There is no magic bullet I think. It also depends on the market you are after. If you are not after the big bucks from huge corporations, there are a few things I believe do help, things I also see on the healthchecks.io website:
- Have a no bullshit, clear description of what your product does right on the front page. No marketing lingo, no big overpromising. *Relevant* screenshots help.
- A free plan without huge caveats. This depends on your service, but it helps if people can actually trial the full service before committing. It also helps with word of mouth advertising, as someone who is using it personally might also recommend it for their company.
- Have clear and reasonable pricing.
- Don't hide documentation for your service behind a login. I have advised against using SaaS's services in the past because I couldn't easily find documentation.
- Actual have clear documentation for your product. It shows a level of maturity.
- Be clear about you as a company. You don't need to have an about page with mugshots of all team members smiling and their role description. But I do want to know what sort of company I am dealing with. So, I am looking for an about page with a reasonable description. Ideally, you have more than just a contact form. In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service.
Disclaimer: Purely my personal experience being involved in selecting SaaS services. It also more or less aims at smaller to mid-sized companies, as with bigger companies you sadly do need some marketing bullshit. But with larger companies you also get to deal with more bullshit in regard to their requirements, something the healthchecks.io owner also specifically seems to avoid.
The above also assumes that you get people to land on your website. Which is really difficult, which is why I guess a lot of these services have a blog. Blog posts allow them to be posted on websites like hackernews and other media more often.
> In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service.
Great point. Always leaves a bitter taste, like the business is trying to hide behind their website.
In Germany there's a law that requires anyone doing business on the internet to have your real address on your website (commonly known as impress, see §2 DDG). From what I know this is even a EU regulation, so probably law in all EU countries. And honestly, I think that's a really good law.
There are a lot of office spaces available for single person businesses around here.
The point is that I don't need to be able to visit or physically mail anything. But it is just one more point of trust and something I can more easily verify.
Frankly, I'd be okay with a P.O. box if it is clear it is a small business operated mostly from someone's home.
It simply, at least here, is something that allows you to verify things like a company actually being registered at that address.
Another thing is that geographic location matters. For things like data protection laws and other laws the company I want to do business with might or might not follow depending on the country they are based in.
We're not a one-person shop, but as a fully remote startup we also use a forwarding address service. Not very expensive and quite convenient. Lets us rebind the final destination of our mail (like, when our "handles everything official" person moved!) without needing to update a lot of places.
- Have a no bullshit, clear description of what your product does right on the front page. No marketing lingo, no big overpromising. *Relevant* screenshots help.
- A free plan without huge caveats. This depends on your service, but it helps if people can actually trial the full service before committing. It also helps with word of mouth advertising, as someone who is using it personally might also recommend it for their company.
- Have clear and reasonable pricing.
- Don't hide documentation for your service behind a login. I have advised against using SaaS's services in the past because I couldn't easily find documentation.
- Actual have clear documentation for your product. It shows a level of maturity.
- Be clear about you as a company. You don't need to have an about page with mugshots of all team members smiling and their role description. But I do want to know what sort of company I am dealing with. So, I am looking for an about page with a reasonable description. Ideally, you have more than just a contact form. In fact, if you don't have a real address listed, I will not consider your service.
Disclaimer: Purely my personal experience being involved in selecting SaaS services. It also more or less aims at smaller to mid-sized companies, as with bigger companies you sadly do need some marketing bullshit. But with larger companies you also get to deal with more bullshit in regard to their requirements, something the healthchecks.io owner also specifically seems to avoid.
The above also assumes that you get people to land on your website. Which is really difficult, which is why I guess a lot of these services have a blog. Blog posts allow them to be posted on websites like hackernews and other media more often.