How to Market Your SaaS Platform
to Developers During a Recession
With the recent downturn on public stock markets
due to COVID-19, a recession or depression is
almost inevitable. It’s likely we see mass failures
across retail, travel, entertainment, and other indus-
try sectors. The spillover from coronavirus disease
and the following shelter-in-place can have drastic
consequences in the startup world. Small brick
and mortar businesses that were shuttered due to
shelter-in-place rules will no longer are spending
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money on Facebook or Yelp to promote their busi-
ness nor will they maintain their SaaS subscriptions.
Large enterprises will pull back spending in sales
and marketing in anticipation of a recession. This
could cause reduction in seat counts or usage for
SaaS contract. Similarly, sales teams may find CFOs
and financial controllers are blocking many more
purchases than before forcing deals to be stuck in
procurement or legal review.
How to Market Your SaaS Platform to Developers During a Recession
 The good news is that many developer platforms
and APIs have tricks that make them more resilient
to a recession. However, if you’re not doing these
items today, now is the time to reconsider to ensure
the longevity of your product and/or company.

Key Initiatives To Stay On Track

Focus on the self-service business

During a recession, many large enterprises are hesitant to commit financial and
human resources to run a paid pilot or sign a large enterprise contract due to their
own financial uncertainty. You could have the best social proof and quantitative
numbers via case studies and strong customer logos, yet VPs may have received a
directive to freeze all non mission-critical spend and hiring leaving them no choice.
On the positive side, many senior engineers and managers have a budget for
discretionary expenditure for SaaS tools. While the budget may be small and only
enable a spend somewhere between $100/month to $1000/month, these expendi-
tures usually require very little to sign off or approve. With the correct usage based
pricing model, you will be able to expand these accounts over time which may
even approach the ACV you would normally see with a small enterprise agreement
even though the customer is paying month-to-month on a credit card. While your
competitors watched their sales pipeline dry up and laid off vast numbers of their
sales force, you get to gain self-service customers whose usage may accelerate
quickly once the market starts to recover.

Recession-proof your pricing strategy

With a self-service business, there are a variety of ways to price. Usually, you want
to price using value-metrics rather than cost metrics. However, there may be
multiple value metrics you could leverage. Ideally, ensure your pricing enables
upsells to be automatic even if their is a reduction in staff. For example, a sales tool
that priced by the number of contacts in a CRM or a marketing tool that is priced
via MAU (Monthly Active Users) will do better than a tool that leverages per seat
pricing. A large reduction in staff can cause the company to renegotiate a lower
seat count. However, a few companies will experience a fall off in MAU or number
of contacts.

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 Track your adoption funnel religiously
If you don’t have any product analytics tools in place, now is the time. Instrument
everything you can. Instrument your APIs. Instrument your web apps. Make sure
every advert or external link is leveraging UTM parameters.. This enables you to
understand which acquisition channels have the highest ROI and drive product
growth. Top of funnel growth is no longer ideal. You should only be investing in
channels that lead to direct conversions. For most developer platforms, this means
customers have actually integrated and are actively using your API. If you’re only
measuring page views and sign ups, take the downtime to re-evaluate what your
true

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 Build your online presence
With the conference circuit shut down, now is the time to think about your online
presence. Create blog posts and webinars that can be posted both to your own
blog, but also syndicated out to partners in your space. The key for content though
is to ensure it’s authentic and relevant. Quality content almost always wins over
sheer quantity. By creating content, you’re increasing your presence in organic
search, but you also gain other benefits. For example, potential customers will
share the content via social channels giving you additional exposure for free. You
can also leverage the content when following up with a strong prospect. Instead of
just consistent nudges on “let’s set up a time to chat”, you can demonstrate value
by sharing the content for them to consume at their own pace.

Minimize churn risk

Identifying and minimizing customer churn risk becomes far more important than
top of funnel growth during a recession. Many times, we can find additional growth
by reprioritizing the potential customers that already signed up and/or are paying.
You should have a mechanism to track account health and get alerted when things
are not looking good. Things to look out for:

Customers with decreasing API usage week-over-week

Customers that are only accessing only one or two endpoints
Looking into SDKs that have a higher drop off which could indicate bugs or lack of
documentation
Customers with a high number of errors or latency such as unauthorized errors
Customers who have not accessed your primary value creation endpoints

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 Focus on customer success and developer advocacy
Depending on your company, you may have a more traditional customer success
department or maybe a devrel group with developer advocates taking over some
more traditional customer success responsibilities. Your current customers are
your largest advocate during a recession. Make them successful with your API with
an awesome developer experience and they will tell their colleagues and friends.
Some small things include following up with developers who integrated with your
API already on what their building and how you can help. If you do identify a cus-
tomer that’s running into integration issues, reach out and offer assistance.

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 Look to partnerships and integrations
With paid marketing budgets shrinking and cutbacks in sales headcount, achieving
the same growth milestones may seem like a moonshot. Yet, there are countless
developer platforms that leverage partnerships and integrations for organic, low
cost growth. Take a look at any company that offers a marketplace that you can be
listed in such as GitHub, Heroku, AWS, etc. Because some of these may be crowd-
ed reducing your visibility, you should also look to other SaaS tools that your target
buyer is also using. If you’re a marketing tool, maybe an integration with Hubspot
makes sense. If you’re a API monitoring tool, maybe building integrations with
PagerDuty and Slack make sense so your customers can get alerts via their existing
set up.

Conclusion

Marketing an API platform to developers is tough. Usually marketing and sales

budgets need to be decreased, enterprises are less reluctant to sign new contracts,
etc. By focusing on your adoption funnel and finding growth channels that are
cheap such as content and partnerships can work.

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