Nice article and have to agree: > Go for B2B if you can. Freelancers aren't rich. Even if freelancers have money they seem to spend less.
Freelancers spend money on what they want/need not on OP's crappy wishes.
I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
121–130 of 264 posts
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love the commitment to shipment, an inspiration to us all. I also liked the post title and thought it was fun but also made it clear what to expect. Have you thought about whether you could expand the service to provide more value (and get paid more) by freelancers or considered other avenues where you could turn "RSS + notifications" into another business with a minimum of effort (other job sites, auction listings,…
Thank you! Inspired that I inspired you because I used to read this type of thing and thought I'd never do anything like it. I've thought about expanding to additional freelancing sites but have not thought about the RSS+notifications thing. I still have something eating away at me that it's just an "RSS feed reader" but maybe I'm wrong about that entirely.
Just do this but for other job sites and aggregate. You seem to know Pieter Levels from your Make book reference, and I'm not sure if Remote Ok has an RSS feed or Slack notifications but this could be a pretty useful feature for that.
Also add categories and keywords to filter by for Upwork jobs if you haven't already. Contact Upwork users directly and message them about your product. Do things that don't scale as they say. I'd say contact maybe 500 people and see the response and subsequent sales. You could also contact marketers so they can post their jobs on your platform perhaps. There are many ways for future development it seems to me.
You can email me if you want more advice, I run a SaaS as well (https://getartemis.app) and I do some of these marketing tips I talk about.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#123is there any reason that my company blocked this website for "copyright infringement" ?
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know there’s a lot of this, but what is the angle? Who is running the bot farms to click on Facebook ads and sign up for random services? And what are they hoping to achieve?
My wild assumption is that bot farms need to look like regular users, and therefore keep clicking on things even when they're off the clock. If Facebook has caught up on click farms that click on links but do nothing afterwards, I would assume that filling in some random data goes a long way to make bots harder to spot once your actual clients show up.
Yes, heard this theory before, think this makes the most sense
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#125I'm struck by two things as I mull over how I'll monetize my own SaaS app that I've started ideating.
Firstly, the author says to rather sell to businesses than to individuals. Fine.
Secondly, one of his links (https://makebook.io/) says monetize by asking users for money, and makes a point of saying don't use ads anywhere.
But if my product is aimed at consumers, why not monetize with ads if it's notoriously difficult to get users to pay 5 or 10 bucks?
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#126„Just ship it“ does not mean spending 9 months(!) building something that should have been a no-code MVP built in 2 weeks max.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bummer. Yeah, my idea was more along the lines of find my audience hanging out online and gently, subtly mention my product. Niche specific subreddits, forums (they still exist), Slack rooms, creating YouTube videos and others work pretty okay for initial traction for free.
I get so frustrated marketing like this. I've put weeks of my life into FOSS projects just to post them on reddit and have them immediately deleted because "self promotion". If I can't post my FOSS to the linux subreddit then what in the world am I allowed to post?
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Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#128This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
I told him that too. People put too much emphasis on “Launch Day”, when really Launch Day should be day one and every day after. Never stop promoting and publicly “Launching” new features. Also too many people launching to Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Reddit where their peers hangout instead of places where their customers hangout.
100% agree with you. I recently sort of "launched". Product is still in development but I wanted to start getting the word out. I posted on ProductHunt, shared on Facebook and was waiting to blow up... nothing happened.
I got more visitors from briefly mentioning my site on a comment here on HN than from ads and PH.
Anyway, after a week of sulking that I wasn't the next Facebook overnight I buckled down and continued working with more long term vision. Growing a userbase takes time, 99% of the time.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#129Hrm, you identified your target market within the first tens of words: freelancers working on UpWork.
But you launched on HackerNews. Why didn’t you seek out communities that freelance, especially on UpWork? That’s where you plug your product, after becoming a valuable member of the community.
And becoming a valuable member of that community IS something you can do: you can give free advice on winning UpWork jobs, how to increase chances, etc.
Re: I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich
#130Nice article, fun to read! I think solo-founders should try hard to find a simple and efficient tech stack - including hosting. Why use containers and EC2 when you could just use a PaaS like Pythonanywhere and be done with it?
I love PA, but I wouldn't say that using them is "being done with it". Containers are pretty useful for all sorts.