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

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

#31

Post by bko »

RogerL wrote: post #29
bko wrote: post #20

How are you trying to reach out? Paid marketing doesn't work in my experience. Social media is cheap. I've had an app get thousands of views based on a reddit post, and not one person (literally 0) bothered to click outside of the page (i.e. were curious what app this is). Social media is a false sense of validation, even if you get a hit. Direct sales is the only thing that I found that works consistently. Get in fr…

My inbox is filled with never asked for sales pitches, most having no concept of what we do or what pain points we have. And I'm a principal IC, but still IC, so mostly wasted effort on their part. Every last email gets deleted unread after I report it as spam to our spam filters. I'm sure I've deleted at least one email that could have actually been something worth investigating, but who has the time for all that? A…

Yeah cold emails aren't great. LinkedIn works much better in my experience. Ive replied to some cold emails if it's genuine, not trying to sell my anything. Like if a new grad asking me for advice. I would say use that.

But almost all the cold emails I get are trying to sell me something like an award or a list of potential clients which is something I'm not interested in so i react the same

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

#32

Post by drvroom »

vlod wrote: post #18

Sounds like you have no customers? If so how did you validate your offering against their current flow? e.g. if your potential customers are perfectly happy to use spreadsheets to manage their workflows at your price point, it's not going to work out. Trying not to be an ass, but "Build it and they will come" is not a good strategy (that unfortunately I've done/experienced multiple times).

We offered this as a service and got a couple of customers. There was an interest based on LinkedIn reachout earlier before building.

However, by operating this as a service, we are paying with time and cant scale or become profitable.

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

#34

Post by scarface_74 »

I’m going to tell you something from the other side…

A few jobs ago, I worked for a struggling startup that was trying to pivot and we had one large customer that kept the lights on. I was over the project that kept the lights on and survived every round of layoffs.

The customer was hesitant about giving a small struggling startup money and made us put our code in escrow that they would have access to under certain conditions. The startup failed, they got the code and the company that acquired us for scraps added an addendum to my severance agreement that released me from my non compete and allowed me to have access to my work laptops and work for the client.

A few years later I was the dev lead at another company and I found the perfect SaaS product for our needs. But the CTO wasn’t comfortable basing our entire project around a one man startup. I suggested an escrow agreement, the lawyers got involved and we signed the contract and we were now 80% of his business.

I’m not suggesting you so an escrow. I am saying that many businesses aren’t going to trust a no name one person startup until you have some referenceable clients, provide an easy migration path if you go tits up and they know you aren’t a fly by night company.

Personally, I’m in the camp of “no one ever got fired for buying $WellKnownIndustryStandardProduct”

But I don’t have too much actionable advice when it comes to top of the funnel sales. I’m a “post sales architect” as part of my job. The next step below sales.

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

#35

Post by bobosha »

anovikov wrote: post #23
bobosha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 to 10 is reportedly the magic number

The first startup i was a cofounder with, had over 100. Including high profile ones (the second one ever was Wells Fargo). Still never took off and slowly died over decade+

exceptions maketh the rule.

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

#36

Post by satvikpendem »

jwr wrote: post #8

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 us…

> 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:

Why would you assume this when they literally say they can't even get people to use their product for free?

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