Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#11

Post by hkyeti » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 1:37 PM UTC

vishalchandra wrote: post #10

Checked out your product. It looks like a really good implementation of a "poll and survey SDK for mobile developers". There are tens of thousands of mobile developers building all kinds of apps, which group of devs actually need to add different polls / survey in their app every week ? You made it to scratch your own itch.. but what exactly was your itch ? And how frequently did you want to switch the poll, survey t…

Valid questions - basically our main pain point was:

- we wanted to know why players are leaving at certain points but all we had were guesses, and stats didn't tell us why (bored? confused by a UI? difficulty too hard? etc) - so we built a way to ask them directly and find out

it works well for us and our early adopters, and it's an ongoing thing - you're always trying to improve your game in this freemium/games as service world

other secondary benefits - being able to collect email addresses, being able to ask those who like your app to rate it 5 stars, giving extra virtual currency to people etc

Based on the feedback I think game developers particularly would find it useful and get benefit out of it if they used it..

but how to reach them effectively, educate them about it and get them to take the leap and try - that's what we're facing now..

some ideas we're thinking: - revamp homepage to make it more about use cases and get them to select who they are and show content relevant to them (lot of web work) - spend cycles on content marketing, writing articles on our site with content related to what we do, but not always mentioning us to try and get inbound traffic (though we're noobs at SEO) - lots of commenting on developer communities, with our fresh accounts (we forgot to create accounts at the start on all those sites so we'd be coming in pretty fresh)

any thoughts?

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#12

Post by hkyeti » Sun, Sep 21, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

poweribo wrote: post #9

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-pursuit-o...

Thanks for the share. Much of this is not feasible due to lack of budget and being outside the US. We're trying to figure out what would be the best use of our cycles for the two of us to get more traction with no spend..

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#13

Post by vishalchandra » Mon, Sep 22, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

hkyeti wrote: post #11

vishalchandra wrote: post #10

Checked out your product. It looks like a really good implementation of a "poll and survey SDK for mobile developers". There are tens of thousands of mobile developers building all kinds of apps, which group of devs actually need to add different polls / survey in their app every week ? You made it to scratch your own itch.. but what exactly was your itch ? And how frequently did you want to switch the poll, survey t…

Valid questions - basically our main pain point was: - we wanted to know why players are leaving at certain points but all we had were guesses, and stats didn't tell us why (bored? confused by a UI? difficulty too hard? etc) - so we built a way to ask them directly and find out it works well for us and our early adopters, and it's an ongoing thing - you're always trying to improve your game in this freemium/games as…

I got an answer to the third question on problem-solution fit, but not to the first two questions, i.e. ~

1. What are the alternative solutions (can be dev coding it themselves) and what do they lack in and how much more value (approx. time saved in coding this functionality as a percentage of time taken to code the rest of the app) does your offering create in comparison to the alternative ?

2. How often do your users face the pain-point (i.e. how often do they need to create a different type of survey) ?

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#14

Post by vishalchandra » Tue, Sep 23, 2014, 2:52 PM UTC

hkyeti wrote: post #11

vishalchandra wrote: post #10

Checked out your product. It looks like a really good implementation of a "poll and survey SDK for mobile developers". There are tens of thousands of mobile developers building all kinds of apps, which group of devs actually need to add different polls / survey in their app every week ? You made it to scratch your own itch.. but what exactly was your itch ? And how frequently did you want to switch the poll, survey t…

Valid questions - basically our main pain point was: - we wanted to know why players are leaving at certain points but all we had were guesses, and stats didn't tell us why (bored? confused by a UI? difficulty too hard? etc) - so we built a way to ask them directly and find out it works well for us and our early adopters, and it's an ongoing thing - you're always trying to improve your game in this freemium/games as…

I thought some more about it and I think the issue is that the value proposition of your product is not strong enough to get traction. One of the ways you can improve it is by converting it into a monetization channel for app developers.

So say a free game app has a 100K users playing the game and you know the location ( enable GPS in your SDK) of these users and the times when they are active (start tracking that too) etc then those users could answer a quick survey for larger brands (who pay per survey completed). So the survey is not about the game users are playing, but about a new movie that is launched or a new Xbox Game title that is launched etc. The free app could continue to be freely used if the user answers 1 survey every 20 times he or she plays the game. Survey can even allow you to show a relevant targeted ad next time or promote some other app game too.