Bernard Huang @Clearscope. Market fit and pricing strategy for SaaS

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 this episode #14, we are talking with Bernard Huang, the co-founder of Clearscope (https://www.clearscope.io/), one of the best-in-class SEO content optimization platform that drives search traffic. We are a fast growing digital marketing SaaS with 1,000+ customers like Adobe, Deloitte, Nvidia, Expedia, HubSpot, Shopify, Intuit, and Condé Nast. Bernard talks about disrupting the market, finding market fit, difficulties of letting go of the day-to-day operations in a small team, founder burnout, and much more.

(0:00:07) – ClearScope Co-Founder Shares Bootstrapping Success

I chat with Bernard Huang, the co-founder of ClearScope, a search engine optimization platform that has driven search traffic for over a thousand customers. We discuss Bernard’s entrepreneurial journey and his decision to bootstrap ClearScope rather than seek venture capital funding. He shares how he hustled from a young age to build his reputation in the Silicon Valley tech space and how his natural language processing experiment ultimately became ClearScope. Bernard shares his insights on how to continue making history with ClearScope and the importance of staying flexible and responsive to customer needs.

(0:18:48) – MVP and SaaS Business Strategies 

Bernard Huang and his team used Ruby on Rails to launch their search engine optimization platform, ClearScope. The platform used natural language processing to generate recommendations of concepts that should be included in a piece of content based on what was found in Google search. Bernard shares his thoughts on how the cost of launching a SaaS has changed in the last decade and the challenge of standing out with yet another tool in today’s market.

(0:32:24) – Achieving Product-Market Fit 

We explore the two main ways to achieve product-market fit and how Bernard and his team used Ruby on Rails to launch their search engine optimization platform. We also discuss the importance of being aware of the type of product market fit you’re trying to achieve and the strategies needed for success. We discuss the nuances of customer acquisition, unit economics, and product feature set. Finally, Bernard shares how they caught an early trend within natural language processing and search engine optimization, and how they used to polish user experience through marketing websites, case studies, and customer success to stand out among a handful of competitors.

(0:39:02) – Scaling a Bootstrapped SaaS Business 

We discussed the different options and strategies Bernard and his team have considered for their future, including becoming a sustainable lifestyle business, private equity, micro acquisition, and IPO. Finally, Bernard shared his thoughts on the “magical number” of 10 million in annual recurring revenue for bootstrapped SaaS businesses.