SaaS Lander is an acceleration program dedicated to series A French SaaS startups that want to scale in the US market. Since 2014, 100 startups have been accelerated and $2B+ capital has been raised by our alumni and.

I joined the team right when the pandemic started in 2020 and since then, the program has become fully remote. I led the transition from a consulting to a product approach, leading to an significant increase in the quality of the program.

Constraints

Startups in France have never done so well and Impact found a perfect product market fit. But Impact is a spin off of Business France, a government agency. For the team, it means that we constantly have to deal with strong endogenous variables:

• 1. High turnover
• 2. Unusuality
• 3. Staff
• 4. Tools

<aside> 🔭 In 2020 when the future of the program became uncertain, I presented a product driven vision to my manager. Today, it is fully implemented.

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Covid opportunity & product driven vision

When Covid happened, the first few months were really tough for Business France, as the business model relied on events and business travels. We used this time to rethink our programs, including Impact.

In order to align the team and gain management approval, I created a series of workshops covering 3 topics:

• Identity & vision: who are we and where do we want to go?
• Material: what did we create since we were founded? How do we gather it?
• Communities: what can we do for our alumni, speakers and mentors?

We also used this time to reach out to the entire community of alumni and interviewed them to gather customer feedback.

Product mapping through scalability principles

I believe that every product can scale, at least partially. To work on increasing product scalability, I like to decompose the product and apply 3 scalability principles:

1. Harmonization
2. Automation