4 Marketing mistakes I did with my first SaaS - Monitz

About Me:

Hey 👋 I am Prasanna and this is my first Indie hacker post 🤩

I am doing part-time DevOps consulting and want to create Bootstrapped SaaS products. I have experience as a Backend engineer, so thought API Synthetic Monitoring could be a good idea and built monitz.co

Development effort was not much, spent around 1.5 months and I reached out to clients after having a full-fledged App.

These are 4 mistakes/learnings for me in Marketing for the past 1 year,

1. Deviating from Product:

I presented Monitz to a company where I have worked before and I have connections with top-level management. Gave a demo of how it works and they were sort of impressed with it and said they want to work with me. But they offered a consulting job and eventually, I can implement Monitz there.

But once I started working, I was pulled into multiple directions & I never got a chance to implement the App. I got burnt out due to work pressure and stopped working on anything for the next few months.

Learning: Be clear about what you want to do. Don't accept consulting offers, if you are there to sell your product.

2. Pitching the product to fellow Developers:

Reached out to fellow Indie hackers and Solopreneurs thinking that they are the right audience. But they are not interested in spending money on it.

It's not a pain killer, it's just a vitamin for them.

Some were hesitant in giving their product API details, so built a Demo app that they can monitor. But no one turned out to be a paid customer.

Learning: Sell / Reach out to people who are having pain & who can pay.

3. Not going that extra mile:

From one of my friends got a CTO-level contact at a big lending company. They have this clear pain point & I had discussions with the Architect level people.

Discussions went well, but they want a solution that is completely different (Real User Monitoring instead of Synthetic monitoring) and asked me how long it will take to change Monitz to that.

It might have worked, but the timelines are too restrictive and I don't have the energy to do that.

Learning: If there is a clear scope of business then it's not a bad idea to completely change the product. Especially if they are your first customer.

4. Too much time spent on one client:

I kind of pinned my hopes on one client. Setup Monitz for their backend and integrated with their Slack to get notifications about their App health. Even after multiple attempts & reducing the price point, they never upgraded to paid plan.

It turns out that they are hesitant to depend on a Solopreneur without any VC background. This was my first App, so trust is the problem.

Learning: Companies want stability and not to depend on one person. It's difficult to convince them, so move on, Fast.

I could have done a lot better and tried a bit more. Monitz is in shelf mode now and sometimes people ping me and say it is a good idea & I should pursue it. But felt I spent too much time on it & not getting the confidence/motivation to work on a B2B App.

Next, I am building a B2C Micro SaaS App superstatz.co and I should say it's doing good. In the future, I will document how my Marketing experiments are going for it.