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11 Comments

Converted an old product to a new SaaS product

Hi Indiehackers

I had a Knowledge Base feature as part of another software that did not go well.

After more than a year I have launched the Knowledge Base module as a separate product, as my current SaaS product needed an affordable knowledge base software.

Is it a good idea

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    The fact that you used it yourself is a good indication that it could work. And it's not an uncommon thing to simplify and focus on a very specific niche.

    What other research have you done? Is anyone else using it? Have you found people who need it? What competition are you up against? What makes you stand out? Does it interest you to pursue it as an idea?

    What do you think/know were the problems with your other product?

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      Thank you very much for taking time to reply.

      For starters I felt that exactly similar competing products were very expensive. We are a bootstrapped company and hence competing products were close to affordable.

      I have used similar products and they match with us in terms of features. Pricing I believe we can be competitive.

      I have launched it today because I wanted to stop the subscription of a competing product. I have not found customers as of now.

      I'm thinking of running it as a side project and using this product to learn digital marketing which is my weekness.

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    I've been looking for affordable KB software for myself. Mind to share me the link to your product maybe I can give some constructive feedback for it?

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      I have updated the link in my post. Please note that there might be some bugs or errors.

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      Sure will post the link.

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    Is the KB product novel? There are tons of those out there, and maybe you should better focus on your core business (where you have expertise nobody else has) and use a commercial KB option for that part of the biz.

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      This KB tool is not novel. It was fully built as a feature in another product that I shutdown last year. I was looking for a cheaper alternative but could not find one. They all were equally expensive. So I decided to spin of the KB feature as a separate product.

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        if you have an understanding of the pricing of this type of product from your prior research, do you think your solution is viable at a similar or lower price?

        You got to figure how much you will need to spend to market it and what's the cost of acquiring a customer, and retaining one. That would take a little trying with advertisement / marketing to figure what's the typical funnel break down.

        The way to look at the funnel is backwards: how many customers do you need to generate per year to make this viable? How many qualified leads do you need to turn a sale? How many leads do you need to generate to turn a qualified lead? How much do you need to spend in ads to generate a lead? That's your total cost to acquire a new customer.
        Similarly, what does it take to keep one? Or what's the churn? People stay and renew, that's great. If people quit in troves that means you need to spend that much more to acquire new customers. That take a bit of time to figure out obviously, but with these values you can figure your Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) with new customers and renewals.
        Then obviously you need to figure the cost of running a minimal service and the cost of scaling it. Is this something that scales easily (just add a few more servers when you have more users?) with little to no support? Or do you need an army of Customer Support Engineers to get your customers setup and able to use the product? Obviously the later doesn't scale well.

        At first you might run at a loss. How much money and time does it take to get to the point where you have enough customers so it is self sustaining? Think of the time it will take, then double that!
        Do you have that kind of funds to make it happen in time?

        This is what you need to figure out.

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          Thank you very much for the detailed reply. I will work out the points that you mentioned.

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    @krishnan_ubuntu - where can I see your product?

    If it helps here's a recent post weighing single vs multi-threaded approaches https://www.indiehackers.com/danielheinz/post/8382d86860

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      Thank you for sharing the link. I will not be working much on this KB tool as most of the work is already done. I just worked for few hours to remove it from the core product and make it a standalone one.

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