What was the initial reactions of people when they tried your product? Did they say they loved it and would want to use it everyday?
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#12Thanks 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!
I had a list of about 300 people when I launched preorders and about 30% of them converted to paying customers. I was sending out weekly updates with progress toward preorders, and then after preorders started I sent out weekly updates with download links for people who paid and "buy now for X% off, won't last long" messages for people who hadn't.
The whole story is here: https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#13Reasons 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…
> I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing.
Just like the OP, you've generalized your personal experience to other developers. It is an easy trap to fall into. I agree with the takeaway called out in another comment: validate the idea as objectively as possible and as early as possible.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#14Thanks 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!
I had a list of about 300 people when I launched preorders and about 30% of them converted to paying customers. I was sending out weekly updates with progress toward preorders, and then after preorders started I sent out weekly updates with download links for people who paid and "buy now for X% off, won't last long" messages for people who hadn't. The whole story is here: https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-p…
Wow! Nice conversion rate! Good job on not making the same mistake again!! And Good luck!
I'm reading the "Adventures" post as we speak.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
By reading my comment again, it may appear a bit bitter, which was not my intention. I just wanted to point out that I hoped that you didn't give up and that post mortem was just a new marketing ploy to resurrect it.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#16its sort of silly, but one thing in the post that stood out for me was the $29/month for SSL and database.
It was a significant amount of money for this dev - but it could have been done even cheaper with the aws free tier and getting an ssl cert from somewhere like positivessl / commodo.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#17its sort of silly, but one thing in the post that stood out for me was the $29/month for SSL and database. It was a significant amount of money for this dev - but it could have been done even cheaper with the aws free tier and getting an ssl cert from somewhere like positivessl / commodo.
It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert).
You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#18Reasons 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…
It's funny but your list of reasons are kinda stuff learned in business school. Switching costs, substitute products, etc are common to all businesses in my opinion and a little bit of analysis might have helped the OP to identify his niche. However, that said, the experiences learned from failing will have a huge impact in the OP's success in the future.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#19This 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.
Cohen's advice is good for two reasons:
1) Obviously you see if there's any demand for your product but perhaps more importantly ...
2) It forces developers to put on their salesperson hat. Lots of us developers just like building products and just willfully ignore the other part - selling the darn things!
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#20This 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.
get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.
I can't think of any valuable product that was created this way.