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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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281–290 of 325 posts

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

#281

Let's try to visit your site, step by step. First screen - A gratuitous 3D animation shows sample pages from your site. Why didn't you spend that effort to make the pages look better? - There's a profile cover page featuring a portrait of a white hipster with a sad expression, "Nelson Bighetti" from "Silicon Valley". It looks like LinkedIn, but more importantly it is strangely prominent. Moreover, who is he? A mock p…

Why does the race of the hipster matter? That’s in poor taste.

Being a photograph/character the company chose to illustrate their services, it is part of their communication strategy. Not all Silicon Valley characters are white, and not all are male.

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

#282

I’m one of the people who dropped off. Your chat person told me to try hiring your sample profile. When I went there, it was just a poorly made typeform. Your NDA process didn’t account for anything as simple as finding out what country the other person is in. Regions impact legal documents significantly. Everything else was basically the same. Overall, I think your premise of “I know we have a decent product” is fla…

That's because there's no product.

There are two kinds of freelancers/consultants:

1. Successful ones - those that bill tens thousands of dollars a month/hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. This group knows how to open a bank account, how to invoice a customer, how to setup cron jobs for nagging a customer, how to setup per customer support phone numbers, how to talk to attorneys and accountants. For them there's nothing in your startup that they already do not know or dont have someone else do for them.

2. Everyone else. That group does not have the money to throw at your promise because every schmuck on facebook or linkedin is promising them something for $30/mo.

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

#283
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.

Can't speak for everyone, but it is common on any site.

The assumption is that they _will_ spam, sell the data or do something comparably exciting, so it's nearly always a disposable address first, changing it to a real address later if needed.

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

#284
Offer shares publicly without a prospectus? You do realize that is illegal in most jurisdictions? Reading that made me think your somewhat naive, and likely your product would be too. I realize that this sounds harsh, but I'm not saying it to be mean.

Other than that, I assume your product doesn't solve a problem or need enough for people to pay for it. The best idea for next time is to try to establish that earlier.

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

#285
As an ex-freelancer, you're trying to do too much & don't have the credibility I'd want to turn over my business to your system. I have my own systems in place - my own website, my own contracts, etc. so why would I want to use yours? Will they be relevant to my market?

It's like looking at a cable TV lineup where I might want 1 channel but have to subscribe to a bunch of others. $29 was a lot of money to me for a SaaS as a freelancer, where some months were lean and I tried to keep expenses as low as possible.

The "Personal assistant" that will answer chat queries seems like something that would be worth $29 on it's own. Is the PA a human or a bot? I'd definitely be interested in a 24/7 message taking service that could answer simple questions about my service set (and escalate more complex inquiries) for $29/mo. It sucked to have to answer my phone or get an email from a potential client when I was on-site with another client. Generic office answering services were expensive and didn't work well with freelancer setups.

I'd at least look at segmenting your pricing model - have a "Rolls Royce" option (human PA, custom responses, etc) to make $29/mo seem like the cheap option, and a starter plan I can start with, remove the risk of signing up (30 day free trial?), allow me to choose which features I want to sign up for.

Also for the first 100 or so users, you won't find them through random web signups - you'll find them in person, where you can talk to them and figure out what they really want. You don't have a product that solves a market problem right now, you have a hypothesis.

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

#286
post #280
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the story, in fact, looking back, I feel quite foolish to ask too much information in one go :D The gist of the story is very interesting, but in our current scenario I don' really have a way to reach the folks who dropped off, that's why I came to HN. I'll be exploring the other points you noted, and work on them.

That might be your problem too. The absolute next thing I build, after features, is a feedback pipeline. I do this before even integrating the payment gateway. Often it's in the form of some support forum or in app public chatroom. Take a close look at any comments wherever you advertise. I'd even recommend against FB/Google advertising at first because it's difficult to get feedback. Analytics might help too and you…

Thanks, I think I have tons of feedback from HN now, honestly, I did not expect this much! :) I am currently sorting out each feedback and converting to actionable items, will probably come with a blog post or something soon about the actions :)

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, asking for help everywhere is awesome, as humility is the key to take the right steps to fix a problem. If you cannot talk to those who did not sign up or like the offers, then you need to take to people who have extreme pains in using sites like freelance.com or upworks.com these sites have crazy traffic but until today they have not resolved key issues for freeelancers or seekers of freelance talents.…

If you don't mind me asku, what sort of problems were you having with sourcing from freelance superhubs?

Can you please explain this a little bit more? I don't exactly get what you are asking!

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

#288

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…

I'm not a freelancer, but I'd assume the biggest problem getting started with freelancing isn't the NDAs etc. It's getting clients. Maybe your marketing should be geared to people who are already freelancing and who want to upsell/become more professional?

Thanks for the feedback, I think I've been hearing this a lot now, will think about this deeply and do something :) We actually had a lead generation too inside the platform, but its still in the process, ideally picking up all the leads around internet form slack groups, LinkedIn etc and qualifying the leads.

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

#289

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…

Woah, all my points already here. Would add, and please don’t take this personal, but get a native speaker to do the voice over. You are unlucky to have a bad stereotype matched with your dialect. In addition: 1. Don’t use thumbs up icons and smileys in your professional website. I’m not on Facebook. 2. So many grammar errors. Also in the video. 3. First overview in the video has so much information yet tells me noth…

Thanks for this one! Tried using the smileys to make it look bit relaxed :) Will consider the other points and do the needful.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 eliminat…

Looks like I can get the copy changes from here too :) Thanks for this!
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