Your Approach To Thinking Can Make or Break Your SaaS

Victoria Rudi
July 5, 2022
⌚ 3 min read

The entrepreneurial space on Twitter is packed with posts praising “doing” instead of “thinking.” That’s understandable. People tend to confuse “overthinking” with “thinking” and “doing” with “getting results.”

Let’s take these concepts one by one:

→ Overthinking: Spending most of your time thinking uncontrollably or overanalyzing a subject. For example, this can be the architecture of your website, your business model, or the pricing plans. Overthinking may lead to:

  • Analysis paralysis or the inability to decide on a subject or situation
  • Absence of action or random action that has zero impact on changing a situation
  • Perfectionism or spending most of your time on irrelevant subjects, such as selecting the perfect font for your website or recording multiple times a tutorial video
  • Excessive worries, tiredness, and burning out symptoms
  • Lack of clarity
  • Often changes in plans

→ Thinking: Using your mind to produce thoughts and reason about something. There are two ways of thinking:

  • Freestyle thinking: Letting your mind wander about different subjects without controlling the thinking process or outcome. In some cases, freestyle thinking is great for coming up with unexpected solutions. Freestyle thinking usually happens when you’re relaxed, walking, running, or doing any other activity that doesn’t require mental energy.
  • Purposeful thinking: Engaging in structured, framework-based thinking that aims to analyze a specific situation, identify the best action course, and/or solve a well-defined problem.

→ Doing: Executing or engaging in a series of actions. By separating thinking from doing, we’re simply in motion, which involves:

  • Having no clear strategy or purpose
  • Repeating the same things without analyzing their impact
  • Generating weak or no results

→ Getting results: Engaging in a series of actions that stem from a clear purpose with a specific end goal. It’s worth mentioning that combining purposeful thinking with doing will result in diligent actions, subsequently leading to results.

Thinking Without Doing = Wistful thinking

You can dedicate a part of your time to thinking and developing a strong, well-defined growth strategy for your SaaS. Yet, you won’t move the needle without deploying this strategy and the action plan that derives from it.

Doing Without Thinking = Impactless or harmful actions

Without thinking, though, you won’t be able to articulate your actions and align them with your growth strategy, ensuring their overall impact on your business.

In my experience, I’ve seen teams jumping into doing without thinking. Someone comes up with the idea that sounds good, and everyone agrees to execute it without evaluating things such as:

  • Why should we deploy this idea?
  • Is this idea aligned with our overall growth strategy?
  • Do we have the necessary bandwidth to deploy this idea?
  • Is our SaaS platform meeting the requirements necessary to deploy this idea?

For example, someone may throw the idea of transforming users into creators and nudge them into building templates based on your software. Everybody likes the idea and decides to go with it. However, without going through the thinking process first, the team may miss several crucial details, such as:

  • The platform allows a limited number of use cases, making templates obsolete.
  • Apart from branding details, the templates would look all the same.

You can deploy multiple actions. However, if there’s no thinking behind it, they’ll have little to zero impact on your overall growth.

Thinking + Doing = Results

We can’t separate thinking from doing, especially when growing a SaaS. Thinking is as critical as doing.

In some cases, SaaS teams will come up with specific actions and try to integrate them into the overall strategy resulting from a detailed and purposeful thinking process. That’s a wrong approach, however. Here’s how it looks:

Wrong approach:

  • (step 1) Coming up with a cool action
  • (step 2) Integrate the action into the overall strategy and deploy it

→ Example:

  • (step 1) Let’s create multiple feature pages based on high-intent, low-volume keywords. This action will help us increase organic traffic.
  • (step 2) More organic traffic will result in higher conversion, a goal we aim to achieve with our growth strategy.

Why is this approach wrong?

Just think about it: Building multiple feature pages won’t necessarily help you increase conversion. The team came up with an idea and justified its implementation by making a wrong assumption: more landing pages will lead to more traffic, which will ensure a higher number of signups.

Better conversion practices will help you ensure higher conversion—not a higher number of landing pages. They did that to integrate the idea into the overall growth strategy that aims to increase conversion.

What should they do instead?

Right approach:

  • (step 1) Schedule time for purposeful thinking
  • (step 2) Design a well-defined growth strategy
  • (step 3) Define an action plan based on your growth strategy
  • (step 4) Deploy the action plan

Example:

  • (step 1) Run several purposeful thinking session
  • (step 2) As a result of the thinking process, you may define a growth strategy focused on driving signups by attracting bottom-of-the-funnel leads (instead of top-of-the-funnel)
  • (step 3) Decide to focus on creating content for bottom-of-the-funnel leads, such as comparison articles, success stories, and more.
  • (step 4) Build a timeline and start creating the content

Thinking is crucial to define a strong “doing” framework.

You can’t separate those two. Moreover, be deliberate and purposeful with your thinking time for better results. Your approach to thinking will make or break your SaaS.