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My experience releasing failed SaaS products

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Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#71

Post by tluyben2 »

schnebbau wrote: post #56
ThePhysicist wrote: post #38

I'm not sure in which areas the author released SaaS products but what's mind-boggling to me is how fast successful SaaS businesses get copied these days, especially if they are rather "simple" (in the sense of being reproducible by a small team without large investment). Privacy-friendly website analytics is maybe a good example. There are literally thousands of companies with almost the same USPs (GDPR-compliant, c…

This is true. If you are building a crud application (todo list/trello, social media scheduling, and analytics are all examples of simple crud applications), the moment you see success it will be cloned by people in eastern Europe, India, or SE Asia, and priced at 10% of yours. A moat or barrier to entry is a must now. Solve hard problems.

Depends what you want to achieve of course; there are many copies of most services around which, in certain regions of the world, do well. There are a lot of SaaS products, notably all kinds of project or task management applications, of which there are 100s of 1000s around, where the owner(s) makes enough profit to have a nice, comfortable life even though there should be crippling competition. I had two of those (in the task management/PM space; I had many more in other spaces) which I both sold, but they made me a very comfortable year income for the years I had them, without any work besides the initial investment of building them (which was not very hard as they are crud apps).

If you are not interested in becoming a (global) market leader, there are a lot of opportunities up for grabs. In the EU (and I guess that goes for other regions in the same way), a lot of companies buy local; the company I currently work for is Dutch and, although we have many competitors globally which might be cheaper or better, there is simply enough income to be made for a company with an office, employees, better than market pay and steady growth only from Dutch clients who rather do business with other Dutch people and inside the EU. GDPR and other EU guidelines and rules rather worked in favour of many companies here; Govs and many other institutions for instance demand all data to be inside the EU and signed contracts that they will never share data outside the EU; many US/Asia SaaS products simply do not offer that with guarantees acceptable (or to be trusted) to companies here.

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#72

Post by davidpolberger »

I wrote about my experience creating a SaaS product in 2018:

https://medium.com/@david_39141/after-15-years-im-finally-re...

Like the OP, the first version of my service launched to crickets (though I had spent almost two full years building that beta version). The 3,500 people who had signed up for e-mail updates took a quick look, and then left, never to return, when they realized that the service was very bare-bones.

The solution in my case was actually to add features, because that first version wasn't very useful. I spent another three years adding features before launching paid plans, two years ago. I made sure to have thousands of conversations with users to make sure that I was on the right track.

Today, I derive my income fully from this service (Calcapp, an app builder for people needing formula support mostly on par with Excel). I haven't gotten rich, and I would have made more money as a consultant, but the income is passive, I still enjoy working on the product and interacting with customers, and I'm confident that our best days lie ahead of us, with a major update on the cusp of being released (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25389963).

Launching a SaaS business is the hardest thing I have ever done, but getting people to derive real value from something I have built is immensely satisfying. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#73

Post by lmarcos »

kristianc wrote: post #54

The article betrays a complete lack of empathy for the pain points of the customer - which is probably why he's having so much trouble to get people to pay for them. He starts out by citing Field of Dreams "if you build it they will come" but then seems to completely miss that point by building it without validating it was something people actually wanted. "I didn’t care so much about creating a product that would ac…

> He's getting into this for the wrong reasons - to be an "entrepreneur" or have a "passive income" rather than solving a problem anyone wants solving.

I always thought this was "common sense". I just don't understand why people focus so much in "I need to bootstrap a saas!", "I need to listen to what other entrepreneurs are saying", "I need to put my product on indie hackers!", "I need to join an accelerator!", "I need investors!".

Sorry, but imho all of that doesn't make any sense. Build something because a) you think it may be useful (for you or for others) and b) you actually enjoy building things.

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#74

Post by denton-scratch »

Spamming forums, and requiring people to surrender PII in exchange for a trial product, is anti-marketing.

Delivering a product that crashes on install, is anti-marketing.

Writing a blog-post that is hard to read due to lack of critical editing and poor grammar and punctuation is anti-marketing.

There's probably a reason this guy hasn't given any information about what his failed products were supposed to do: it didn't matter to him. "Oh, I'm not top of the hit-parade after 3 months? Scrap that one, cry a bit, then start again with a new product".

The crappy, spammy marketing will have annoyed a minority of vocal people - people who write bad reviews. Withdrawing a product suddenly, after a few months, while that product still has users, is not likely to win friends. And if you want a "passive business", you'd better have a USP and some IP that is hard to replicate, otherwise some other techie is going to come along and eat your breakfast.

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#75

Post by davidpolberger »

davidpolberger wrote: post #72

I wrote about my experience creating a SaaS product in 2018: https://medium.com/@david_39141/after-15-years-im-finally-re... Like the OP, the first version of my service launched to crickets (though I had spent almost two full years building that beta version). The 3,500 people who had signed up for e-mail updates took a quick look, and then left, never to return, when they realized that the service was very bare-bon…

If you don't like Medium, here's a version of that write-up hosted on our blog:

https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2018/04/09/launching-after-15-y...

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#76

Post by lmarcos »

defnmacro wrote: post #20
JCDenton2052 wrote: post #12

A 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.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".

As a "tech guy", I never understood the notion of MVPs. Sure, start small makes sense, but delivering something half baked just demonstrates one doesn't care enough for their readers/customers. Why would anyone like to put himself in such a position?

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#77

Post by kristianc »

lmarcos wrote: post #73
kristianc wrote: post #54

The article betrays a complete lack of empathy for the pain points of the customer - which is probably why he's having so much trouble to get people to pay for them. He starts out by citing Field of Dreams "if you build it they will come" but then seems to completely miss that point by building it without validating it was something people actually wanted. "I didn’t care so much about creating a product that would ac…

> He's getting into this for the wrong reasons - to be an "entrepreneur" or have a "passive income" rather than solving a problem anyone wants solving. I always thought this was "common sense". I just don't understand why people focus so much in "I need to bootstrap a saas!", "I need to listen to what other entrepreneurs are saying", "I need to put my product on indie hackers!", "I need to join an accelerator!", "I n…

It’s often either being in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur, or they genuinely are trying to build a successful product but conflating the Promotional ‘P’ of marketing (posting on Reddit, ProductHunt etc) with the other three - product, price, place.

Which is unfortunate, as those kind of people are usually the first people to dunk on marketing with Bill Hicks videos, calling it a form of deception etc.

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#78

Post by Applejinx »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #55
polote wrote: post #42

Once again this post follows the usual strategy to make sure to fail your startup https://blog.luap.info/how-to-make-sure-to-fail-your-startup... These people are very motivated, are able to start new projects and working hard on it. Unfortunately contrary to what the world wants to make you think. Succeeding is not only a question of working hard, there is a lot of luck involved and also a lot of knowledge. But it i…

Intuitive post that was. Particularly liked this part: "This is always difficult to make an article to tell people how to be successfull. Because for any tips that you may give, there are always people who will succeed by doing the opposite. People are very different and we have to accept it. Also being successfull is all about being yourself and being innovative, so really the kind of things which don't follow rules…

Reminds me of the famous viral Cracked motivational article.

Nobody cares about you, who your self is, whether you 'are innovative' or 'don't follow rules'. What did you DO?

That's the only part people can see. It's a very tough sell, going around like 'I am innovative!' and not doing anything significant. Got the cart before the horse there, very possibly without a horse.

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#79

Post by yoshyosh »

ackbar03 wrote: post #14
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #11

I think one of the important lessons that the author is yet to learn is that people don't give a shit about your product. You have to realize that even if someone gives you a 1 star review saying "product does not work", they still probably don't give a shit. Even people who use your product more than likely aren't going to give you any feedback. The fact the author is focused on things like SEO and is overly emotion…

>It also sounds like they're trying to build generic B2C products, which I think is the complete opposite of what you should be building as a solo bootstrapper What would be your recommendation then regarding this point? Niche b2b?

This talk is the holy grail on this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw niche b2b, w/ natural recurring cycles, $99 price point at a minimum, and not needing to be on call is most ideal

Re: My experience releasing failed SaaS products

#80

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

That 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…

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