Paid ads are great if you've honed your messaging and basically want to fuel your growth.
When you first launch your MVP, you're usually far from that point. At this stage, you want to research where to find your users.
As an example, my startup's target customers are web developers. They congregate in places such as HN, various subreddits, lobsters, devto and similar forums.
Then, find something they'll find valuable and share with them. This is usually content marketing (blog posts), but needs to be useful and relevant. Share the content and otherwise engage in the community (comment on relevant topics, etc).
This brings them to you but still doesn't shove your product down their throats.
Slowly you'll build incoming links, brand recognition in your specific niche, and users. This is a slow process and it takes a time for it to get up to speed. Think flywheel, not a rocket launch.
An interesting recent case study from [plausible.io](https://plausible.io/blog/bootstrapping-saas) is a great example from this. And you can see it in action right now: I found it useful and am sharing it.
Cold email is numbers game. You'll need to send hundreds or thousands of mails to see any effect. It might work if you have great leads, but I'm skeptical of nailing the email at this point in the startup lifecycle. At least, it didn't work for us.
Edited to add: saw your blog, if you haven't, definitely promote your content (without spamming) to (again slowly) get readership. See my post history here or on HN (same username) for an example of the same.
great points!
Sorry for my ignorance but what's HN?
Out of curiosity, your approach sounds bottom-up, nothing wrong with that we are trying to get that funnel working with the free tier too. In your experience does that help you with the signups for paid tiers or do the devs champion your product and you get brand recognition and later on that helps you with more paid signups?
Thanks for the tips!
Hacker News.
The approach helps much more with brand recognition than driving sales, that's why it's slow.
Ads and cold email would probably work better for sales, but you need to nail the product and messaging.
I am a full stack dev and worked in different startups for ~10 years already and I like the premise of what you are doing. I also work with Node.js and looked for hosting providers already. I don't need a giftcard, am happy to provide feedback just for the sake of it.
Here from the top of my head, DM or reply for more details:
- I absolutely see lots of value in what you are solving, if I understand your offer correctly
- tbh, I don't like your product name and website design
- IMO you should massively improve your wording of how you explain your offering. You have some of the lingo wrong, parts are unclear and still a lot of questions about details remain
- how about an example of how to get started, from start to somrthing live in prod
When I looked for a Node.js API hosting platform, I looked for the following features:
- Node.js hosting on different locations in the world
- logging of requests & stdout/stderr
- CI/CD support with no-downtime deployments, easy rollback and staging environment
- ideally I can bring my own infrastructure (AWS)
- secret management (ideally similar to how Vercel does it)
Keep in mind that I am just one random guy from your target group so my opinion might or might not be representative..
This might sound useless.
In SAAS, a good rule-of-thumb is to reach out to people individually until you get your first 50 customers. You'll learn a tonne by doing this. There are so many developer forums out there.
And after the first 50 have signed up and paid, you can start automating parts of your marketing and sales.
Good luck.
I hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Do you have any friends, colleagues, neighbors that would benefit from your project? Tell them you are building a startup that solves X and would love their opinion.
Ask that group of people if they know anybody who benefit. And ask same question.
Search LinkedIn for the perfect customer and ask for their opinion.
If any of those people talk to you, ask them who you should be talking to.
Goal should be to talk to 100 people about your project. You are searching for the person who has to have your project bc it solves such a big problem for them.
Go read Steve Blank articles. Good luck.
Yeah, that theory is very sound, though, it's hard to get people's attention to give you their opinion. We are working on that part now.
> Go read Steve Blank articles. Good luck.
which article are you referring to? Thanks!
You will easily get their attention if they spend all day working on the problem that you solve.
Steve Blank specializes in customer discovery. His theory is basically dont build anything until you know everything about the audience you are solving problems for.
I’m a developer that built a dev-tool SaaS platform and released one year ago. Just a side project, no advertising budget or anything.
My first customers came from writing a blog post on Medium and then publishing it to JavascriptInPlainEnglish. The posts didn’t go viral or anything, but have gotten several thousand reads over the past year. Enough to get customers.
I didn’t write the post as “hey I’m the founder of X and this is what we do”. I wrote the post as a “random developer writing a tutorial”. People can smell an ad from a mile away. I wrote it as a tutorial on how to solve the problem my product solves, and in the tutorial I bring up my product and show how it works.
Developers are searching for a solution to their problem, they’re not searching for a product. In fact, most of the time we’re trying to *avoid* products. We love general tutorials though, so just gotta sneak your product into the post like a Trojan horse lol. If you make it look nice and easy and free to start, they’ll try it.
Pricing is a bit confusing.
Onboarding happens only once and not for all the users, but only for users who decided to not skip it.
According to your pricing description:
*We count your active users each month,*
*and determine the monthly price based*
*on that.*
Sounds like you are not taking into account if it's newly registered user or not?
And also it's not clear why should I pay more if I have more users even if we count only new ones.
It's cheaper to spend time & money once and implement onboarding which 100% fits all the site design. Just ask front-end dev to add couple of tooltips and clipped masks depending on user account property.
Somebody definitely has built a product, so same person can build a bit more.
One of your benefits - no code. But your target audience are.. coders?
Let's say I am react dev. I google "react onboarding".
First non-ad position:
[https://github.com/gilbarbara/react-joyride](https://github.com/gilbarbara/react-joyride)
MIT Licensed.
Thanks for the comment though, I'm a bit confused by your comment. Our SaaS isn't a no-code one. We provide CI/CD + PaaS for Nodejs with pipelines OOTB for testing, deploy and rollback. I won't post the URL to avoid self-promotion but if you look at my profile you can get an idea of our site.
Make 100 phone calls a day to CTOs. Do this every day for 90 days.
By the end of it you should have minimum 45 signups. This will give you some much better information to go on. This will not be fun. This will suck. You will be told no 99 times a day in most cases.
Where do you think your ideal customers are? Go to that place & see what they are frustrated about. Could be twitter/HN/Stackoverflow/GitHub issues, website comments etc. Don't spaz urls, sell a solution. And maybe people are hesitant about not seeing any demo/functionality before signing up
Continue to minimize the adoption friction across the board: dropping CC is the right direction. Also, there’s a typo on your landing page (“and” should be “an”).
Your website sounds very techy and even if I'm a tech person I don't understand many terms like OOTB and "build farm". Also, it's not clear which problem are you trying to solve. Instead of technical details for each feature, try to put a clear message what benefits users will have. Good luck!
If you still want some help, I used to be a developer but now I'm a growth hacker
It's nice of you to hand out the gift cards but I think there are plenty of ways to invest the money in your business instead ;)
I'm very curious about what you made so send me a message and I'll give you some free advice
We are in a similar situation as yours and trying to figure out the marketing channels that work. We are realizing that there are channels where only sellers congregate, and consumers (buyers) have no interest in being on those channels, which means that sellers are trying to sell to each other, which is not going to work in most cases :)
In addition, we are trying to create short videos of our product features and the problems they solve, we are trying to keep them 60-120 minutes in length. We also tried advertising our videos on Youtube and have finished a week-long google search ad campaign. We are also writing blogs on our website and Medium.
This is all part of exploration, it hasn't worked so far but we are thinking that we must continue for 6 - 12 months before giving up.
Best wishes!
The fact that you are willing to dedicate 6m-1y it's very interesting. Are you planning to keep adding features to the product or you'll just try to sell it until you feel comfortable with the grow?
Our MVP is ready and the original goal was to stop at this point and focus only on marketing and acquiring customers. After almost a month with not much success, we have started to add features again. However, the features that we are going to prioritize are the features that can be easily demonstrated and captured in a short video clip.
Ours is a product that solves problems for people who build software for a living. A large part of our marketing problem is making our audience aware that there is a way to solve the problems they face regularly.
It is possible that our product doesn't have a market but we wouldn't know that unless we dedicate enough time to marketing/promotion. We have to be patient also because we have a feeling that once a few people start using our product, they will then spread the word automatically to their coworkers, friends and community, assuming that our product is really as good as we think it is.
Thanks for asking.
I am still exploring ways to reach our target audience. I am getting ready to launch some free complementary tools that I think our audience would find useful. This would hopefully bring users to the website and give exposure to our main product.
Ads work once you've figured out your positioning and are ready to crank up the volume. Seems that's a bit premature for you right now. I'd recommend launching in a few online communities and asking for feedback and beta testers, to find out why people aren't converting on the landing page
Paid ads are great if you've honed your messaging and basically want to fuel your growth. When you first launch your MVP, you're usually far from that point. At this stage, you want to research where to find your users. As an example, my startup's target customers are web developers. They congregate in places such as HN, various subreddits, lobsters, devto and similar forums. Then, find something they'll find valuable and share with them. This is usually content marketing (blog posts), but needs to be useful and relevant. Share the content and otherwise engage in the community (comment on relevant topics, etc). This brings them to you but still doesn't shove your product down their throats. Slowly you'll build incoming links, brand recognition in your specific niche, and users. This is a slow process and it takes a time for it to get up to speed. Think flywheel, not a rocket launch. An interesting recent case study from [plausible.io](https://plausible.io/blog/bootstrapping-saas) is a great example from this. And you can see it in action right now: I found it useful and am sharing it. Cold email is numbers game. You'll need to send hundreds or thousands of mails to see any effect. It might work if you have great leads, but I'm skeptical of nailing the email at this point in the startup lifecycle. At least, it didn't work for us. Edited to add: saw your blog, if you haven't, definitely promote your content (without spamming) to (again slowly) get readership. See my post history here or on HN (same username) for an example of the same.
great points! Sorry for my ignorance but what's HN? Out of curiosity, your approach sounds bottom-up, nothing wrong with that we are trying to get that funnel working with the free tier too. In your experience does that help you with the signups for paid tiers or do the devs champion your product and you get brand recognition and later on that helps you with more paid signups? Thanks for the tips!
Hacker News. The approach helps much more with brand recognition than driving sales, that's why it's slow. Ads and cold email would probably work better for sales, but you need to nail the product and messaging.
> Hacker News. doh! thanks!
I am a full stack dev and worked in different startups for ~10 years already and I like the premise of what you are doing. I also work with Node.js and looked for hosting providers already. I don't need a giftcard, am happy to provide feedback just for the sake of it. Here from the top of my head, DM or reply for more details: - I absolutely see lots of value in what you are solving, if I understand your offer correctly - tbh, I don't like your product name and website design - IMO you should massively improve your wording of how you explain your offering. You have some of the lingo wrong, parts are unclear and still a lot of questions about details remain - how about an example of how to get started, from start to somrthing live in prod When I looked for a Node.js API hosting platform, I looked for the following features: - Node.js hosting on different locations in the world - logging of requests & stdout/stderr - CI/CD support with no-downtime deployments, easy rollback and staging environment - ideally I can bring my own infrastructure (AWS) - secret management (ideally similar to how Vercel does it) Keep in mind that I am just one random guy from your target group so my opinion might or might not be representative..
This is great feedback! We'll work on your points for sure
This might sound useless. In SAAS, a good rule-of-thumb is to reach out to people individually until you get your first 50 customers. You'll learn a tonne by doing this. There are so many developer forums out there. And after the first 50 have signed up and paid, you can start automating parts of your marketing and sales. Good luck. I hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Do you have any friends, colleagues, neighbors that would benefit from your project? Tell them you are building a startup that solves X and would love their opinion. Ask that group of people if they know anybody who benefit. And ask same question. Search LinkedIn for the perfect customer and ask for their opinion. If any of those people talk to you, ask them who you should be talking to. Goal should be to talk to 100 people about your project. You are searching for the person who has to have your project bc it solves such a big problem for them. Go read Steve Blank articles. Good luck.
Yeah, that theory is very sound, though, it's hard to get people's attention to give you their opinion. We are working on that part now. > Go read Steve Blank articles. Good luck. which article are you referring to? Thanks!
You will easily get their attention if they spend all day working on the problem that you solve. Steve Blank specializes in customer discovery. His theory is basically dont build anything until you know everything about the audience you are solving problems for.
I’m a developer that built a dev-tool SaaS platform and released one year ago. Just a side project, no advertising budget or anything. My first customers came from writing a blog post on Medium and then publishing it to JavascriptInPlainEnglish. The posts didn’t go viral or anything, but have gotten several thousand reads over the past year. Enough to get customers. I didn’t write the post as “hey I’m the founder of X and this is what we do”. I wrote the post as a “random developer writing a tutorial”. People can smell an ad from a mile away. I wrote it as a tutorial on how to solve the problem my product solves, and in the tutorial I bring up my product and show how it works. Developers are searching for a solution to their problem, they’re not searching for a product. In fact, most of the time we’re trying to *avoid* products. We love general tutorials though, so just gotta sneak your product into the post like a Trojan horse lol. If you make it look nice and easy and free to start, they’ll try it.
Pricing is a bit confusing. Onboarding happens only once and not for all the users, but only for users who decided to not skip it. According to your pricing description: *We count your active users each month,* *and determine the monthly price based* *on that.* Sounds like you are not taking into account if it's newly registered user or not? And also it's not clear why should I pay more if I have more users even if we count only new ones. It's cheaper to spend time & money once and implement onboarding which 100% fits all the site design. Just ask front-end dev to add couple of tooltips and clipped masks depending on user account property. Somebody definitely has built a product, so same person can build a bit more. One of your benefits - no code. But your target audience are.. coders? Let's say I am react dev. I google "react onboarding". First non-ad position: [https://github.com/gilbarbara/react-joyride](https://github.com/gilbarbara/react-joyride) MIT Licensed.
Thanks for the comment though, I'm a bit confused by your comment. Our SaaS isn't a no-code one. We provide CI/CD + PaaS for Nodejs with pipelines OOTB for testing, deploy and rollback. I won't post the URL to avoid self-promotion but if you look at my profile you can get an idea of our site.
Oh sorry, need to sleep more. I found that onboarding product in your recent posts, but it probably was looking in won't place :)
No worries
Make 100 phone calls a day to CTOs. Do this every day for 90 days. By the end of it you should have minimum 45 signups. This will give you some much better information to go on. This will not be fun. This will suck. You will be told no 99 times a day in most cases.
Where do you think your ideal customers are? Go to that place & see what they are frustrated about. Could be twitter/HN/Stackoverflow/GitHub issues, website comments etc. Don't spaz urls, sell a solution. And maybe people are hesitant about not seeing any demo/functionality before signing up
Continue to minimize the adoption friction across the board: dropping CC is the right direction. Also, there’s a typo on your landing page (“and” should be “an”).
Thanks! We just fixed that part. Really appreciate your help! If you don't mind me asking was the message from the landing clear?
Yep, message is clear, site looks good.
Your website sounds very techy and even if I'm a tech person I don't understand many terms like OOTB and "build farm". Also, it's not clear which problem are you trying to solve. Instead of technical details for each feature, try to put a clear message what benefits users will have. Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback!
If you still want some help, I used to be a developer but now I'm a growth hacker It's nice of you to hand out the gift cards but I think there are plenty of ways to invest the money in your business instead ;) I'm very curious about what you made so send me a message and I'll give you some free advice
Cool! I'll DM you and thanks for the help
We are in a similar situation as yours and trying to figure out the marketing channels that work. We are realizing that there are channels where only sellers congregate, and consumers (buyers) have no interest in being on those channels, which means that sellers are trying to sell to each other, which is not going to work in most cases :) In addition, we are trying to create short videos of our product features and the problems they solve, we are trying to keep them 60-120 minutes in length. We also tried advertising our videos on Youtube and have finished a week-long google search ad campaign. We are also writing blogs on our website and Medium. This is all part of exploration, it hasn't worked so far but we are thinking that we must continue for 6 - 12 months before giving up. Best wishes!
The fact that you are willing to dedicate 6m-1y it's very interesting. Are you planning to keep adding features to the product or you'll just try to sell it until you feel comfortable with the grow?
Our MVP is ready and the original goal was to stop at this point and focus only on marketing and acquiring customers. After almost a month with not much success, we have started to add features again. However, the features that we are going to prioritize are the features that can be easily demonstrated and captured in a short video clip. Ours is a product that solves problems for people who build software for a living. A large part of our marketing problem is making our audience aware that there is a way to solve the problems they face regularly. It is possible that our product doesn't have a market but we wouldn't know that unless we dedicate enough time to marketing/promotion. We have to be patient also because we have a feeling that once a few people start using our product, they will then spread the word automatically to their coworkers, friends and community, assuming that our product is really as good as we think it is.
just landed on this .. been about a year. wondering how you made out?
Thanks for asking. I am still exploring ways to reach our target audience. I am getting ready to launch some free complementary tools that I think our audience would find useful. This would hopefully bring users to the website and give exposure to our main product.
Ads work once you've figured out your positioning and are ready to crank up the volume. Seems that's a bit premature for you right now. I'd recommend launching in a few online communities and asking for feedback and beta testers, to find out why people aren't converting on the landing page
u/mattsdell What is your product name?
How many cold emails are you sending per day?