Srikrishnan Ganesan | Source | CEO & Co-Founder at Rocketlane

A strong customer community can bring your product to new heights and instill loyalty amongst your customers. In 2022, we’ve continued to build our community via Slack to bring together like-minded individuals working in the same space and facilitate beneficial industry discussions, including a roundtable program involving domain experts. Social media is another great way to leverage your community – we have a “customer of the month” spotlight series and round-up customers’ current openings and share it with our network. Beyond fostering a virtual connection, we’re aiming to invest in monthly events, local industry chapters, or other means to engage within the industry’s community to deliver more value to our customers.

In today's world, for a SaaS company, the early team should look like: one business generalist with pre-sales or biz dev expertise who can handle customers, investors, and marketing, one product head, four to five engineers, one multi-disciplinary design lead, and one product marketing lead. People like products that feel modern, and well designed in today's world. So this is the bare minimum team needed to launch an offering that can be considered credible.

Review sites and forums are a great way to learn about your competitive landscape. Also PR, social presence, testimonials and case studies they have, etc. are valuable resources to learn about their positioning, what's resonating with their customers, etc.