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Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

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Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#1

Post by hkyeti »

TLDR - Built a SAAS early adopters like but struggling to get the word out… any suggestions?

The background: two of us built our first SAAS service over the past 6 months. It's a poll and survey SDK for mobile developers (think a survey monkey 2.0, for mobile)

We made it to scratch our own itch - two co-founders are an game dev and app apps.

The handful of customers who have deployed it so far really love it and are use it every day now..

BUT… we're struggling with getting the word out.

Naively we thought if we build a great product traffic would just grow by itself (I know silly in hindsight).

So far we’ve tried posting about it here and product hunt, but not much traffic. We tried some direct emails to developers emails from App Store but low response rates.

It' quite frustrating - any suggestions?

EDIT: the service is https://polljoy.com

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#3

Post by hkyeti »

tarikozket wrote: post #2

The only tip that I can give you guys is, don't change your name but change your slogan with "survey" to reach more people. Here is some science: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=mobile%20survey%2C%20...

Good practical, suggestion thanks! Any other suggestions from the homepage?

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#4

Post by frobfoo »

First of all: Despite not being in your target audience, I really like your landing page. It looks fresh and professional to me. Maybe a nice key visual (e.g. a screenshot of an actual survey) in the hero section would make it even more compelling and help understanding what polljoy does in the very first moment.

Regarding marketing the app, here are a few (unsorted) ideas off the top of my head:

* You said that you developed the app in order to scratch your own itch. So basically, you need to find more people like you (or rather your co-founding developers) that are in need for such a solution. Where do these people "hang around"? Where are they looking for help with their work, where would they look for such a tool? How can you get in touch with them?

* Contacting developers directly would be one of my first ideas, too. How many developers did you contact? Did you get any feedback at all? Did you add tracking to your mails so that you can estimate open/click rates? Maybe you need to improve your cold pitch mail...

* Are there any conferences or game development meetups in your area where you could spread the word about your service?

* Did you think about performance marketing, e.g. AdWords?

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#7

Post by hkyeti »

frobfoo wrote: post #4

First of all: Despite not being in your target audience, I really like your landing page. It looks fresh and professional to me. Maybe a nice key visual (e.g. a screenshot of an actual survey) in the hero section would make it even more compelling and help understanding what polljoy does in the very first moment. Regarding marketing the app, here are a few (unsorted) ideas off the top of my head: * You said that you…

Thanks frobfoo for the feedback.

"You said that you developed the app in order to scratch your own itch. So basically, you need to find more people like you (or rather your co-founding developers) that are in need for such a solution. Where do these people "hang around"? Where are they looking for help with their work, where would they look for such a tool? How can you get in touch with them?"

We're thinking to start in stackoverflow and unity forums, and try to figure out other sites and forums. Challenge is that we don't really post or have accounts there so we're starting from scratch and concern about being spammy?

"Contacting developers directly would be one of my first ideas, too. How many developers did you contact? Did you get any feedback at all? Did you add tracking to your mails so that you can estimate open/click rates? Maybe you need to improve your cold pitch mail..."

We got pretty low click rates, about 5% and then low conversion on the homepage. We guess that they just get bombarded with so many messages from ad networks etc the tendency is to delete everything?

"Are there any conferences or game development meetups in your area where you could spread the word about your service?"

We're in Hong Kong and no travel budget, so not really :(

"Did you think about performance marketing, e.g. AdWords?"

I checked out the rates, seems really too expensive for adwords, maybe the VC backed ad and analytic companies are pushing up the keywords for everyone. Not really an option, have to figure out how to grow with no/minimal marketing spend..

Appreciate the help

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#8

Post by hkyeti »

hkyeti wrote: post #3
tarikozket wrote: post #2

The only tip that I can give you guys is, don't change your name but change your slogan with "survey" to reach more people. Here is some science: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=mobile%20survey%2C%20...

Good practical, suggestion thanks! Any other suggestions from the homepage?

Update - switched the headlines (we're a/b testing a few) over from "poll" to "survey"

Re: Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?

#10

Post by vishalchandra »

Checked out your product. It looks like a really good implementation of a "poll and survey SDK for mobile developers".

There are tens of thousands of mobile developers building all kinds of apps, which group of devs actually need to add different polls / survey in their app every week ?

You made it to scratch your own itch.. but what exactly was your itch ? And how frequently did you want to switch the poll, survey that you conduct ?

When a user has a pain-point then we need to evaluate the following as well i.e. a user with a pain-point by itself is not sufficient, we have to check for problem-solution fit as well ~ 1. What are the alternative solutions and what do they lack in and how much more value does our offering create in comparison to the alternative ? 2. How often do users face the pain-point ? 3. When do users face the pain-point ?

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