If you were early in a B2B SaaS product category but over the years you’re starting to get clones every week, what would you do?
That’s what happened to Feature Upvote, a client of mine.
I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. I have long relationships with some of my clients. I have seen them go through multiple positioning shifts.
And I wanted to share some of these stories with you. Here’s the first one.
Feature Upvote, a feedback board tool
Steve McLeod, the founder of Feature Upvote, started it around the same time as Canny in 2017, the current leader of the category.
There was already another leader at the time: UserVoice. But it was not the best software and they went upmarket, so there was a big opportunity.
When popular software went upmarket
I remember that time in 2015-2020 where very popular software went upmarket and became inaccessible to many companies in a time where competition was very sparse. Zendesk comes to mind. It created a ton of opportunities everywhere.
Here’s a 2016 article from Tomasz Tunguz talking about it. In summary: SMB CAC and lead volume don’t scale; ACV, sales team, and enterprise features do. VCs pushed a lot of companies to go upmarket.
Then the category filled up
Move forward to today and there are new tools in the feedback board software category every week, maybe every day.
Not easy to stand out and grow. Plus, the product is not really a painkiller for many businesses:
Most businesses don’t have that much feedback to manage or just don’t actively try to get feedback.
And even if they do, they might just use a form builder and a spreadsheet because they don’t need a tool to manage 10-20 comments per month.
Finding a painkiller audience
Steve noticed that problem and looked at how he could reposition Feature Upvote to make it into a painkiller.
He found that a growing share of customers were video game companies. No other tools in the category were catering to that audience. And these companies get a LOT of feedback because they have hundreds of thousands of players instead of a handful of paid customers.
Plus feedback without a board is all over the place: on Steam, Discord, Reddit, it’s a total mess to manage.
So he decided to niche down and focus on video game companies more specifically when marketing Feature Upvote.
Another reason he wanted to make that change was that video game customers are more enjoyable than “boring corporate” SaaS.
You can listen to his podcast on the reasons he repositioned Feature Upvote here.
The old channels didn’t fit
But this change had a problem: the channels fitting that new audience were not the same.
I did some SEO content for Feature Upvote and we tested video game content a bit but from my research and experiments, there weren’t many opportunities.
People in that industry are on Discord communities and give recommendations about tools they used there. Hard to reach people without being part of these communities.
So instead he created a podcast interviewing people in the video game industry and it works pretty well.
I also helped him on:
the homepage messaging
interviewing some video game customers for some fresh customer stories
writing guides based on the advice that was in the 30+ podcast episodes
Why most of the category won’t follow
I see too many founders afraid of niching down, so it gives you an edge if you do it.
Also not everyone in that category will make the switch:
Classic distribution channels they’re used to don’t work (SEO, ads at least on some platforms).
Podcasting isn’t as easy as writing content. Steve had another podcast before so he knew how to do it.
And he also has to go to video game conventions like Gamescom which not everyone can afford if they have a small SaaS.
Anyway lots of reasons why this ICP is underserved and competition might never arrive.