Immediate goals

Weekend ahead, lots of time to make progress. So, by Monday goal is to launch LEV3R, and this is the roadmap for doing so.

MVP concept works not just for products, but also for missions, so I need a Minimum Viable Mission (MVM), that triggers the first users to get the concept and get value out of it as soon as possible.

I like the following MVM: Increase your SaaS revenues by promoting other SaaS to your customers.

It will probably look better in the home page with huge font sizes for the first part: Increase your SaaS revenues, and latter, with a smaller font, the how-to: by promoting other SaaS to your customers.

Few things to test here

1. This might take SaaS owners out of their comfort zone, key for this is to use the word promote instead of recommend. Probably share would be better.
2. It doesn't mention this is, mostly, recurring revenue, as SaaS commissions typically last for 12 months, which is not bad considering average life time for a SaaS customer is 24 months
3. So I should also test using MRR instead of plain revenues, which is a common acronym in the SaaS world

Let's say we have our mission, what's next

Mission drives product so, what do we need from the procut, to deliver our mission's promess?

Website

We'll need a website, with a huge hero area for our value proposition, below that we can go a bit tactical on how this works, probably using real world SaaS companies as examples make it easier to understand it.

Main goal of this website will be to get users to sign up to LEV3R. That means we'll also need...

Users dashboard

Here's where users will signup, signin and generate their ad placements.

Regarding ad placements, I'll start with simple ads looking like Carbon ads, other formats should follow, like email components, image banners, API, top/bottom bars, etc.

Actual ads

If we are going to alow users to display ads... we need to have campaigns to fulfill those impressions. So I'll need to signup for at least 20 affiliate programs to have some coverage. Happily SaaS usually don't care about geo limitations, they just pay a commission no matter where the clients is from, so that will lessen our adserver requirements.

Adserver

If we have affiliates who will be running ads, we'll need an adserver. At the very least we'll need to track impressions, clicks and conversions. And to display these metrics in some basic reporting in the Users dashboard.

Given the nature of this marketplace, affiliates will need to define what categories of campaigns they are willing to run, so they are not promoting their competitors!

Admin panel

Last but not least... I'll need some admin tool to manage the users and campaigns.

Seems like a lot, is it?

Let's do the list:

1. Website - One pager so users can get the concept and signup
2. Dashboard - Create your placement, define categories you want to promote and see reports
3. Adserver - A different application, in a different infrastructure to serve the ads for each placement and log the reports
4. Admin panel - See and moderate users and campaigns
5. Affiliate programs - Register into as many programs I can to fill the demand side

Friday 7:53PM at this moment, this seems doable in two days. Let's see how it goes.