A permaculture approach to SaaS
What SaaS startups could potentially learn from this sustainable design thinking framework. Shower thoughts from a startup CEO and permaculture enthusiast.
Why SaaS?
My startup builds SaaS software for managing on-demand teams. When I say SaaS, I mean true SaaS — agile and scalable software with self-service, a transparent subscription model and regular updates.
It’s now been about four years that I’ve spent getting to know the startup world and working full time as a CEO, so thinking about SaaS takes up most of my days, weekends included.
I’ve come to support the belief in product-led growth (and community-led growth) as the best strategy for building and scaling SaaS. Especially with freemium SaaS (such as ours), a sales-led strategy simply doesn’t add up in the long run.
Why permaculture?
Permaculture is a land management philosophy where agriculture works with, rather against nature. A holistic no-dig approach to planting diversity instead of monoculture fields, it imitates sustainable plant communities that flourish in natural conditions without human disturbance. It is a radical contrast to the common industrial agriculture techniques of aggressive monocropping where soil is disturbed by constant plowing, fertilisation and weed control, leading to erosion and soil loss, and requiring repetitive and frequent input.
Seven years ago I made a major life choice to sell my city apartment, live in a tiny house and homestead. We grow our own organic vegetables, so you won’t see me picking up a squash or a tomato from the retail shelves. This saves my family a lot of money and keeps our meals healthy and pesticide-free.
Bootstrapping a startup is child’s play when you are able to treat yourself daily to delicious luxury food.
I find that many concepts in permaculture are great for illustrating a product-led growth strategy. Maybe some of these examples will be inspiring for you as well.
Deliver value and obtain a yield
The core principle of product-led growth is delivering meaningful value to the customer. If they find the product sincerely valuable and useful, they’ll keep using it, keep paying for it, and actively recommend it to their peers.
I find this to resonate well with one of the 12 principles of permaculture: “obtain a yield”, meaning that nothing should be designed, built or maintained without the likelihood of a meaningful reward. There are no vanity projects in permaculture, and just like with product-led growth, everything we build must directly contribute toward delivering meaningful value.
But there is much more than simply effort in, profit out to this principle. Permaculture strives to enrich the whole ecosystem by getting as much yield across many areas as possible. While chickens produce eggs and meat, they also have a lot of additional potential in a permaculture setting. They’re great as pest and weed control, produce nutritious faeces for composting, and are an excellent workforce for turning compost piles.
While SaaS is often built as mono-functional for the sake of clarity and ease of sales, we can still be inspired from looking at our product the permaculture way and utilising everything to its fullest potential.
What else could our SaaS features be valuable for? Do we actually need to build new ones?
Integrate and build growth loops
“Integrate, not segregate” is another of the 12 permaculture design principles. Good designs let relationships develop between key elements.
In wilderness, trees and plants grow together without additional fertiliser, water, pest or disease control. The plants growing next to each other provide all of this for themselves. The goal of permaculture is to replicate this symbiosis. Instead of single rows of single vegetables, we can interplant diverse crops next to each other, and integrate livestock to the daily processes.
A common example of these miniature forest gardens is the trio of maize, climbing beans and winter squash, called the Three Sisters. Beans produce nitrogen necessary for the other two while enjoying the support when climbing up the tall corn plants. Squash leaves shade the ground to prevent moisture loss and discourage weed growth. The success of each plant actively contributes to the success of the others.
Feeding chickens with garden scraps results in some great quality compost material that can be returned to the vegetable garden. Nutritious compost supports the crops, only to provide more garden scraps for the chickens to enjoy. A wonderful growth loop to scale over the years!
In SaaS, the most common example of product growth loops is about customer acquisition. One user’s activity in the product results in multiple other users paying attention and eventually getting on board. Ideally these activities will repeat organically, providing an endless and exponential growth cycle where more and more people become aware and interested in the product.
What I think permaculture can teach us SaaS founders here is that it’s rarely exactly the same kind of users that make up a growth loop. Chickens don’t consume their own droppings, and planting two beans next to each other isn’t going to help either of them climb up.
We often need two very different kinds of personas to interact with each other around the product to produce a successful loop. The people who actively share content from a social network may not be the same people who consume content on a social network. People who respond to surveys may not have a need to create surveys themselves.
This doesn’t mean that these loops don’t work, on the contrary. But as designers we need to realise that it’s maize and beans that we need to plant next to each other. Not beans and tomatoes, not beans and beans.
Fundamentally understanding the symbiosis of different user personas is the only way we’re able to successfully design these self-sustainable loops.
Respond to change and design for the user
At the core of product-led growth is usability and user-centric design. If our clients need to enjoy and cherish the product, it needs to be designed with exactly them in mind. Product-led companies employ armies of UX designers that spend their days on user research and usability tests, and drill down on product data to define opportunities for upgrading the product experience.
There’s a lot of overlap between UX design and permaculture planning guidelines. A lot.
Some of the 12 principles are just straight out of a UX guidebook.
- Take time to observe and interact — engage with nature to design solutions that suit a particular situation.
- Use existing nature patterns to inform your designs.
- Accept feedback. Discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems function well.
- Respond to change in a creative manner. Create a positive impact with a well-timed intervention to inevitable change.
Whenever some core rules are listed for UX designers, it’s these exact same concepts in a slightly different wording.
- Know your users really well
- Base your design on existing needs and behaviours
- Test a lot and iterate
- Keep testing even after the product is live
With SaaS, we’re looking at a bunch of people going about their lives. In permaculture, we’re looking at different elements of nature growing and thriving in their environment.
Zones as community tiers
Permaculture zones are categories for defining the distance of design elements from the maintenance centre, i.e. household.
Zone 1 is the nearest to the farmhouse, designed for elements that need daily attention (greenhouse, worm farms, poultry, etc), while zone 4 is an area of wilderness that gets occasional visits for foraging or pasture activities, but may not need any active maintenance at all.
Looking at our SaaS community, I’d say our zone 1 users need the daily attention and full support to make sure they succeed exactly like my tomato plants. They take up most of our customer success resources, but also give back the most community support, reviews and chocolate deliveries. I really need to visit the greenhouse every day, and be quick to react if the weather changes and the doors should be opened or closed to adjust the temperature.
I rarely meet our zone 4 users. I can learn about their paths by looking at footprints from the night in our product analytics, but there’s not much I can or need to do about their daily experience. If we’d start actively maintaining their shrubs and bushes, they might leave. But wild blueberries taste better than the cultivated ones, so it’s worth taking that walk to check out those bushes during harvest season.
Zone 5 is defined as an absolutely untouched zone for meditation and reconnecting with nature. It should help us understand our place in the world. For me, it’s the part of my homestead that slowly transitions to forest, with tall spruces and active anthills.
In a business context, startup events are a great way to experience some additional wildlife as a SaaS founder. Observing other startups in the wild is a wonderful reality check of witnessing our ecosystem in its pure form and learn from what we see.
Industrial agriculture
While all of this is a wonderful philosophy, in practice product-led growth is still defined as a “go-to-market strategy”. This is a keyword taken directly from the sales-led approach. Our pitch decks still define new markets as something to conquer, and our strategy timelines still try to define deadlines similar to aggressive irrigation, fertilisation and harvest schedules.
It’s much harder to quantify and predict the yield in advance with permaculture methods. If your design works out, you’ll have a sustainable, self-scaling source of produce for years to come. If you mess up the design, your crops will not enjoy their environment and die right there. But there’s not much you can do during the process to beat them into obedience and force them to grow and turn a profit.
It’s a stressful bid to swear your design will yield results. It takes a lot of experience to create successful designs on the first try. Your design needs to consider possible winds, sun angles and water flow, and then match the conditions with the personal preferences of each plant and their companions.
Most likely young fundraising startups still fill their decks with sales-led presentations, even if they actually practice product-led strategies. Even product-led consultants mentor us with example cases of successful designs, but rarely teach us how to earth the anxiety when watching your designs fail in nature, without the desire to plough over the fields with investment-powered heavy machinery.