Help me positioning my SaaS product
Hey all!
I’m working on a product for Indie Hackers and early-stage founders, and I’m finding it a bit tricky to nail down the best way to position it.
For context, it's a tool that helps founders quickly validate their ideas by automatically finding and interviewing people in their target market. I'm hoping to rework the landing page to better connect with founders' emotions, starting by understand why they're building in the first place.
If you're an Indie Hacker or early-stage founder, would you be open to having a ~3 minute chat with the AI about your experiences with building products? It’s a fun way to share your thoughts and it'd be a massive help.
If you’re interested, you can chat with the AI right here: https://heyprobe.com/interview/6iKr5DlaSGpXRHXId38F
Thanks in advance :) Also, always happy to help with anyone’s projects in any way I can. Cheers!
Hey Savannah,
I would love to learn more about this product. I work with early-stage SaaS startup founders on go-to-market strategy/marketing. This has me very intrigued!
Positioning/messaging is the most important part of marketing. It is the most difficult thing to get right.
You need more information on your landing page about how it works, who it interviews, your target audience's pain points, how you solve those benefits, etc..
The video was very helpful, but you have to have that explanation in different ways because everyone consumes/learns media differently.
I'd love to hop on an intro call to learn more and give you some pointers on positioning / GTM. (no pressure btw, it's not a sales call, just giving back to the community).
Links are in my profile or you can book one here.
https://calendly.com/saasxsrb/intro
Hey Scott, thank you very much for the helpful tips. I'll definitely keep that in mind when updating the landing page. I didn't realize how lacking in information it was, but now, I definitely see it!
I appreciate the kind offer, and I just scheduled a call with you. Looking forward to our chat 😊
Looking forward to chatting as well!
Hey Savvy, this is such a good idea. I can see myself using this product.
The problem I face is of getting started. I keep building the product for far too long before I release out to the public.
I guess, this can be one of the positioning that timely user feedback will help indiehackers to ship and iterate faster.
Yes same
For sure. I've done this many times, and when I do eventually launch, no one wants it 😅
You're right that the <ship and iterate faster> benefit is really important for builders. Thanks for bringing it up :)
You're welcome! Happy to brainstorm further if you'd like :)
This is a great problem. As an early stage startup founder from engineering background, my biggest pain point is building what customers need and how to find them.
Thanks @abh1sek. Experienced the same pains with my previous products too!
The link is saying the creator of this product is not accepting request.
Thanks for letting me know! This should be fixed now – I hadn't added enough interviews to the account initially.
As a startup founder coming from an engineering background, my main challenge lies in creating products that truly meet customers' needs and figuring out how to locate those customers effectively. It's a significant hurdle I'm eager to overcome.
Hey Savvy,
Tested it out and all I can say is "I am blown away by the product"
Would gladly use this
Wow. This made my day 😊
Could I use this line on my website? It's so powerful!
By the way - if you're B2C and doing customer discovery, DM me and I'll send you a few free interviews!
Interested in this service: "For context, it's a tool that helps founders quickly validate their ideas by automatically finding and interviewing people in their target market." But from this post, I don't see how you're planning to solve this problem
Hey @zymeth02, thanks for asking! The tool has access to over 150k people (located mainly in the US and UK), and it interviews them based on the goals you provided. The landing page explains it a little better (heyprobe.com)
Great idea, but I'm not able to play around with it. Seems like the bot is saying it's been turned off at the moment.
Hey @shopdev thanks for the catch! Hadn't added enough interviews to my account initially, but it should be fixed now :)
This sounds interesting. But a common tension between indie hackers is that they don't wanna build something that is not wanted or disliked by the community. Can your tool, which validates ideas fast, help alleviate that fear?
Definitely! If they conduct interviews with Probe and see a recurring pain among a community, then build an effective solution for it...it'll be very unlikely for the solution to not be wanted by that same community.
SMH
Hey @hatkyinc, thanks for commenting. Do you mind clarifying what you mean – is the problem that the convo is with an AI rather than a survey?
Yea, solving problem with ai that aren't problem and just making a worse solution, it's more effort consuming while not producing anything better, you have questions that don't need to be open questions...
Completely respect your opinion, but I see the problem a little differently. These days if you want to do customer interviews, each takes a huge amount of time recruiting participants and doing the calls. For a lot of people, including myself, it is a big problem! And I've gotten really good feedback from many founders using it to conduct customer interviews.
Maybe there's a bit of confusion on what the product does? You give the AI goals, and it goes off and interviews real people in your target market. The interview transcripts are not AI-generated – the responses are given by real people.
I was talking about the survey you linked, the survey itself isn't an interview and it uses simple survey questions that are commonly a radiobox
I have to idea why people in this site are gungho about making a product for early stage founders.
That's is like the worse possible icp possible. hahhaa
Shopify would disagree. They IPO'd with a 10BN? valuation on 300k mom and pop ecommerce stores. They have entreprise offerings now, but they didn't need em to get to IPO.
Also Wix, Squarespace, and a ton of others basically all going after single-person businesses that pay them small sums of MRR monthly.
These businesses are incredibly hard to build but also super resilient once they exist cause any individual customer that churns represents only a tiny hit to the platform's revenue since there are so many of them.
Thanks for your comment! I have to disagree that it's the worst ICP, though! This has been the most successful product I've ever built – and all my previous products were targeted toward non-founder ICPs. I find it makes things 10x easier being a part of the market you're building for :)
I think I saw your other posts. Did not realize that you are the girl that post about actually consulting early stage founders.
I thought it was jus a random person that got the big idea to take on indie hackers.
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The reason why I said its a bad idea was that early stage founder, the non vc ones are not flushed with cash. Unless they are already well off, or have savings.
Plus is really risky cause most startups fail. They are pre product-market fit which make helping them harder.
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Good points, but I suppose it depends on what you're building. Even if not flushed with cash, a lot of founders would pay ~$60 to save 15 hours+ conducting and recruiting for interviews. Heck, I try and pay for a lot of products I discover on this forum!
A great example would be @marclou working on Ship Fast. He's selling a ~$200 product to Indie Hackers and he's made over $200k in a few months. Early-stage founders may not be flushed with cash, but if you build something they really want, they'll pay you for it!