Your SaaS startup can make a better version of something that already exists or it can make a new thing that people haven’t heard of yet. They are two different games.
- Existing categories in markets that are already crowded
- New categories in potential markets with no crowd yet
There is one more, in between those two. There are categories that exist in other markets, but are new to your market (your customers).
SaaS founders need to know which game they are playing to make the most progress.
Some software founders, like me, prefer to go where the crowds aren’t yet.
Like Morgan Katz 🎟️, a practical SaaS founder and CEO of Ticketnology, which provides a new kind of “season ticket management” software for SMBs that share sports and entertainment tickets with employees and clients.
Morgan sold season tickets and managed events for 10 years until COVID hit. Overnight, all event tickets were delivered digitally, which created headaches for whoever had to distribute tickets and make sure they were used.
She seized the opportunity to create software to help manage distribution across multiple ticketing platforms and different types of guests. Ticketnology helps maximize the event experience for the guests—and it improves ROI for the companies that spend big money on tickets and suites.
Ticketnology is now a $2M ARR software business and it is growing fast–without outside funding. Morgan and her team are on their way to their next milestone of $10M ARR.
But their prospects still don’t know there is software that could make their lives easier and make the most of managing their season tickets.
It’s a new category. So Morgan had to find the right sales and marketing approaches to find customers—and build their market.
As Morgan described it on the Practical Founders Podcast this week:
“Season ticket management is not a ranking keyword on Google yet, so it’s very different. People don’t know the word season ticket management.
“We struggled to find a simple message you just put on a LinkedIn ad online is or what the term is, what the phrase is, and what all of that is. We trial-and-errored everything, and most failed dramatically.
“We do well when we can talk to people or we can connect at an event. We do a lot of conferences. We do a lot of content and I speak at a lot of events. We make sure we’re a helpful resource even in our cold outreach with education and tips.
“We also try to be a resource for sports teams to hear from their corporate season ticket clients and make sure that they know we’re their advocate to make sure that season tickets are successful.”
Morgan and her small team are educating, evangelizing, and partnering to grow fast and bring the category of “season ticket management software” to the world.
All new categories are intentionally installed in the world by crazy and relentless founders who do the work to solve new problems and educate their markets.
Listen to this interview with Morgan here on the Practical Founders Podcast.
#practicalfounders
