Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early stage entrepreneurship.
— Marc Randolph (@mbrandolph) October 21, 2024
You have to have a lot of ideas — a lot of bad ideas — if you want to end up with a good one.
You have to stop thinking and start doing.
Why iterate.so Exists
Iteration is our game. We launched our growth studio, iterate.so, with two main purposes:
- To build our own portfolio of solutions.
- To help SaaS companies grow and scale.
As we start this journey, we want to showcase our approach—how we think and work—by sharing a series of mini-cases.
For this first case, we explored creating a new tool, potentially a micro-SaaS product. This mini-case shows our approach to building and validating a prototype, giving you a window into our problem-solving mindset.
Using Constraints
Iteration and experimentation are at the core of how we work. To keep this process efficient and effective, we set some clear constraints for every project.
Constraints help us stay focused and simplify decision-making. Fewer decisions mean faster results.
Here’s what we set for this first iteration:
- One sprint timeline: Complete the first iteration in two weeks.
- Minimal effort: Use as little time and resources as possible.
- Full cycle: The iteration covers everything from building the prototype to getting real feedback.
Finding Our Audience
“To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.”
— Julie Zhou
We set out to serve B2B SaaS companies—specifically those pre-PMF or in a scale-up phase.
This is an audience we know well, and we felt confident we could identify growth challenges for them.
To start, we looked to our SaaS-HQ newsletter, which has over 1,500 subscribers. The audience here includes founders, growth professionals, and product managers in SaaS—ideal candidates who could help us identify common pain points in the industry.
Finding a Problem to Solve
Our initial goal was simple: find interesting people to talk to within our B2B SaaS audience.
We believed that by connecting with engaged subscribers, we could uncover valuable insights that would reveal growth challenges worth tackling.
Finding our First Users
To get the project rolling, we needed people to talk to. Here’s the approach we used to find our first users:
- friends & family ↓ (easier 🟢)
- people you’ve worked ↓
- people who follow you on social media or newsletter ↓
- professional communities (discord, slack, etc) ↓
- cold outreach ↓ (harder 🔴)
After reaching out to friends, former colleagues, and some social media followers, we turned our focus to the subscriber list. Given that these were all organic, we anticipated strong engagement and expected to find promising individuals to speak with.
But as we analyzed our subscriber list, we encountered an unexpected roadblock: many subscribers used personal email addresses, making it difficult to determine their roles, companies, or industries.
Houston, we have a problem
we wondered:
- Are other newsletter creators struggling with the same problem of limited subscriber data?
- Could this be a meaningful problem to solve?
Defining the problem
The goal here was to frame the problem clearly, explore possible solutions, and identify the resources needed. We also focused on the impact: how we wanted the user to feel and what a successful experience would look like.
Problem Statement
* notice our audience has been redefined.
Solution Snapshot
Key Benefits:
→ Instantly gain insights into subscribers’ job roles, companies, and locations.
→ Segment the audience for more personalized, targeted campaigns.
→ Optimize email send times based on geographic data for better open rates.
Building the Prototype
The goal here was to approximate the user experience as closely as possible while staying within the constraints we set.
We focused on creating an “aha moment”—the point where the user realizes the value of the tool. This meant balancing research with a bit of experimentation to see what would create that experience.
Once we understood the challenge of gathering detailed subscriber data for SaaS-HQ, we started exploring ways to enrich our existing subscriber list with additional data points. Our goal: to see if data augmentation could give us a better view of our readers.
We found our solution by using third-party data providers. From there, we quickly set up a local workflow that could output a more informative list of subscribers with specific data points. We then poured this enriched data back into beehiiv, allowing us to target audiences more precisely and and do a few more cool thing.
Getting Real Feedback
With a working data augmentation process in place, we shifted our focus to getting real-world feedback from potential users who could benefit from this workflow.
We created a quick demo video to showcase the concept and illustrate how enriched subscriber data could lead to more personalized, impactful newsletters. To make the demo more interactive, we used a hypothetical productized interface built with Vercel’s v0. Using AI code generation tools allowed us to create a basic, functional interface in no time, perfect for quick prototyping and validation.
Our goal now was to test if the problem we’d encountered for ourselves was something others were also experiencing. This would help us better understand the right audience and their needs.
Sharing and Collecting Feedback
Where Do beehiiv Users Hang Out?
Two main communities stood out for engaging beehiiv users: the beehiiv Slack channel and the beehiiv subreddit. We planned to share our demo there, studying the best times to post to maximize engagement.
We posted the short, 20-second showcase video version to introduce the idea.
Handling Feedback and Curiosity
We carefully monitored each reaction in both Slack and Reddit, quickly following up with a longer, 90-second demo video that provided more details. We also invited people to a quick 15-minute chat to help us better understand their needs and expectations.
The engagement was encouraging—our Reddit post even became one of the week’s most active threads.
Iterating Forward
This initial case study was just the beginning. While we’ve gathered valuable insights and interest, true validation lies ahead — the product itself isn’t validated yet.
In the upcoming phase, we’ll take a bold step to see if this tool has real value: asking for payment directly in calls with potential users.
Stay tuned as we dive into the next chapter, where the prototype faces its ultimate measure of success. Will it prove to be a “nice-to-have” or a must-have that users are eager to pay for?
We’re about to find out.
