Building a SaaS fully in public #1
Hello everyone,
One of my 2022 goals is to build all of my projects in public. I first started with building Submetrics in public. Here is the first post. Now I want to open the doors up and build Playgroup in public.
What is Playgroup? Playgroup is a modern community platform. It allows creators, brands, and businesses to build and host their communities.
Now you’re probably wondering why anyone would build a community platform. There are hundreds of them. The competition is real especially with free platforms like Facebook Groups and Discord. You’re right, the competition is real which makes it very difficult. The plus side is that the demand is also very real.There are multiple communities for everything you can imagine.
So what is going to make Playgroup different from the rest? I’ve been thinking about his question a lot recently. There probably isn’t going to be too many differences between Playgroup and other platforms. The biggest difference is going to be Playgroup being an open community platform. Essentially this is a new term I coined after seeing this https://opensubscriptionplatforms.com/. An open community platform allows for importing and exporting your communities content. This is huge since almost all platforms lock you in, which is very unfortunate due to your community's content being your biggest asset.
Playgroup’s Metrics
- $54 MRR (2 paying customers)
- 439 visitors the last 30 days
- 827 page views the last 30 days
- 10 trials in the last 30 days
- 0 new customers in the last 30 days
- 241 early access subscribers for the new launch
Overall the metrics aren’t very good. One of the problems I’ve been faced with is converting visitors to trials and trails to paid users. Below are the big things I’m doing to increase both of these metrics.
Complete frontend UI rework
Complete landing page rework
Here is the new landing page that will be launched with the new frontend UI.
https://playgroup-landing.vercel.app/
I have a big hunch that improving the landing page and frontend UI will increase visitors to trails by a significant amount while also increasing trails to paid customers. I’d love any UI or landing page feedback if you have any!
The current development timeline is looking to be about 1-2 months before we launch. I have an amazing developer working on the code and I couldn’t be happier. The UI was designed by Jim Raptis and the developer is Mina. Both highly recommended!
Screenshot Mockups of the UI
https://www.figma.com/file/b44UBMtPPZ0wp8ELIGBizQ/Playgroup-(Copy)?node-id=20%3A444
Marketing Plan after launch
- Open Community Platforms (A website listing all of the open community platforms)
- A community for community builders (Using Playgroup to host it)
- Blogs + SEO
- Referral program
- Cold outreach (Sales)
I also have a ProductHunt Ship page with 241 early access subscribers for the new update. This is something I’m working on building up and would realistically like to be around 500 before launch. I’m looking for some ideas on how to get that number up!
https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/playgroup
My goal after the new UI is launched is to hit marketing and sales hard and get to $3k-$5k MRR by the end of the year. That is going to require me to get between 50-150 new customers. If I can pull off 1-2 new customers per week, I should be able to get there. In the meantime I’m not too sure what to do since I don’t want to hit marketing and sales until the new UI is launched, which won’t be complete for another 1-2 months.
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I’ll be doing an in-depth update every week :)
Figma mockups are looking great! Nice work!
Thanks! I'll have a demo video out next week :)
All the very for these plans, Yaro.
Thanks! This is a tremendous undertaking and honestly I'm nervous. Just need to take it a day at a time.
I can understand! :)
By coincidence, first I bumpted into a community site that uses your product. Then, here I'm seeing your product. I liked your SaaS. I wish the best for you. Which channels are you using for acquire new users?
Thanks! Which community was it? My current plan to acquire new users is to cold out reach people in a few communties for community managers. That’s my target audience.
It's called Komunite.
https://i.ibb.co/Dzhffz0/Ekran-Resmi-2022-01-24-18-21-14.png
Haha that once isn’t mine. That looks like Circle. The new UI does look similar. The current UI live looks a lot different.
Oh sorry for my misunderstanding. New one looks great.
Good luck Yaro.
For cold outreach, what tools are you using? How do you build your prospecting list, generate emails, (phone numbers?)
I'd be interested to know !
Thank you! This is a solid question. My current thought is to use Scrapegram and scrape emails from followers of community platforms (Circle, Discourse, etc), then use MailMeteor to send cold out reach emails. Anyone who responds positively will be put into my sales funnel.
Ah, very interesting tools. I've come across them in the past, they're indeed very nice tools. Thanks !
Congrats! I'm pretty familiar with a Community as a Service (CaaS) platform called Hivebrite, which you may have seen/referenced. If not, check it out. It's very robust at this stage, having raised multiple rounds of funding. It might give you some ideas on functionality you'd like to one day build. I will say, there is a map view of where everyone is in the community geographically, and it's fantastic for a B2B community where the pin represents a business address. (For personal addresses, that would probably be too much.)
Hivebrite is pretty solid and a mature product. Deff something I'm striving to get to. The map view is quite an interesting feature but more of a nice to have versus a critical feature. This feature is actually on my feature list already haha. Let me know if you'd like a demo :)
Good luck Yaro. Keep pushing the envelope!
Thank you! I will be haha
Maybe if you segment by niche you will be able to find the one that convert better
Yeah great idea, I was also thinking about this. Most people are creating private communities, which usually some sort of membership sites have. Perhaps I should niche down and focus on membership sites looking to build a private community.