Tips for Developers Who Want to Build a SaaS Startup

Customer feedback is the most valuable resource for a starting company. Understand what brings value to your customer, and understand what the pain points are. Where do they get stuck trying to use your product or service?

Apply what you learn from customer feedback. This is also a feedback loop on the improvement cycle of your product, as you should observe a drop in customer service requests once an improvement has been applied.

With every improvement cycle, the product should bring more value and less friction to the customer. This will make marketing so much easier as you now understand the customer's pain points, and you have a product that solves just that. Do it right, and the product will basically sell itself (you still need marketing though).

Look at the background, does it make sense? Tell me what the background to the left of hear head is. Look at her earbobs, how often do people wear different ones in each ear? Does the left earbob look like anything?

> 1.. you don't relate to the problem

Yeah, it's like being blind. "Why do people buy that thing?" is a question I barely get answer confidently

> 2.. because developers don’t pay for shit

It's getting worse. These folks always demand open source alternatives, self-host. Sometimes, the moral of story is "I want your free labor no matter how your family is doing"

> 3.. Don’t pick something that needs a pretty UI:

Super related here. When I realized my product value is literally UX/UI, it's like the end of the word because there's no many HCI solutions at all. It's always hard to use for any target, techie, non-techie, it's hard still.

> 4.. Learn how to market instead.

Developers try to do marketing is like trying to do self-surgery, ones just can't

> 5.. You don’t want to be going around talking to actual humans

I ended up shitting on a customer because he thought he knew problems (my app trying to solve) more than I do, but I'm confident he didn't know shit.

> 6.. Try writing

Yeah, this is part of content marketing. It kinda sucks to me though, lots of content marking is just for sake of marketing, doesn't bring much knowledge.

> 7.. Keep it real.

The most real sad thing is going back to working for corp.

In the worst case you can't make it fast enough and you lose the customer, but you've at least proven there's a market for the idea. There will be other customers.