How did you validate your SaaS?
In bullet form, what was your process to confirm your SaaS product had legs?
Interested to hear from humble Indie Hackers on the ground who have grown (or been a part of growing) a SaaS company — in any way.
Why?
Across the web, we typically see this nature of content (most) from industry giants...
Looking forward! 👌
Number 1 thing: see if people will pay you money for it.
What I learned the hard way:
The only thing that matters is whether or not you're providing value to your target market, and you can't know that unless they open up their wallets and pay you.
these all feel good. but true.
Indeed. Revenue feels better! 😀
So it means that just make the product live if you think you've developed the all possible MVP features and just make them pay if they need it ?
I too have a product under development and was thinking to get as many beta users as possible and limit certain features for the Freemium. If they want then they can buy Premium.
Freemium might work for your product, but you won't know until you have users buying your premium product. Free users take up a lot of your time and are generally more needy/ungrateful, so that will have to be a judgement call on your end. But yes, I'd launch as soon as possible to start seeing if you can get paying customers. If you can't, figure out why they aren't interested in paying!
I know betas have turned out great for some people, but I've done a few so far and they've never turned out how I wanted and I won't ever be doing a beta period again. In my experience, people just aren't committed to using a beta so they either don't even try it out (even though they signed up) or they churn quick without offering feedback.
thanks for answering. I am willing to do Freemium and Premium thing. Hope this works out for me
Please keep us posted!
Thank you Zeke, hands down my favorite reply of the month!
This was like a light-bulb moment for me, Zeke!! 😊
Thanks for this ... Really valuable advice. More solid than many in-depth articles I've read!
In your experience (if you don't mind sharing), how did you overcome this hurdle? In the end, did any of those bullet points attribute to paying customers..?
#RESPECT
I went nearly a year without a paying customer, even though I had an email list of over 300 people and a beta user pool of ~400 people, got on the front page of HN twice, and was #3 product of the day on PH. Still, nobody stuck around, much less offered me feedback. It was tough, and I considered giving up many times.
But the problem was that these users weren't my target market—they were users from PH, HN and Reddit—tire-kickers as a lot of us call them. They just want to try out the hot new thing, then rinse (i.e. churn) and repeat with the new hotness. They aren't prepared to open their wallet.
I stopped focusing on those channels, and started focusing on marketing directly to people in my target audience (developers, CEOs, etc.). In my case, this was utilizing cold emails and Google Ads to bring in people who I knew would actually pay me, then ideally getting them to talk to me through Intercom so I could sell my product. I also started working on my marketing site's SEO, i.e. creating pages and updating content to match specific keywords I needed to target.
You are one of the rare examples of no-bullshit, straight-to-the -point type of guy and that's awesome. Values provided by people like you are promising. It must have been a real struggle building a product and not seeing anyone pay for a year, when everyone talks about how they make $$$ from their SaaS. Glad your product took off a year later. Kudos!
I believe this will serve as great inspiration to others, as it has me, Zeke! Congrats on persevering. A year without a paying customer ... That must have been really tough on the morale.
A lot of the time, I see material based on 'how to hack PH' and 'how to rocket your product launch on Reddit' etc (nothing wrong with that, but sometimes irrelevant) ... So your advice is truly golden. 🌟🌟🌟🌟
In other words: Forget vanity / shallow metrics, and precision target instead!
It's easy to say your company smashed it because of a successful (on the surface) hunt on PH. Your experience is exactly the stuff I was hoping for. 🚀
Cheers, man!
It will be interesting to see if anybody else comments with positive bottom line results after using any of the methods you listed above...
^^^^ 💗 THIS.
@ezekg This is a nice story. When did you and how did you get this insight that the users that were on board were not your ideal customers?
In the end, nearly 100% of my early customers fit that bill. After discussing with a few of my bootstrapping friends, we concluded that it was because I was searching for users in the wrong places.
Changing my tactics on where I was finding users resolved the above issues, and I finally started to get paying customers.
This sounds really cool. In fact, this is something I usually encounter when I am working with developers and many early-stage start-up founders. What I find common many a times is that there is a lack of awareness on the importance of a clarity on the pain point, but also an equal amount of difficulty in articulating the pain point even when there are handful users on board. Based on this work, I have put together a checklist to articulate and build a pain point hypothesis for an early traction. I would love to get your feedback on this checklist (https://climblean.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/checklist-pain-point/). I can email share this with you through email, if you prefer that.
your alpacagetaways venture making you any money??
Nothing substantial yet, but working on it. B2C is a tough game!
godspeed my friend
Thanks for being 100% real, Zeke!
I put up a ClickFunnel landing page to an app I hadn't built yet and shared it in a ton of Facebook groups to a niche audience (product market fit) and presold $20K worth of lifetime subscriptions (server costs were low) and used that money to build the app. I love and 100 agree with @ezekg
Genius!! Were you already a member of these FB groups Travis, or did you just drop in and share?
I really like this pre-sale method. Hadn't even considered it. Props!!
(P.S. Me too: @ezekg sounds like a legend & I've only been here 5 minutes).
Already a member and it's key to just get in and make nice with the admins of the group
Worth the time! Thanks Travis. Appreciated! 🏆
Definitely not a legend, but thanks for the complement. 😜
😆 ** BOWS TO ZEKE ** 😆
This is a great question!
How we did it....
TL;DR - Grew a FB group, did Facebook Live events showing tool in action, wrote super-valuable blog content to share in the group and required CC's to start a 14-day trial to prove people were willing to spend money on the solution.
Because we were the target audience, we felt it more easy to develop a feature set as our tool solved our own needs. The best the we did to validate from other potential users was to create a Facebook group that we built over a few months (2,500+ users now) so we surveyed them, asking tons of questions and then launched with a 14-day free trial that required a CC to start and would auto-charge on the 15th day. Requiring a CC to start a trial ensured people were willing to pay for the solution. No sense in having a ton of users but zero revenue lol.
We basically focused on this Facebook group strategy for a while and eventually shifted into how-to Facebook Live events where we used the tool and each time we gained more trial users. Our blog content is constantly shared inside the group as well.
From there we created a short ebook for free and asked for emails in exchange which got us to 800+ subscribers pretty fast. In addition to that, we began requiring answers to questions to join the FB group where we asked if they wanted the ebook and to leave their email address as the answer - it's not required to join but it helps us build a larger list constantly.
With all of this taking maybe 5-10 hours a week we've been able to grow to 72 paying monthly users. We're launching a second product this coming month and will then double-down on growth for our original SaaS product as there's a ton of value we can provide in terms of new features for users.
Super Indie, but that's why I'm here ;) lol
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Cheers for the detail, Dillon!!! 😎👊😎
Really interesting that you chose FB to primarily launch your offering ... Sounds like your members have been magnetized with super-valuable content. (Feel free to share your best links!)
3 questions on FB:
#1: Did you grow the group organically?
#2: Were the FB Live events for group members only, or public? (I guess public?)
#3: Do you ever worry about the power FB has over your members..?
🙌 Really clever strat. Hats off! 🙌
I'm sure learning a lot here...
Oh! And finally, did you use a tool like Chargify to run the auto-charge? 😀
#1: we started with some paid ads but that wasn't the best option so we switched to optimizing it so it would show up in search and began teasing it in other, related groups. Now we're adding 20+ people per day organically.
#2: Private for the group. In hindsight, we should have made them more public. They weren't private, just not shared outside of the group.
#3: 100%!!! That's why we request emails now ;)
Now it's making the shift from the group which is now pretty passive to the next channel for active, new user growth.
#1: That's really good, despite the decline in organic reach!
#2: 100% agree. ✔
#3: Ahaa! Good man... 😎
Finally, please keep in touch Dillon — I'd love to see your channel transition!
sale 10 person before writing a line of code
Did you accomplish this, @INDIECAKERS? Would love to know more! 😄
Have to admit, the ultimate validation sign for any product is a continued chain of payments from your customers. Once system in place its throughput is predictable and could be optimised.
The main takeaway from that for a new products is - on the early stage try to minimise the time and UI friction between customer activation to the product offer/payment to collect the baseline for conversion numbers. If no conversion observed - kill the idea or pivot.
Also trials is no-no and it's a good idea to ask for the card upfront. The last seems counterproductive but actually leads to a very quick product validation.
Appreciate your input here, Alex!
Absolutely agree with reducing the friction (at ANY time!).
Have you had experience offering trials, and did this not go to plan..?
@DillonD's answer above touches on this — Clever auto-charge method after X days of a free trial. 👌
Hi Sam, I was offering a trial period for one of my mobile applications (7 days full features then offer to upgrade to pro subscription) but than A/B tested it against freemium model when premium features were shown along the on-boarding and then gracefully disabled in the app's UI.
The user was still able to use the app but offered to buy a pro version directly after on-boarding/activation. That tremendously decreased my learning cycle and improved conversion. Also consider the factor of retention here and ask yourself how many users will see your offer/payment form after 30 days of trial or after first 15 minutes after on-boarding ;)
Hey Alex — Smiling all the way through your reply, bud. Super smart! 😄
I believe the psychology behind wanting what you can't have (but can see!!) is very powerful. I guess your results proved it...
This, combined with the very quick nudge to pay (while the product is still very fresh in the user's mind) sounds like a solid strat!!
Thanks so much for sharing these nifty ideas here...
I'd also love to know if you (or anybody else here) have tried this method on products that aren't primarily app based? 🙌
My 2cents - validation of idea is not the same as validating whether an idea is a viable business. Most of the validation I hear is idea/concept which is important but as was mentioned in previous posts the only real validation of a business is a paying customer.
Makes total sense. Thanks for hammering this point home, Cole! ✔
100$ facebook advertising(b2c) or google adwords (mostly b2b) and I try to understand how people move inside the funnel (In a very simple MVP)
Love the simplicity + funnel analysis, Marco — As I have limited experience with this sort of stuff, how simple is a simple MVP (in your view)? 🙌
If you have any examples, it would be really cool to see!
Cheers man...
I reuse some simple code (login, register etc) to be able to deliver an MVP in 1 week. so... VERY simple (the core logic it's never more 1K lines of JS)
Thanks a lot Marco, very helpful to know this. 🏆
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Ha! Nice one, Mick — Were these signups paying, or signing up as interested / freemium?
(If the latter, did they then end up becoming customers?)
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Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. ~10% bottom line conversion rate isn't bad after a 9 month period, following an interest-only signup! 👍
What do you mean by "signups"? Did people give you their emails to indicate interest, or was it something else?
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