamiliar to them. No wonder we didn’t have any takers.

We weren’t providing a huge amount of value to them for all this work (sometimes a little extra work) that they would have to do to store all that data in our app. Sure we had automated reminders, but this wasn’t compelling enough for them to make the switch and pay for our service.

It wasn’t until we added the ability for their employees to submit leave requests for approval by upper management. NOW we were on to something. The managers didn’t have to do as much work, as that was now delegated to their employees.

It was up to the employees to submit a leave request with their leave type they wanted, their start/end dates etc. and then all the manager had to do was to literally click one button and the process was completed. Any approved leave would be automatically added to the company calendar so that everyone had a ‘helicopter view’ of who would be away and when.

This was the turning point where we started to see traction in the market. Just by focusing on one niche area that actually cut down on work that the business stakeholders had to do. Also, we were repurposing all that collected data to give different perspectives on team movement and activity. Finally, our customers were seeing real value in our system.

Incidentally, we have since added many more features in our HR app, but the leave requests module is still our most popular and widely used feature - 7 years later!