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Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

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Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#221

Post by wellboy »

cod3boy wrote: post #117
wellboy wrote: post #75

How much did you pay for those 600 people and were they targeted long-tail searches from google (ndas for freelancers) or random visitors? Usually the conversion rate for visitor to payed customer is 0.1-1%, depending on your product, that's normal.

We paid nothing, it was all from Product hunt. We were on the top 5 day before yesterday.

Ok, that's all very untargeted.

Try targeted long tail google ads. If you spend $200 for every acquired paying customer, you are golden. Send me an email if you have questions.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#223

Post by dfabulich »

eps wrote: post #199
arjunvpaul wrote: post #32

Emperor Akbar, on a whim, once asked his minister Birbal to find him ten fools. You can get the gist here (Source: http://folklore.usc.edu/?p=24202 ). Birbal stumbled across the third fool while the latter was looking for something at night. The guy was looking under a streetlamp and couldn't seem to find whatever he was looking for. Birbal asked him what he was looking for so frantically. He explained that he lost h…

> Collect an email address just before anyone clicks get started. That's a sure way to collect a bunch of mailinator.com addresses.

Is this common on a SaaS site? My experience with landing pages is that people will cheerfully enter their work email address without a second thought.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#224

Post by Silhouette »

cod3boy wrote: post #176
tnolet wrote: post #174

I'm a "pro" freelancer in the tech space. You've already had many relevant tips and critiques here so I won't repeat them. Just wanted to add this one, as I've seen it firsthand with startups: you are focusing on you. You fail to make me, a potential customer pretty much exactly in the market you are targeting, believe you have any idea how freelancing works and where the pain and value adds are. Genuine question and…

I've freelanced on the side for a few years. I used to put together a google form for the requirement collection, then send the NDAs on DocuSign,I had a quite number of people asking me to send an NDA before discussing. Quickbooks for accounting and sometimes PandaDoc for agreements. While putting together this product, I wanted to reduce the friction of getting started with freelancing and put together all of these…

Just as another data point for you, we don't generally sign NDAs, and I never did as long as I was freelancing solo either. It's close to 100% downside for the freelancer/consultancy to do that up-front, and it's a rare client whose project is going to be so attractive that we'd make an exception. A basic mutual confidentiality clause in standard terms has always been sufficient IME.

So, I started watching your YouTube walkthrough, and right after the "give me your email address before you can do anything" red flag, you got into some sort of legalese agreement. If I'd been interest at all in your product before that, I wouldn't have been any more at that point.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#226

Post by retrac98 »

> It's not the product, I strongly believe we have a decent product.

Check your dissonance. It’s the product.

There are numerous things I could pick holes in here, most noteably that the product tries to do far too much and probably doesn’t do one thing brilliantly. Personally I’m not going to invest my valuable time in finding out if that’s true. The ask is too big.

That said, nobody here is going to be able to give you a recipe for success. People are notoriously poor predictors of what will and won’t succeed in business. You’ve just got to work your way through this balancing intuition against feedback and data. It takes time, it takes money, and it’s really hard work.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#227

Post by josephorjoe »

Veratyr wrote: post #211
noobhacker wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What grammatical or typographical errors prompt the advice to get someone to proofread the website? I'm asking because I see this advice quite often, and most of the times I can't find anything wrong. Could someone point out specific errors that I miss? Perhaps I need to get an editor myself.

"We help freelancers become more professional with automatic streamlined process for managerial tasks like client onboarding, signing NDA and requirement collection right from their personal website." "with automatic streamlined process" should probably be "an automatic streamlined process". I don't think the way it is now is technically wrong but it doesn't feel right. "Never delay your client to wait for an NDA." d…

and if you really want to get it right, you need to use proper parallel structure when stringing clauses together:

`for managerial tasks like client onboarding, signing NDA and requirement collection right from their personal website`

would read better as:

`for managerial tasks like onboarding clients, signing NDAs, and collecting requirements right from their personal website`

Copyediting is largely getting eliminated as an 'unnecessary' expense in the world of web content publishing, but when the life of your business might depend on some marketing copy, good professional copyediting is priceless.

--edited for alliteration, grammar, and oxford comma

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#228

Post by jlgaddis »

jwilk wrote: post #198
niko001 wrote: post #148

1. Get a native speaker to proofread your website copy 2. The title of the page is "Sieve Pro - The best management tool for" (missing a "freelancers")? 3. Some people might like it, but I'm always turned off when websites are using SV characters as profile placeholders - makes the site itself seem like a joke 4. As others have said, develop your own signup form instead of using TypeForm - TypeForm always gives me an…

What's "SV character"?

See the guy on their demo page [0]? He's a fictional character [1] on the HBO show Silicon Valley [2].

[0]: https://bighead.sievehq.com/

[1]: http://silicon-valley.wikia.com/wiki/Big_Head

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#229

Post by rhizome »

a_imho wrote: post #217

I'm at problem zero, how did you get 600 people to come to your website, what channels did you use? Some piggybacking here, if anyone is up to giving advice https://smileydelta.com/

You have some misspelled words on your front page.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#230

Post by tfmatt »

dfabulich wrote: post #223
eps wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Collect an email address just before anyone clicks get started. That's a sure way to collect a bunch of mailinator.com addresses.

Is this common on a SaaS site? My experience with landing pages is that people will cheerfully enter their work email address without a second thought.

Cheerfully enter my work email!? I am way more reserved with that than my personal address!!
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