STRENGTH

Buffer SWOT Analysis Identify Product Market Dynamics and Challenges Product Strategy Transparent Roadmap Alignment More features in the backlog are prepped for Business customers Community Dedicated users Passionate user base willing to switch from Edgar and Instagram API to Buffer Leverage community for support Product council Beta testers Word of mouth marketing WEAKNESS Sales Is the customer success team / happiness hero part of the business on-boarding team or sales team or sales engineering team? Case studies are good but can be stronger use cases and value statement Nature of user — need to analyze how to move up organization (ex: Land and Expand) Business tier plan, free -to- $99biz -to- $899 enterprise, nothing in between Need to create additional plan for anchoring Business pricing plans confuse with Team pricing plans Product Lack synergy with all the products Currently its 3 *separate* products Create a foundation base or system of record and then proceed to build a social media marketing suite on top of the system of record (ex: Hubspot, Salesforce) Focus on bundling jobs concepts to solve customers problems (ex: Intercom) Features are unknown due to UI You can post comment on Facebook posts inside Analytics; UX is unclear “Non-binary Actions” Highly discourage from recommending any future Post Suggestion or Hashtag Suggestions (non-binary actions) features Dependency of Platforms unable to use some features (tagging) due to official API Developer Community Need to grow developer community, low developer content Currently unable to scale problem-solving to users / customers request OPPORTUNITIES Community Develop 3rd party developer community Enabling developers to attain greater revenue growth Promote Buffer API to unlock various use cases Shine lights on Buffer culture for future engineers and technical hires Turn Buffer.com/extra into an App Store Directory Example Slack: Buffer Platform / Product Moving beyond simple workflow to take over piece of a typical company software suite, and can make Buffer as the premier software similar to Salesforce What is everyone’s marketing stack, and how can it integrate well with others Maximize integrations with Zapier and IFTTT Leverage Buffer’s historical data for 3rd party Encourage the product team to strip down and re-think about how Buffer can utilize the social media metric data it already has to build a core data foundation for businesses Encourage customers on collaboration and build draft and creative space — because pricing based on seats Recommend the product team to weave in usage between the 3 products as a product strategy moving forward Sales Purchase for your whole team — use professionally, everyone should be on social Create more education content for feature suggestion (ex: Neil Patel-type content for “how to find best hashtags”) As product move up-market, need to shape the sales conversations. THREATS Competitors Way too many competitors of various sizes Larger competitors compete against business customers — switching cost might be too high (ex: Newscred) Climate Require sales to negotiate and tap into marketing budget for bigger clients Seasonal purchase pattern and usage Baremetric Downgrades for Businesses need to be analyze; unable to keep small business plan customers at same rate as Upgrades JTBD USERS JOBS (as study from building OzContent and analysis in Newscred & Percolate) When I, a social media strategist, have an idea and I am ready to share content, I want to easily create a text message under 140 characters, so I can post it on Twitter. When I have my social media post ready and approved, I want to schedule and post to all my social media channels at once, so that it will save me time. When I receive a notification regarding my posts, I want respond / converse to comments for every channel in one single interface, so I don’t have navigate through multiple social media sites. When I want to know what shared post resonated, I want to review analytics and metrics, so I can continue to post content from similar topics that resonated. When I want to create content, I want to group content together as “campaigns”, so I can cleanly analyze topic and group posts that resonated well. When I realize I have different use cases for my company and clients, I want to customize my Buffer scheduling needs, so I can save time by building a customized one-time workflow without adjusting my clients to our original workflow. When I finished my contract with my client, I want to switch out their social media channels easily and I can charge my clients a % share of my SaaS products usage, so I can off-board my clients cleanly and fluently without any issues. branding (url shorteners, hashtags analytics) When I want to write a draft post, I want to use a simple Wysiwyg, so I can record my thoughts without anxiety of advance editing. When I want to share ideas, I want to collaborate draft materials with my colleagues, so we can develop mindshare on our social media posts. When I am on the go, I want to be alert about trending topics, so I can capitalize on posting to social media. When I am too focus on other activities, I want to receive recommendation based on our analytics data, so I can discover opportunities when I am inactive. When I learn more about readers / followers / customers as a whole, I want to drill down a follower list and graph, so I can see which segment is more engaging. When I am uncertain about how my posts are doing, I want to request feedback from my audience, so I can further engage with them and understand if my content posts are working or not. When I feel like my posts can do better and I need more understanding, I want to receive more training, and want more learning about best-practices, so I can execute and be better at my job. When I remember or want to find out how an post did, I want to search posted content, so I can know if the post did well or not and if the overall topic area resonated. USER DESIRES Minimum time on app should not be a dashboard to hang out on Connect from sources and feeds What are users doing with the RSS sources? are they drafting on top of it immediately? Get hashtag, maximize exposure Tagging, and editing Looking for full stack solutions Publishing / Engagement / Reporting See growth coming from all channels Gary-Yau Chan is a SaaS entrepreneur and currently lives in Brooklyn NY. You can also message him on Twitter @garyyauchan. Or catch him at The Startup Chat Facebook Group or checkout his portfolio. Tags: Product AnalysisSubscribe to learn about building profitable SaaS products.