Great post for you because the honest introspection will lead you to more success.
Great post for us because even though these lessons have been written about before, it seems to take lots of repetition for them to sink in all the way.
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)
It's a business in a similar vein to someone selling things at a local craft fair. What would have to change about his idea for you to consider it a business?
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
...I'd like to see this mysterious Kickstarter page that has had basically no work done in advance.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#54I looked at the original announcement and looked specifically at the technical details list. If I didn't have the stuff on the tech details list available, and had to accomplish roughly the same non-technical task, there are a lot of ways to take notes more or less for free. I can't operate without gmail and I guess google drive so I need not worry about an app built on them.
Dropbox is not a negation of my argument, in that they handle the annoyance of keeping a storage service up.
In my cartoon mind if gmail is down, then storing notes in gmail doesn't work, but the bigger headache is gmail is down not that I can't access some minor notes. So just use gmail for free. Or github. Or a browser extension to "save email to dropbox or google drive"
The other problem is you have a very narrow window of opportunity for a programmers note taker because of habits. The concept of writing README and TODO files and inserting source comments or placeholders, perhaps with tags to search for and ASCII art for markup, has been a part of programming education and tradition for a long time. Could you sell a note taker app to noobs who don't already have a github / text editor habit? Well, maybe, but it'll be harder.
So in my cartoon mind I have an idea it gets entered into TODO or perhaps as a TODO flagged comment in the appropriate spot and its done. You need a wedge to fit your process into it. Like if PUSHes to github regularly failed or github filtered out source code comments to "save disk space" or something. But if it works great, something new is going to be a hard sell.
Now if you did something unusual once you got the data that might sell. Here's a nice web front end that uses GIT and/or github and/or dropbox and/or google drive and/or gmail as a backend.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#55I apologize in advance if I sound snarky, but I (and I suspect many others here) hadn't heard of Marginalia until today. How much did you spend on ads and where did you advertise?
Don't be silly. When he said he spend a lot on advertising he didn't mean that put up a superbowl ad. He probably spend it on Google Adwords for people who where searching for related terms.
"people who where searching for related terms"
I think that would be a strange thing to search for, and I'm not sure it would be a profitable demographic.
Sometimes the problem is not just "do people search for something" but who are those people doing those searches?
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)
Not sure - if it's a hobby, then it's a hobby with fair potential to become a passive income or a lifestyle business (or more).
Just because the parent has reduced the risk of setting up a business doesn't mean he isn't setting up a business. There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business - but he surely has a smaller chance of making a significant loss.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#57This 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.
While I don't know about 30, we use some apps in house that clients began to use for their business. We're now looking at building those apps for ourselves and our clients are on board. We'll be saving the expenses, and have some folks on board before day one. Cool.
Along the road we have had the clients ask us if we can extend the app for certain use cases they have. Since we built their web-presence and integrated those with other tools.. Lets just say things are developing.
So maybe look to your existing clients (you know, the work you do during the tim you wish you were building your app). They are a great source for us, so far...
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)
Not sure - if it's a hobby, then it's a hobby with fair potential to become a passive income or a lifestyle business (or more). Just because the parent has reduced the risk of setting up a business doesn't mean he isn't setting up a business. There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business - but he surely has a smaller chance of making a sign…
There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business
Really? He stated in his comments that he doesn't plan to do anything for this site. No marketing, no publicity, nothing. His goal is to not lose money. Not to make money, just simply to not lose any. Do you think that has the same chance as success as someone who's only goal is to make money?
It goes back to my original comment on his post - if your #1 goal isn't making money, then you should consider it a hobby. That's not a bad thing at all, again, it's to keep things realistic with yourself.
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#59This 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.
Note the careful wording: "before you even start coding it". Coding is a time-consuming thing, very fragile (if you get it wrong, you may almost need to start over again) and brittle (making changes is, connectedly, hard). Very significant validation can be done without ever writing code. (That's a lesson that I've been learning this year, as one who delights greatly in coding.)
Re: Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure - if it's a hobby, then it's a hobby with fair potential to become a passive income or a lifestyle business (or more). Just because the parent has reduced the risk of setting up a business doesn't mean he isn't setting up a business. There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business - but he surely has a smaller chance of making a sign…
There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business Really? He stated in his comments that he doesn't plan to do anything for this site. No marketing, no publicity, nothing. His goal is to not lose money. Not to make money, just simply to not lose any. Do you think that has the same chance as success as someone who's only goal is to make money? I…
> Do you think that has the same chance as success as someone who's only goal is to make money?
Yes, or at least maybe. The viability of businesses is extremely low in almost all circumstances. Doing something creative and putting it out there with a will to get some income from it perhaps has no lower chance than a more aggressive business strategy.
By reducing the cost of running the business to near-zero, you extend your runway to near-infinite. I'd say it's as good a bet as a VC-funded startup which needs regular cash injections to survive infancy.
> if your #1 goal isn't making money
I understand why you are saying that, and given the state of the world, you may well be correct in your belief.
However, I find it an extreme and quite a negative view.
As a consumer, I (with my limited economic power) would rather support people and small businesses with a #1 goal of improving the world in at least a small way - perhaps those which you would probably call hobbies - rather than support things that have a primary or exclusive goal of making money.
I believe that having money as a primary focus will, slowly but surely, damage your business branding over time.