Find your SaaS customer before you build a product with Nicolas Saliba @Tryane

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love brought to you by https://saas.group/ . I’m your host Anna Nadeina, Head of Growth for saas.group.

In episode #13, we are talking with Nicolas Saliba, the founder of Tryane Analytics (https://tryane.com/en/), a cross-channel analytics platform that helps internal communication professionals to be more efficient.

From Engineer to Entrepreneur: The Birth of Tryane

Nicolas’ entrepreneurial journey began with his engineering background. After working in the civil engineering field, he recognized the opportunity to disrupt the industry with software. Together with a friend, he set out to build a collaboration analytics platform that would help companies better understand their internal communication and productivity.

However, the initial approach of building a “shiny” product first and then trying to find customers proved to be a mistake. “We built the POC and then asked ourselves, ‘Okay, so who do we sell that to?’ which is exactly the opposite of what you should do,” Nicolas recalls. This early misstep taught him a valuable lesson about the importance of understanding customer needs before building a product.

Pivoting to a SaaS Approach: The Yammer Opportunity

As Tryane struggled to gain traction with its initial product, Nicolas and his team faced a critical turning point in 2014. With the company on the brink of bankruptcy, Nicolas made a bold decision to pivot the business and focus on a new opportunity – the emerging Enterprise Social Network (ESN) market, specifically Yammer, which had just been acquired by Microsoft.

By conducting customer interviews and understanding the pain points of internal communication professionals using Yammer, Nicolas and his team were able to develop a SaaS-based analytics solution tailored to this specific market. The result was a remarkable turnaround, with Tryane gaining 60,000 users and dozens of paying customers within just a month and a half of launching the new product.

Scaling Sales and Lead Generation

With the Yammer-focused product gaining traction, Nicolas knew he needed to optimize Tryane’s sales and lead generation processes. Drawing inspiration from the book “Predictable Revenue” by Aaron Ross, he implemented a sales team structure that separated lead generation, closing, and customer success management.

“The highest paid and the most difficult skill in sales is closing,” Nicolas explains. “Your “closers” should not spend time generating sales. You have junior people doing SDR, generating leads, nurturing them, and then you have your most experienced and usually most expensive salespeople close the deal.” 

This division of labor allowed Tryane to better identify and address bottlenecks in their sales pipeline, while also freeing up the closing team to focus on their core strength – converting qualified leads into customers.

Personalization and Targeted Outreach

In addition to optimizing their sales processes, Tryane also placed a strong emphasis on personalized outreach and targeted messaging. Rather than blasting the same generic message across multiple channels, the team focused on understanding their ideal customer personas and tailoring their communication accordingly.

“Everybody has an email, but then the read rates of the newsletter are not that great. You have to be more specific about where should you post and what time and also what you tell your customers. For me, internal communications iare very much like external marketing.”

The Importance of Communication in Business

Throughout Tryane’s journey, communication has been a central theme. Whether it’s communicating with customers to understand their needs, conveying the company’s vision to the team, or crafting effective sales messaging, Nicolas has learned the importance of clear and targeted communication.

“Whatever you do you have to tailor your communication. You don’t talk to every person the same in your life so it’s completely the same in business as well,” he says.

Resilience and Adaptability: Keys to Entrepreneurial Success

Reflecting on Tryane’s journey, Nicolas emphasizes the importance of resilience and adaptability for founders. “Entrepreneurship is like jumping from a plane and figuring out the way to build a parachute and that’s kind of like how it is,” he says. “I’d rather just be with my team and innovate and try new stuff and you know if it fails, it fails. That’s life.”

Despite the ups and downs, Nicolas has remained steadfast in his commitment to Tryane, constantly learning from his mistakes and pivoting the business to better serve its customers. This resilience and willingness to adapt have been instrumental in Tryane’s success, and serve as an inspiration for other founders navigating the challenges of building a thriving SaaS business.