If you want to know how to build successful SaaS companies, then you should read the seven inspiring saas case studies now. Take a look...
The Worldwide Saas Industry expects a growth rate of about five times from $31.57B in 2015 to $172.20B in 2025. The SaaS industry continues to flourish with the ever-rising demand for the capacity to hold data in substantial amounts. In addition, technological advancement by way of Artificial intelligence also contributes to its growth.
So if you plan to build something around SaaS, then reading these inspiring stories would be worthwhile. I've aggregated and discussed how SaaS companies offer solutions to various problems, from lead generation to sales to customer grievances, that helped them (customers) overcome and grow.
Let's hear it straight from the mouth of the customer. We have also highlighted some of the best features of each SaaS platform.
1. ClickUp
By 2023, ClickUp expects to generate $200M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). In addition, ClickUp's Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is rising— from $3M in 2020 to $6.7M in December 2021. ClickUp's current revenue retention is 150%.
The Problem
A coaching institute aims to provide entrepreneurs learning tools to put their dreams into action. Naturally, it needs to organize e-courses and monthly schedules and handle sudden cancellations, digital downloads, and coaching membership, which can be quite a handful.
The Coaching Institute organizes all its Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) using the 'Docs' feature on ClickUp. It is an indispensable tool that helps entrepreneurs manage their framework, processes, schedules, emails, notes, and client feedback.
Organizations can use the 'Docs' feature on ClickUp to embed files, level up the note-taking processes, and even take screenshots directly from their Dropbox or Google Drive. In addition, you will find all related data in one place via the 'Docs' feature on ClickUp. That eliminates storing data on multiple difficult-to-access document files by integrating all team ideas and information into easy-to-access pages.
ClickUp's helpful features
User-friendly ClickUp facilitates complete visibility on the dashboard, providing easy accessibility to all tasks, projects, lists, and space.
Filters and Favourites help in the easy running of 'To Do' lists in numerous convenient ways depending on your working style. If you work individually, the 'Favourite' feature will help you better, but the 'Filter' feature will suit you best if you work as a team.
The best ClickUp is the facility to integrate your email and Calendar (Google), making scheduling and rescheduling simple.
2. Canva's growth story
Canva has over 15M users, 0.3M paid subscribers and a valuation of $3.2B in less than seven years. They attracted 2M subscribers in the first two years after finishing at $125M on a funding round.
The Problem
The magazine was in the first phase of its entrepreneurial journey and needed access to economic software to create attractive presentations, graphics, and images. Unfortunately, the entrepreneur had no design tools or skills. So he hired interns but had to find a way to engage them in content creation and work with a team on projects.
The Solution—From Zero to Hero—Learn how a Magazine Shot to Fame with Canva
Canva makes it incredibly simple for beginners with no prior designing skills to breathe life into their work. The team can work in one place to collaborate, edit, comment, approve or reject designs and even send feedback, all in real-time. With the help of Canva, teams can continue to convey a consistent brand message and follow company guidelines on all designs.
Canva's Helpful Features
Use Canva's Magic Resizing to affect the total transformation of your designs with a single click. Reshape, resize or apply the custom scaling feature to change a design from what it is to what you want it to be
Use the time-saver feature at the bottom of the screen to change the color of the design components to transform them from plain to spectacular.
Canva Pro subscribers can use the Canva brand kits feature on the top right corner of the screen to customize the design by adding your brand color, logos, or fonts.
Save hours of creation time by using the wide range of available templates accessible for Canva's Free and Pro subscribers.
Canva Pro can use the Backdrop Remover Tool in Canva to remove the background from your image. That will help your experience to complement your vision. Use the Erase and Restore tools to remove stubborn spots.
3. Postman—the ultimate assistant
Insight Partner's Postman raised $225M in the fund round and has 17M users and 5,00,000 enterprises as subscribers. Postman's private API network comprises the world's largest comprising of well-known names like Stripe and Paypal.
eCommerce Platforms Use Postman, not Only for Development
To develop apps, multiple users utilize the API of an eCommerce store. The result—bugs were leading to errors. Postman can help the technical support team request replication and debug in times of escalations. Diagnosing and healing become easy as Postman works to deal with each request individually.
You can use your passcode to access the data on your Postman account.
The Postman Echo from Postman API is a data learning and testing tool.
The Postman Visualiser decodes your request responses using JavaScript, HTML, or CSS to store and present comprehensible data.
Postman API supports GraphQL, which is rising in popularity, and the query auto-completion, including user-defined GraphQL schemes, is one of the best.
3. Later, the social media scheduler
After its launch in 2014, by assisting Instagram subscribers to schedule and publish their posts, Later has grown to serve over 4M users globally and extended its services to Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook. They are a great social media scheduling tool and offer plenty of pre-made layouts. Their free plan includes one social set that works for one Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Tiktok account).
The Problem
A well-known company manufacturing eco-friendly women's products works its strategy on six content pillars—travel, fitness, charity, wellness, environment, and style. They want their audience to find their brand pillars in their social media posts, and unfortunately, that necessitates extensive planning.
Women Products Brand's Organized Post on Social Media
To impact its audience with a compelling message about its brand, the company needs to see how its posts appear on its social media account before posting them.
The Solution—Later's Visual Instagram Planner. The company uses this feature from Later to balance the colors and fine-tune the story narrative to organize its post a week in advance for its various social media handles. The consequence is a considerable rise in followers!
Later's the best feature—the latest additions.
With Later's TikTok Scheduling tool, you can easily reach out to the 1BTik Tok monthly users across 150 countries worldwide. The feature allows users to prepare automatically, schedule, and publish their TikTok videos, and it works well for busy people to maintain consistency.
The Instagram link in the bio will help you attract more traffic to your website.
4. Notion—customizable to meet the client's need
Since its re-launch in 2018, Notion has grown to have 20M users. Their USB? They stay committed to the users and develop and expand worldwide depending on feedback from their user community.
The Problem
A tech company that works with a group of indigenous people with their sets of objectives work of various products. How do you work with a group who work independently on one page?
To utilize a Notion database that manages objectives and critical results as it coordinates all teams towards a standard set of company goals. In addition, the team works to merge their individual goals with the company objectives.
Best Features of Notion
Use the People property for project collaboration that is so much like ClickUp. You can also loop people with the People attribute.
The test editor in Notion is simple and can be customized, so it is another Notion feature that users extensively use. Notion's test editor is great for storing notes and ideas and organizing and generating content.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs.com is a complete SEO solution that combines free instructional resources and a supportive community. Ahrefs enabled fresh link-building and ideas for content analysis and may soon replace multiple tools, which is essential for SEO.
The Problem
A hosting company is looking for new ideas and topics to produce valuable and relevant content for its readers. In addition, they need a new set of tools to help them track their campaigns and keep the competition at bay.
Boost your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) by optimizing existing content and identifying critical ideas of popular trending topics using Ahref solutions.
Best Features of Ahrefs
You can use Ahrefs to filter out sites that do not link back to your site to make it easy to find low-hanging outreach possibilities.
Use Ahrefs to filter backlinks that point only to 404 pages on your website. Then, you use that list to redirect 301 redirects. You can then look for the pages that closely relate to the 404-page content and implement a 301 redirect.
6. Chili Piper
Chili Piper has secured $18M in the A round and $33M in B round, raising the total amount to $54 million. The funds raised will help to speed up product development.
The Problem
A travel and expense company learned by experience how important it was for his business to schedule a meeting between the visitors to his website and his company representative immediately.
The Solution—Quick Responses Equals Better Conversions
Chili Piper's interface with Clearbit helped the travel and expense company effect an immediate response, leading to lesser friction and greater conversions.
Best Features of Chili Piper
Chili Piper helps you incorporate changes with minimum clicks to help you balance out the number of calls scheduled towards the month-end.
Chili Piper facilitates convenient checking of calendars to schedule meetings. In addition, the chili piper automatically incorporates all discussion details in the invite.
7. Darvinbox
Darvinbox is an Asian Cloud-based HR IT platform that operates in 10 Asian countries and will soon launch itself in the United States of America. The company has raised a capital of well over $110M.
The Problem
An e-commerce platform intends to use HR technology consistent with the company's ethos and infrastructure to make it easier to transact and collect all data to make the right choices.
Darvinbox helped the e-commerce site to raise its adoption to 85 percent. Within six weeks, the company implemented Darwinbox for its 12,000 employees. They could complete 16 integrations with zero user intervention and perfect data integrity.
Best Features
Darvinbox has various HR tools to let management concentrate on improving ROI instead of spending hours over their HR system and operation.
Darvinbox works well for huge businesses with multiple HR departments to automate workflows by connecting all tasks across endpoints.
Bonus- Razorpay
Razorpay's online transactions only in Ahmedabad and Jaipur rose by 50% in just six days contributing to the payment volume of the gateway service, which increased over time to what it was in 2020.
The Problem
Educational institute struggles to pay vendors for the merchandise they purchase for students and staff. Maximum efficiency with limited resources is what they want to achieve.
The Solution—The Payment Gateway with Unlimited Options
Razorpay streamlines fee template creation and reminders to parents, bill allocation, and data management by offering a fully functional payment ERP solution.
Best Features of Razorpay
You can go online in minutes with Razorpay Payment Gateway's wide range of payment methods.
Use Razorpay Subscriptions to onboard subscribers from anywhere in the world. You can also automate your customer's fixed-price recurring charges on a set schedule.
Wrapping up
As you read each of these case studies, you can't help but notice the link between client testimonials and increased lead conversions. All case studies in this article are real experiences of customer frustrations and Saas platform solutions that helped them (the customers) to overcome their grievances and grow to unimaginable heights.
Although there is no one set pattern for creating a SaaS case study, there are specific common threads that businesses could use as a recipe for success. You find the research in this post to blend customer success stories and a valuable blog post for new and existing customers.
Sawaram Suthar (Sam) is a Founding Director at Middleware. He has extensive experience in marketing, team building and operations. He often seeing working on various GTM practices and implement best one to generate more demand. He is also founded a digital marketing blog - TheNextScoop.