Great post Pete, I'm really enjoying your Stripe + Rails book. Keep it up!
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
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Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#22This 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.
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Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#23Great post Pete, I'm really enjoying your Stripe + Rails book. Keep it up!
Thanks!
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#24This 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.
That's quite the sweeping dismissal of Kickstarter.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#25This 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.
I likewise performed a detailed dissection of my previous failed website on my blog - very therapeutic. It still has one fairly regular user (me!) so I keep it going but I launched in much the same way: built it silently then managed to get about 10k+ visitors through HN. Only a few hundred gave it a go initially and within a fortnight or so, no tangible traffic at all.
Great learning experience though, and this post is a reminder to me to make sure I don't repeat the same mistake.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#26You 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.
I think you did a really great job in completing the project and launching. Disclaimer: I'm an MBA student so take my thoughts with a grain of salt :) I thought that your marketing was spot on in terms of trying to generate something but I'm just wondering if you tried targeting other types of customers or even zoning in on very specific types of programmers ( beginner level, expert level, etc)?
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#27This 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.
Obviously it depends on your exit strategy. Do you want to (a) get a loss making but huge user base or (b) bootstrap a business that has cashflows from day 1?
Sounds like that advice applies more to the latter route than the former.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#28This 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.
This seems like sound advice, but I'd like to hear more on the execution of it. Do you actually get these people to sign contracts, or is it more of getting people to say "yeah, I'll pay you for that"? Do you let them know you haven't written any code, or just say it's "in development"? Etc., etc.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#29This 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.
Just this weekend, I started coding up a tiny "saas product" that I thought about last week. Nobody knows about it, and that certainly has no launch page or audience. I got most of it done over the weekend, and really enjoyed putting it together in my favorite stack (sinatra, roots, marionette) and doing some design work, which I don't often get a chance to do.
I'll probably launch it late this week or next week. I have no audience, and don't expect massive profits either. I made it mostly because I want it. Since I plan on using it extensively, I honestly don't care if I have huge profits or a gigantic audience. I spent $5 on the domain name, am hosting it along with 10 other sites on a $5/month digital ocean box. I put in some great work this weekend, and am now going to end up with something that will fit nicely into my workflow.
It will ship with a decent free plan, and a $5/month pro plan with some expanded capabilities. If one person signs up for the pro plan, that covers the cost of hosting for this site and 9 other sites (bonus!) If 2 people sign up for the pro plan, it's profitable. If zero people sign up, I paid a very small cost for something that's going to be really useful to me.
Sometimes I wonder why so many developers gravitate towards huge ideas that they think other people might want rather than starting small, with things that you want. With this little thing I'm making, there's no risk. I've already won.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#30Reasons 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…
One more reason for me not to switch:
- why in hell would I want to use a browser-based solution for something a free, native, off-line program is much better?