Imagine a municipality. Shops, apartments, and roads. When I looked at all these, I realized how similar they are to SaaS products, which led me to question. Let’s deepen the queries and blend them with examples.
Shops and Residences
I liken shops and homes to the payment areas of our SaaS, where the revenue flows. This also reminds me of shops, where people in homes come into contact with people in other homes.
We use the community feature or social media to enable sociability in our SaaS. This can increase the use of our product. It allows for an emotional connection.
Police Stations, Fire Brigades and Hospitals
Police Stations
People who deal with people who cause outbursts in socializing environments. In SaaS, it’s the moderation team. I am a solopreneur and I can’t make a place for my members to socialize because I don’t have a moderation team.
I’ve built different communities before, I’ve moderated forums with thousands of members, and if you don’t have moderation, you can get into legal problems. This is a very bad thing!
Fire Brigades
It’s like the people in the software team who find bugs and fix them. This is very important or your product can fail.
Hospitals
The technical support center in your product. I use email for that, but it’s no problem. Even this thought exercise relaxes my mind.
Environmental Engineers
Good environmental design creates healthy relationships. For example, if you put a sign on a pedestrian road, cars may not be interested and speed on the pedestrian road. To solve this in environmental design, they make the road narrow. Because it is narrow, all the vehicles are lined up one after the other. This inevitably makes the vehicle slow down.
It intuitively guided the vehicle owner without any warning. Yes, we can call these people UX designers. I’m having this problem in my SaaS right now. My members were asking me to delete their accounts and I did some work and finally, I understood why they should delete their accounts. That’s a topic for another article.
Walkways and Parks
Having places where people can play sports or spend time with their families affects the happiness of the people inside the municipality. This is how I interpret this in terms of SaaS.
Making things that can be used for free. The best representative of free products right now is Marc Lou, who creates a virality effect with different free products for his users and attracts an audience to his existing products.
I created Notion Unicode for free in my product and people still don’t realize how cool it is. I believe they will realize it in time.
Signs, billboards, brochures, social media, etc.
We can call it content. If the municipality organizes a concert, you should know about it. This increases the happiness of the existing public. We can say that this is done in SaaS with newsletters, social media, and notifications on the dashboard page.
So what comes to your mind? You can tag and share from X. Or write comments from the Substack.