Critique my first SAAS product landing page, pricing model & marketing strategy
Hi Indie Hackers,
After month of hard work, I'm all set to launch my first SAAS product Open Milestone. It helps startups and companies to share their product updates, milestones, announcements and press releases with the users in a beautiful timeline format.
Some background on why I created this. Few months ago, I came across Indie Hackers timeline and it was truly inspiring. I learnt how @csallen started IH and how it evolved until acquired by Stripe (would love if he starts posting again on timeline). Kudos to Courtland for his wonderful work 👏 At that point, I decided to create timelines for my own projects (still under development). I bought a domain name from NameCheap and created simple timelines for my products.
In last few weeks, I noticed many founders were sharing pre-launch product updates on IH asking for feedback. It was another great inspiration to make OM available for everyone. I quickly added many features in last couple weeks until I thought it is more than enough to roll this out publicly.
The beta pricing model is simple and based on per product. Everyone can join for free and create unlimited timelines for free. The Pro plan is for those who want to get more timeline control like custom branding, privacy and more. It means you can have premium and free timelines under same account.
I am still confused how to proceed with launch and marketing. Here few thing I'm thinking on:
- Launch beta on Product Hunt, Hackers News, Reddit etc.
- Collect feedback and build a list of most desirable features
- Start coding to add new features
- Relaunch
I would love to hear IH community feedback and suggestions on OM landing page, pricing mode and marketing strategy. What features should I add? Is pricing model fair? How should I proceed with marketing (I can write very good code but in terms of marketing, I am nothing)?
P.S. Some features I've in my mind (would appreciate your feedback on these too):
- RSS feed for timelines
- MailChimp integration (allow users to subscribe to product updates)
- Community forum (!) to help users find all latest updates from different products
Edit: Thank you for the great feedback. It's very helpful so far.
Based on the feedback, I am currently doing the following:
- Improve landing page (remove graphics, more screenshots and less text etc.)
- Ability to create product public roadmap and let the users vote what they want
- Updates filtering based on category
- More pricing tiers with clear feature sets
I'd appreciate any more feedback in the comments.
When I visited your site, the first thing I wanted to do is to see how a timeline like that would look like, but I couldn't find it immediately. I needed at least 10 seconds to find an example of it in your navbar (the Our Timeline) link. Instead of your graphic you should show timeline screenshots.
Definitely second this. That was the first thing I started looking for, and it took me a moment to find it.
I also agree with silvioporcellana said on this thread, I'm not quite sure why I would use it. I really like the design, and the concept seems interesting (I really like how Sketch does theirs), but I'm not sure how it is worth $10 a month for something my WordPress site can do (albeit not as nicely). I'd spend some more time nailing the value proposition.
Thank you for the feedback. The landing page is not very clear. I'll add screenshots and restructure features section.
Hey there, first of all great job and thank you for sharing this with the community!
While I like the minimal design, I don't clearly see WHY I should use/buy your product - or, as Zig Ziglar would put it, "What's In It For Me". I guess you are aiming at prospects that already know the value of having a public product update, yet that's probably a very limited set of people so quickly explaining what I get if I use your product could be useful (something like "Share your product updates, build more loyal customers" or something like that - you see, I provided a feature AND a benefit - people buy solutions and results, not products ;) )
Then, yeah, I would add some more examples right in the homepage, probably nobody is going to read that whole wall of text and you could convey the same value using a video of the platform in action, or just a couple of images with the main points (in any case you need to distill the main USPs your product has, too many features usually cause confusion)
Then, why show the distinction between free and premium features on the homepage to non-registered users? You want people to register and try the tool so show all you can do for them and only in the pricing section show the different features they will have access to.
Finally, are you sure you want to build a business that only charges $10/month? Scaling that would be... difficult... ;)
tl;dr: Focus more on the value you provide, less on the features you built. Charge more.
This is the wonderful advice. Thank you so much. I completely agree with you.
No. The current pricing is just for the beta. I'm going to add more pricing tiers with different feature sets.
Since this was my first attempt to build a saas product, I've no idea how to handle everything. It was also one of the reasons why I shared with IH community first before posting it at PH or Hackers News. I'm overwhelmed with all the suggestions. IH community is awesome.
Thanks for your reply, glad you liked my comment. One small thing about pricing:
looks great!
An additional feature I would request is the ability to filter by types of update (eg a revenue update, #users update, feature update etc)
I think your next steps are fine but would strongly recommend you reach out via email/phone/direct message to founders and try and get them to use your product!
Thank you for the feedback. Yes, updates filtering can be useful. Just added it to features list
No problem. I found the features section on your landing page to have a lot of text quite densely cramped together. I'd think about restructuring that section.
I really like the product. If it included the following features, I would/will happily pay $10+ /month...
If this is the direction you are planning on following, then I'd be happy to pay for a yearly subscription up front once those first three features work :)
edit: actually, point 3 wouldn't be a deal breaker either, so first two features would be enough to convert me as a customer
Thank you again. Yes, the features section is not well-structured. I'll work on it.
It is already available for Pro users. They can select future publishing date for updates. But such updates are only visible to the owner for now. I'm thinking to add separate section on page called 'Roadmap' where users can add their upcoming features deadlines.
It is a great suggestion and one of top features in OM dev roadmap. Should I integrate MailChimp or create my own custom solution?
This is another very good feature. I'll look into it.
Twitter and Slack integrations are already under consideration.
Yes, I was thinking of the roadmap feature (perhaps with different tags of 'dreaming, planning, building' or similar)
I don't know whether you should integrate with MailChimp or create your own solution. Because of the necessity for double opt-in in some countries, I'd go for a mailchimp/zapier integration but that's just my subjective opinion.
Good luck!
Ok. Thank you so much for the feedback. I highly appreciate it.
Looks great, and these are awesome ideas for the Pro plan, especially the ability to email people with updates!
I’d also like to see:
With all these premium features, you could have multiple tiers, maybe $10/mo for the crucial features and $20-$30/mo for everything.
Thank you for the feedback.
For the first point, I guess a monthly or fortnightly email remainder can be helpful.
I'll look into Trello and JIRA integrations after crucial features.
I like the idea but at first sight, it looks like there are a lot of similarities with Headway (headwayapp.co), even visual ones. How do you differentiate regarding this service? More generally, what's the difference between your service and what Beamer (getbearmer.com) or Barelog (barelog.com) propose?
Besides, I saw your pricing scales with the number of subscribers only. Are you not afraid of the number of views, updates if your service is used by popular websites?
I like the purple/pink gradient, so maybe it would be good to stick with that coloring/branding throughout? Looks good!
I thought of using gradient at the start. Since users can customize their timelines color schemes, it was a bit difficult to handle the gradient part.
Looks fresh. Bit colour overkill. By minimising this, it would make for a stronger look.
Probably said before, but image or clear link to a live timeline would be helpful.
I think your current sub heading (h2), would be better as a main heading (h1), since it tells me more clearly how the product helps the user. Also think along the lines of: "get your users more engaged with your product / keep your users up to date about requested features". The "press releases" seems a bit out of place, I would skip that.
Thank you for the suggestions. I'll keep them in mind while updating landing page.
I agree "press releases" option does not seem fit for now. I am planning to allow users add / edit labels name and colors. It will be more appropriate.
Hi @attacomsian
I really like your product even I didn't start making shape of my business Idea.
Anyways, I have some remarks about the website:
Best Wish.
-Ayb
Hi Ayb,
Thank you for the feedback. I agree the landing page is not well-structured and am working on it right now.
Great product looking page -- the aesthetic across all your projects rocks :) Looking forward to using it.
On the top part of the landing page, a screenshot of a timeline would be more powerful than the graphic you currently have for getting me to click the CTA or keep scrolling
For the pro plan ( and possibly a different tier entirely) allowing timelines on a custom domain would be a great feature that Id personally use.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. Yes, there should be screenshots instead of graphics on landing page. I'll update accordingly.
Custom-domain is already included in current plan $10/month. I am trying to make pricing section more descriptive.
Here is a link to OM timeline on custom domain: http://timeline.openmilestone.com
Nice work. I really dig the font choice and colors. If we need a changelog / roadmap in the future, we will try your tool (bookmarked)!
What I am missing is a link to see „how my users see the timeline“. Just switched browsers and guessed that the URL is public.
To see all the „PRO“ tags is nice, reminds me to upgrade to get all the cool stuff 👍
Good Luck!
Glad to know you like it. Right now, private timelines are not supported. Every timeline is public by default. But I think, it would be a good idea to allow private / link only timelines in future.