How did you get the idea for your first SaaS?
We're all familiar with finding potential problems faced by our customers. One approach deals with discovering new audience & engaging with them to find problems. Other approach focuses on product building from just an idea.
So how did you get started with the the SaaS you're currently working on or have already developed? Let's get to know your product's backstory!
I’m currently working on building a SaaS. In my previous project, I always struggled to keep my marketing plan organized and consistent. Additionally, at the end of 2021, I noticed a lot of people on Twitter were making Marketing a goal for 2022, but they didn’t know where to start. A lot of these people already had businesses with MRR, but they wanted to take them to the next level.
With all of this information, I decided to start building a strategy and project management app for marketing. I’m excited to be building it to solve my own problem, but it’s also something that others want.
That's great. So how does it help manage the marketing tasks?
Besides prioritization, one area I just developed is organizing tasks based on desired results. So if you set a goal, such as 10k unique monthly visits. Then your tasks get setup as objectives to reach that particular goal. This keeps you focused on results rather than simply completing tasks that may not accomplish anything.
Down to me I'm guy who has tough time taking decision (doesn't mean I'm a poor decision maker lmao) and as a developer who always breaks his mind to solve my bugs which I love doing, I literally can't come to a conclusion on what to cook and moved with health content online I thought I should create a recipe app thats has the most customization from choosing the amount of time you have to typing down the max calories you eant the food your searching to have and dating with food exactly swiping the food you and dislike and getting a set of recommendation from an AI, I thought this is the exact type of app that we devs and work professionals need inorder find the delicacy they deserve in shot span of time with the exact amount nutrients they are looking for!
This is reason behind ResPic an Intelligent recipe app with Food dating | Fruits and vegetable detection | Pet treats etc powered by Deep learning!
This ambitious piece of software is available here: https://respic.ml
Is it a paid app and who were the target customers?
It features a freemium model and working professionals and people who are health conscious like Gym goers plus people like who have hard time coming to a conclusion on what to eat.
That's quite an interesting space, @skroshan . So which marketing channel is effective for you in this case?
I was hired in 2012 by a startup to integrate their CRM product with their users’ email accounts. So that if there was a contact in the CRM and someone from the same org had sent an email to that contact or received a reply, it would be visible in the CRM. Worked on in it for a year or two.
Fast forward to 2020, I saw that email is still hard, a lot of companies still struggle with the same issues, so I decided to build a similar thing I did ten years ago but this time as a more universal component any company could use. Took a long time as I started from zero, even had to build a custom IMAP library from scratch. Finally ended up with EmailEngine https://www.indiehackers.com/product/emailengine
It's a great product you've built, Andris. And Nodemailer was a cool open source project too!
Also could you elaborate on Emailengine's use case for a non-technical standpoint?
Let’s say you have an email account support@yourdomain. You want your application to read emails from that account or send out emails as if these emails were sent by that account. You can either figure out how all the various email protocols work and write the code for it yourself (eg an IMAP handler to log in and fetch latest emails from the Inbox) or you can set up EmailEngine and do the same thing with regular HTTP based API calls.
Thanks for elaborating. Now I get it :)
I was searching for sites popular in neighborhood countries that aren't (yet) in my country. Ofc this won't work if you have an international audience, but it's a thing worth considering IMO.
So it was a B2B or B2C business? Wouldn't such companies gradually expand to your country as well?
Was looking for something to do as a side project for about two months, when a tweet came by that triggered some "I want to build this" need.
See http://ExtenDM.com for the tweet ;)
I did started to follow more builder/maker type of people on Twitter, who share there thought and build process to get more in the mood.
Interested in learning more on this one! Would each message in a conversation be sent as a new email in the thread? And would you just reply from your inbox? This would definitely help streamline things on my end.
Thanks for your interest!
New incoming DMs are forwarded to you via email. The reply to DM is the next step and still working on that part.
It's definitely meant to fit the DM flow in your already existing email flow and way of working.
Let me know if you have any questions!
extenDM looks super cool. Just subscribed !
It would help stay focused when working, as customers tend to send DMs on Twitter. Would the DM have a reply from email feature too?
Thanks for the nice words!
It's absolutely no replacement for Twitter ;) but will help prevent from opening and scrolling Twitter too many times a day
Reply to the DM notification is coming to yes!
True that's quite a problem scrolling endlessly on Twitter. Cool.
The best way is solving a problem that either you or someone you know has.
True that it would help. But how do we approach when we find problems ourselves and that has been solved well already?
In that case it's not really a "problem" in that sense. A problem arises only if you can think of something that isn't solved well, you find annoying and so on.
For example, if I'm unhappy with the current website analytics solutions the problem isn't "solved" for me personally - even if there are hundreds of services in the space. On the other hand, if a service does absolutely everything I want and/or I can't think of a single thing I could do better I won't touch that market.
I read this great thread by the founder of ConvertKit today. They're one of many marketing email services. They started to grow rapidly once they positioned themselves as the "email marketing for bloggers" solution.
In essence, it's okay if the problem has already been "solved". As long as you can improve one thing and cater to a specific niche you should be good.
Thanks for elaborating @noahflk. That thread was super valuable.
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