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Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

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Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#1

Post by drvroom »

I built a SaaS in the video space. We are doing everything that makes it a great product. For example, storage, encoding, processing, minor transformation, sharing. The only thing I see that we haven't done yet is full scale editing, auto posting to social.

I posted to all channels (except HN) yet I don't see much demand. We clearly see how businesses, small and large, could benefit from our SaaS saving their staff at least 10 hours for real. Our initial testing shows it works great.

Is there slump in SaaS selling or are we doing something wrong. I am pretty sure it is the later.

Why businesses, especially marketing/sales leaders or product managers, won't show interest in our SaaS. My competition research shows they are growing fast.

Yet, I can't get anyone to use it for free when we clearly add more value for 1:1 feature comparision.

Am I missing something? Has all marketing changed to paid campaigns on Google or Influencer marketing on X, TikTok? We don't have a big (or even medium size) budget.

How do I sell my SaaS to SMBs and large corporations when they don't even reply.

Re: Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#2

Post by anovikov »

That's what i went through several times, until i stopped trying. Thing is, there's no point asking: those who made it, have no idea how they did, and those who didn't, are just as clueless as us two so their opinion doesn't matter. It just happened - there are those famous charts posted around where at one point some product starts to experience exponential growth by like, 50% per month over years and when a founder is asked 'what did you change at that point so it happened' the usual reply is - 'nothing really'.

It's random. See it as something like gambling. It's a healthy way to approach it. And ideally, do it with someone else's money.

Re: Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#5

Post by throwawayffffas »

Why not HN? And what's your product? Can we see it? The auto posting to social, might seem trivial, but I am guessing is a huge pain (selling point) for most people.

Also get out in the real world, go to meetups, or wherever you might meet potential clients and show them your app up close. They will probably be cordial and kindly dismissive, but you might get some real feedback. It's harder to ignore someone when they are standing in front of you.

Re: Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#6

Post by pradeepodela »

I faced the same problem myself — traffic was the main issue. Even if the product is great, it won’t matter unless people can actually find it. Another thing I realized: the intended user and the actual user can be very different.

In my case, I built an app called foundersmail.xyz, which gives users access to founders' official emails and other details. I got the idea after seeing someone else build a similar tool for investors — it worked well for him, but he already had an audience and reputation.

For me, I promoted it across various subreddits and platforms and got around 100 users. I noticed that only 20–30% actually used up their free credits. While debugging this, I discovered most of my users were students cold-emailing founders for summer internships. I thought at least one of them might convert — but unfortunately, none did (still trying to figure that part out).

My two biggest mistakes:

No traffic — not enough eyeballs.

Target audience mismatch — students using it instead of founders or professionals.

Interestingly, there are competitors making money with similar products, so I know there’s potential. I’m still figuring out what’s missing in my approach.

That said, I’m okay with the outcome so far. I haven’t spent a single rupee — free domain, free hosting, and I built it in my spare time and vibe coded. It was an experiment rather than an actual business.

Re: Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#8

Post by jwr »

SaaS founder here. I'm assuming you got the basics right, so you do have a product market fit proven by having paying customers who are happy with your product. With that assumption:

Marketing became much more important than it used to be. I used to be able to rely on organic growth from people finding my SaaS using search engines. But this ended several years ago. Marketing also became much more difficult than it used to be. Generic ads on Google or LinkedIn no longer work, unless you can spend huge amounts of money on testing. I found all paid ads to be a waste of money.

If you have a B2B SaaS, you run into the additional problem of people being busy and not hanging out in forums. With consumers, things are more straightforward. You can generally blast an ad on Reddit, Instagram, and some other sites, and people will see it. Not so with B2B. Many of your customers will be busy working, and they will not pay any attention to work-related ads outside of work.

Content marketing also became more difficult. With search engines, especially Google, going down the drain and the deluge of crappy SEO-gaming and AI-generated content, it's difficult to rise above the noise.

I haven't found the right solution yet.

Re: Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#9

Post by madaxe_again »

So here’s the rub.

Your product is almost irrelevant, as long as it is at least mediocre at what it does.

What matters is your marketing and your positioning. From how you describe it, it sounds like you’re selling steak, not the sizzle - you say what it is capable of but not what it does for you. You mention that it could save “ten hours for real”, and this is the point you need to drive home - this will save you money, make you money, make you more attractive to investors, give you time and peace of mind.

As to channels - social media rules the roost. Pay YouTube and TikTok influencers to shill for you. If you don’t believe enough in your product to pay for marketing, why should they believe in it?

Push out hype-laden press releases. Thump your chest. Drop emails to journalists in the space, with pre-written soundbites and a link to the release. Make it easy content for them to sling up on their platform. The bar is low.

Pick a vertical. Work it, target it, saturate it with your product. If you can find a vertical that’s underserved, then start there.

Finally, make sure your landing page speaks to the above, and hammers the point home right out of the gate. “Vidlify will help you get that Ferrari you always wanted. Here’s how:”

Save jargon for the “I’m excited, tell me more”.

Then, either it will fly, and you can progress to a broader market, or it won’t, and you either accept your loss and move on, or tweak and try again - but don’t get caught in the sunk costs fallacy - just because you’ve already spent X time and Y money, it doesn’t mean you have to commit more.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

#10

Post by vidarh »

pradeepodela wrote: post #6

I faced the same problem myself — traffic was the main issue. Even if the product is great, it won’t matter unless people can actually find it. Another thing I realized: the intended user and the actual user can be very different. In my case, I built an app called foundersmail.xyz, which gives users access to founders' official emails and other details. I got the idea after seeing someone else build a similar tool fo…

For contactng founders, you compete against LinkedIn and a slew of sites selling email credits by the thousands.
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