Ask IH: How do you do pre-sales for your SaaS projects?

Unfortunately, there isn't a set of hard and fast rules that apply to every scenario and guarantee success.

With Pagestead, we were able to generate north of $30,000 in pre-sales before launching. However, it's extremely hard to point at the exact reasons why we were able to achieve this.

The basics are pretty much a no-brainer: you'll need a solid (simply good enough) landing page explaining the product/service and a means for people to pre-order. We made people provide their payment info when pre-ordering and we would be allowed to charge them on the day we'd launch the software. That's the easy part...

Next, you'll need start driving traffic to the landing site. The nature and quality of this traffic will determine your signup rate and therefor success. With Pagestead, we were able to drive a bunch of referral traffic from other, similar products in our portfolio which made a huge difference. Other options would be paid traffic (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), social media promotions, content marketing (although be aware this a long-term strategy, as it can take 6 months up to a year before you'll see any significant traffic from this).

Do things that don't scale.

In other words, just do something manual - When you get to a scale where you can't do it all manually anymore, automate a part of it using code to free up your time, and keep doing this until it's actually a SaaS