I’m all of these types of write ups I always miss two things:
1. Being an expert in your area and focusing hard on solving the problem.
2. Patience and time. Things take much longer than you think.
My experience releasing failed SaaS products
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, niche B2B seems to be the winning play from what I have seen and heard from successful indie hackers.
I’ve had great success building B2C apps as side projects. It’s more about matching your passions to solving issues. Otherwise you’ll burn out and produce crap before you ever make anything people use.
Success by which measure? I fear that a solo entrepreneur making a B2C product that also alights with their passion is firmly in the danger zone - you’ll want to keep making crap that’s no one will use while your passion clouds/hides any signs to stop.
Would love to hear ideas for dealing with overcoming this potential major issue. Perhaps if it’s only a side project that’s safer?
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#63That was a painful read, sorry. My advice for the author is to take a moment and look at the things they pay actual money for. Goods, services, Etc. And how they discriminate between vendors of those goods. (Why buy brand X when brand Y is cheaper, when you need a widget how do you find where to get one? How do you decide which one to get? Things like that.) It is a big "ask" to ask people for money in exchange for a…
> ... money is the first derivative of customer satisfaction not the metric
This is a great sentiment. The product and problem need to come first. So besides being a business person, you need to be a product person too: design, copy, UX etc.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#64It might sound silly, but anyone reading his self-reflection should watch the show Silicon Valley. Some of his "failures" actually failed the same way as the products of "Pied Piper".
That’s what made Silicon Valley so good. I think a lot of us technical wannabe entrepreneurs go through this learning experience. It made the show really resonate.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#65I have been building and failing multiple websites/mobile apps since 2006. To this day, I don't think I could ever be in that situation of creating something that somehow takes off. Theres gotta be a place for failed web/mobile app developers to get together and figure out a way to make it, anyone know of such a place?
Twitter?
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#66I don’t understand why when people talk about startups and side projects they almost never describe the actual product
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#67[deleted]
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#68We don't know what the SaaS products were, what he is describing, how much they were, who was the target... I am just fascinated by these type of posts which people can sit down and write longer than I can tolerate to read. I still don't know what the author tried to convey. Impressive this got 99 votes here.
I actually like that the author didn’t describe the products. That’s beside the point. The point was about the evolution of their goals, definition of success, and ways of failing.
No it isn’t besides the point.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#69A rather painful reading experience. The author needs to learn how to edit their thoughts and use punctuation/grammar properly.
A brief exercise in shipping an MVP and seeing if it gets traction before refining the feature set =). Thanks for reading my ramblings despite the lack of proofreading hopefully its a bit better for others now.
What came to my mind when reading the unedited copy is that you are confusing MVP with prototype. An effective MVP is something that does relatively very few things but that does them well or very well. Otherwise your churning will be huge. In other words, I read your post completely but it was somewhat painful because the copy was not polished for clarity, so I doubt I read a second one. I churned. To build effective MVPs you need to keep an eye on quality. Do fewer things that work flawlessly will have much more impact than throwing a bunch of things to the wall. You need to make a culture change and overweight quality. And I also recommend B2B if you happen to be trying B2C.
Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products
#70We don't know what the SaaS products were, what he is describing, how much they were, who was the target... I am just fascinated by these type of posts which people can sit down and write longer than I can tolerate to read. I still don't know what the author tried to convey. Impressive this got 99 votes here.
I actually like that the author didn’t describe the products. That’s beside the point. The point was about the evolution of their goals, definition of success, and ways of failing.
It would be useful to at least know a little bit about the type of customer the products were for.
There was a story a while ago from someone who had built software for physicians to pick the best drugs for a particular diagnosis. They described the problem and how it was currently solved. They described how they talked to doctors and what response they got. They described what they had to do to create a useful and credible product. I found that post very enlightening.
With this post I feel like I have absolutely no way to judge whether the author's conclusions are relevant to my own projects.