If tenants are created for every new user who signup to your product, then you are not managing it well. We learnt it the hard way, by spending a lot more on our cloud hosting costs.

But we learned and fixed it.

Let’s dig in deeper…

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Insight: What’s the proportion of real users signing up to a SaaS product?
About 53% of the users are real users.
The rest are either duplicate (~20%), Fake/Temporary emails(20%), Bots (~10%)

Sources: 1. Growth Unhinged: Stop fake accounts, 2. Prevent Free-Trial abuse

For B2B PLG products, a user’s email domain holds the key, especially new users from existing domains can be (potentially) clubbed together into a tenant.

Let's begin by understanding the anatomy of a user’s email address,

Anatomy of an email address

A typical email address is made up of a username and an email domain.
In this article, we will focus on using the email domain to make decisions on whether we should provision a new tenant or not.

Tenant Provisioning in a B2B context

A tenant is the most fundamental construct of a SaaS environment. Typically it represents an entity that a Payment plan can be applied to.

Some example tenants

• Organization / Company: This is the typical entity for a traditional B2B SaaS product.

• Project/Workspace: Prosumer products typically charge for a group of users collaborating on a project (e.g. Figma for Professionals/Teams, Canva Pro/Teams)

A registered email domain can be used to determine the root entity of the Organization. Any new tenants created can be associated with the email domain, this helps later in determining the no. of workspaces/teams/projects that the organization create and use.

Tenant Management Challenges for B2B SaaS

In the B2B SaaS domain, tenant management architecture poses significant operational and financial challenges:

1. Elevated Infrastructure Expenditures: Assigning individual tenants for each user significantly raises infrastructure costs due to increased resource and administrative requirements.

2. Organizational Alignment: B2B SaaS platforms are designed for entire business units or organizations, necessitating a unified organizational framework rather than isolated user management.

3. Collaborative Efficiency: A single tenant for multiple users enhances administrative ease and collaboration, enabling integrated workflows and resource sharing.

4. User Authentication: Using work emails for registration filters out non-serious inquiries, ensuring access is granted to genuine, engaged users from recognized organizations.

How can ThriveStack help?

ThriveStack helps in managing the Tenant provisioning strategy at the very outset of a user signing up to your B2B SaaS product.

In response, our platform employs a tenant creation strategy based on organizational affiliation derived from work email domain (e.g., joe@acme.com). Upon registration, the platform identifies the user's organization (e.g., Acme) and checks for existing tenants.

New Users (jill@acme.com), at the time of signup, can then join an existing tenant, create a new one, or opt for both, depending on their needs.

This approach controls infrastructure costs, promotes organizational cohesion, and ensures a high-quality user base by restricting access to legitimate users, thus enhancing the platform's overall functionality and efficiency.

1. (B2C) Every user is a new Tenant: This is a traditional B2C approach. Every new user acquired gets a billing plan attached at some point of time in the subscription lifecycle.

2. (B2B) Join Existing Tenant: Users are allowed to join an existing tenant or account. This is particularly useful in organizational settings where multiple users need to work under the same tenant, such as employees of a business unit.

3. (B2B)Tenant Creation on Demand: Users have the option to create a new tenant whenever needed. This flexibility is beneficial for accommodating different project teams or business units that require separate environments.

4. (B2B) Hybrid Approach: Users can both join existing tenants and create new ones. This strategy offers maximum flexibility, catering to varied user needs and scenarios.

Enable Tenant provisioning TODAY!

ThriveStack enables optimal User and Tenant provisioning for B2B SaaS products

Screenshot below

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Challenge:

The founding team, experienced in sales-led companies, faced the daunting task of enabling their product for Product-Led Growth (PLG), a new and challenging venture for them.

Solution:

ThriveStack, with its robust capabilities, enabled RevenueDynamics to kickstart their journey towards PLG within a day’s worth of effort.

Results:

• Speed to Market: RevenueDynamics was able to send a URL link to their early prospects for product signup and trial within hours, a process that would have taken 6+ months if they had tried to build it themselves.

• Increased Productivity: The startup was able to focus on building their core value proposition, rather than worrying about the infrastructure plumbing needed for growth.

• Focus on Core Features: ThriveStack’s self-serve infrastructure allowed the team to shift their focus on their core product, rather than worrying about procuring and stitching together multiple pieces of growth infrastructure.

• Refine Onboarding Questions: The enriched data enabled RevenueDynamics to reduce few onboarding questions and personalize the user journey.

• Employ a bottom-up CRM: RevenueDynamics now got a PLG CRM system that brings rich insights on users and accounts - from day one, ensuring efficient user management and data-driven decisions.

• Utilize PLG Analytics: The automatically generated acquisition, retention, and virality reports helped drive product growth right from launch.

Testimonial:

“ThriveStack helped us get started within a day. We were able to send a URL link to our customers to signup and try our product in a matter of hours. We are now able to know who is signing up (acquisition report) and are they using our product (retention report). If we had tried to build it ourselves, it would have taken 6+ months to get our product in the hands of end-users.” - RevenueDynamics CEO

Implementation Plan:

• Week 1:

  • The engineering teams selected the Prosumer template (a low-code self-serve template optimized for a PLG pricing escalation ladder) and configured it.

  • Within ~2 hours, they were able to see end-to-end integration working. They were able to test and debug with a simulated end-user, signing up to their product, get redirected to the product onboarding page.

  • The end-user received a decent welcome email (which they are now customizing), and their GTM teams got notified of a new customer.

  • They were able to see the Acquisition report with an uptick in the number of users and accounts signed up. T

  • They were able to use the PLG CRM containing enriched account information, replete with Industry, number of employees etc. - good enough to start segmenting their self-serve customers.

• Week 2:

  • The Engineering team continued the integrations with their onboarding pages, and used the information received (e.g., User and account enrichment) to simplify their onboarding process.

  • Their GTM team readied the integrations on Marketing websites, email campaigns with Signup/Login URLs powered by ThriveStack.

Conclusion

As a design partner, ThriveStack provided white-glove service, helping RevenueDynamics understand how to build for PLG, choose from various templates, and more importantly, gave them the confidence to enable their product for self-service.

How did it all work?

Stay tuned! We will soon reveal which company this is and share their live metrics.

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Before you proceed, can we please steal 30 seconds of your time? ThriveStack is live on Product Hunt today! Please support us with an upvote, and a comment would be awesome. Thank you!

Here’s the link: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/thrivestack-v0-1

Self-Serve starter templates accelerate your PLG journey

1. Get started fast: Design Partners & Prospects told us that they need a simple way to get started. They told us that they didn’t have the time to learn our product and tune it to their business.

2. Unique: Every SaaS product caters to its customers differently. Every step of Acquisition and Activation is tuned differently. There’s no single standard.

3. Customizable: Orchestrating many services would need different services, and integrations all stitched together

4. Guidance: Pre-built templates guide your self-serve initiatives, ensuring you’re on the right track.

We asked ourselves: What if we can enable builders to experience their products being self-served, in their development environment within an hour? That’s what we set to do.

The 6 Templates:

1. Prosumer Templates (2 templates):

Meant to equip typical prosumer applications (such as Figma, Canva, and Miro) with essential Product-Led Growth (PLG) capabilities. In this context, each tenant usually begins as an individual user and gradually transitions to a team or enterprise plan. Due to the lightweight nature of prosumer tenants, onboarding usually occurs after the user-tenant relationship is established.

Key Benefits:

1. Effortless Integration: Thrivestack handles critical self-service tasks, including User Waitlisting, User & Account Enrichment, Free Pricing Plan Association, Tenant Provisioning, and Welcome notifications. Developers are relieved from instrumenting standard SaaS events related to user Signup and Log-in, freeing your team to focus on other priorities.

2. Unlock Core PLG Capabilities: By leveraging the template, you gain access to two pivotal functionalities:

   1. PLG CRM: Understand and engage with users & accounts effectively.

   2. PLG Analytics: Extract valuable insights for growth and GTM strategies.

2. COGS Efficiency Templates (2 templates):

Imagine a SaaS company, where the tenant architecture is either of the following

1. A single-tenant backend architecture: Every customer gets a dedicated backend that your teams are deploying manually in conversation with Sales-Customer interactions

2. or You selectively deploy infrastructure components based on modules/features that customers select.

In either of these cases, your hosting infrastructure would have high COGS. A surge of user activations might escalate your infrastructure costs.

To mitigate this, we have designed templates that allow you to acquire more users, they are onboarded first (you manage) and tenants are then created.

Key Benefits:

• Deploy Waitlists: Enable waitlists to block a surge of users signing up to your product, understand who these users are (automatic enrichment) and then proceed to selectively onboard them.

• Initiate Onboarding before tenant creation: Optimize cost of goods sold (COGS) while customizing user experience. This can streamline infrastructure costs.

3. Traditional SaaS Templates (2 templates):

Tailored for SaaS companies with organizational DNA more akin to sales-led. Your teams have recently started dabbling with PLG and continuing to build more conviction towards self-serve motions.

Key Benefits:

• Get started with minimal effort: Show and tell your leadership (Proof-of Concept) that self-serve can be enabled for your SaaS product.

• Delaying the technical debt to embrace PLG at a later point in time. Core PLG capabilities like the following would enabled automatically. Your engineering & Product teams will take an additional effort to do this later.

  • Know your self-serve Users/Accounts: Auto-enrichment, Segmentation with PLG CRM

  • PLG Analytics: Understand how self-serve motions are performing and what are the users doing with your products.

So, what do you think about the templates? Which one would you opt for?

Try the product now!

If you have better templates on your mind, do share’em with us!

The moment we've all been waiting for is here – ThriveStack is LIVE ON PRODUCT HUNT!

Upvote us on Product Hunt!

Months of dedication, innovation, and hard work have led us to this day. The ThriveStack team has poured their hearts into building a platform that revolutionizes B2B and B2C SaaS growth, making Product-Led Growth effortless and intuitive.

Today, we have the opportunity to showcase ThriveStack to a global audience, and we'd be thrilled to have your support.

Here's how you can help:

✅ If ThriveStack resonates with you, your support with an upvote would mean the world to us.

✅ Have thoughts or feedback? We'd love to hear from you in the comments section – dialogue drives us forward!

✅ Feel moved by what we're building? Leaving a review would be incredibly valuable.

Remember, Product Hunt's spotlight is on for just 24 hours, and every moment counts. If you can spare 30 seconds, your support could significantly impact.

Upvote us on Product Hunt!

Thank you for standing with us on this critical day. Your support is the cornerstone of our journey.

Know more about ThriveStack

ThriveStack Product Datasheet

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ThriveStack equips SaaS builders with tools that facilitate user signup, product trial, purchase, and operating Self-Serve on a large scale.

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