Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
petekeen.net
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#2You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#3You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
Writing a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#4You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
He says later in the article he tried paid advertising, but it never led to sale.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#5You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
I tried content marketing microsites, google ads, reddit ads, talking about it a lot, etc. Nothing really stuck, and then life got in the way and I lost interest.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#6This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#7You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
Writing a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.
Well he put the source on Github and it's very interesting to see how some projects come together.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#8You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
Writing a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.
Ha! No, no interest in resurrecting it at all, I just wanted to share what I learned.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#9Reasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer):
- I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free.
- I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices.
- Your service costs me money to do what I do for free.
- If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free for me.
- Emailing myself notes with tags in the subject in is also free.
Why should I spent $5/mo to use a digital journaling service, and then more time to make this service work with the rest of my workflow, when I already have things in place that take care of my note taking problem?
I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing.
Finally, at least you shipped something. Nice retrospective. Keep at it.
Edit: It's interesting seeing this post and "Ask HN: How do you store and organize your startup ideas?"[1] on the front page at the same time :)
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#10Thanks for posting the "behind the scenes" story.
You say you built a landing page with mailchimp signups for your new product. Did you get many signups? And I suppose these were just signups, no money involved, right? Did a good chunck turn into paying customers?
I would love to know more.
Thank You!