9
17 Comments

How did you grow your SaaS business?

I am just curious to find out how you grew your SaaS business, as an Indie Founder, assuming you didn’t have access to millions or billions of $$$ to grow your business.

As an Indie Founder growing your business can be pretty hard.

  • your product is not as polished as some out there from billion dollar companies
  • you don’t have Financial or technical resources to have every single feature since day one (Some users will demand you have all possible features since day 1)
  • Your company is not yet known by most users, so you may have some users say “Hey I don’t know this brand so won’t use it”
  • your company does not rank well in Google for important keywords related to your business

So I am just wondering:

  • what’s your business about (post URL, description)
  • how did you grow your business?
  • how long did it take you?
posted to Icon for group Growth
Growth
on April 18, 2020
  1. 5

    For us it has been a huge grind and I believe nearly everyone else would have quit. But we have continued to grind. I know the problem exists and we're the best team to solve it.

    It is much easier now.

    1. 1

      Hey @volkandkaya nice work on the founder-bingo, just came across it. Surprisingly the ad-blocker I use blocked the Tweet button FYI.

      1. 1

        Thanks.

        Good to know.

    2. 1

      Amazing! How many customers do you have so far?

    3. 1

      Very inspiring story, hope one day I can share a succes story

      1. 1

        Not a success story yet :) still got a long way to go.

  2. 2
    • DIY SEO software (selfseo.co)
    • Growth was mainly through LinkedIn, Bing ads and in-person networking.
    • It took ~2 years to start getting traction.
    1. 2

      Very cool and wow Bing ads, amazing

    2. 1

      I will try Bing Ads for my own business, thanks to you. I noticed the ads are shown in DuckDuckGo, which I think more technical users are residing ...

  3. 1
    • https://usespred.com/. It’s hard listing items on Ebay, Posh, & Mercari manually. Spred helps you save time by allowing you to upload + sell your items everywhere.

    • Growing my business through Reddit Ads, Instagram + Email Marketing. I think email marketing is super important and people miss out on it. If you provide value-added content they'll share your email and you can grow a bigger list from there.

    • Been working on this for 4 months part time, full time job is funding this.

    Disclaimer: In no way is this a successful venture, but just wanted to talk about some of the things that have worked for me!

  4. 1
    • Excepticon - https://excepticon.io: Exception monitoring for .NET, targeting solo devs and small teams
    • Content marketing (blog, tweets, reddit, etc...), Google Ads. Also received some great marketing suggestions the other night that I haven't had a chance to implement yet: https://twitter.com/Ryan___Doyle/status/1251508481921896449
    • I just launched in March and am still working to get my first paying users

    It's encouraging to hear from others on this thread who took a year or two to get traction on their SaaS. I'm viewing this with a "slow success" perspective - low running costs, no deadline for profitability, and I can leave the service up indefinitely while continuing to use it, reference it in my writing, and promote it.

  5. 1
    • SplitCSS.com - API for removing unused CSS from your website
    • Built it mainly with help of friends. Still working on it though. What helps me grow it is actively talking and writing about it. Also asking and responding to feedback helped me a lot.
    • It's been a couple of months, but I know this will be an ongoing battle, a marathon, so to say. IndieHackers and ProductHunt helped me a lot to gain some early subscribers
  6. 1

    Bootstrapped; went from 0 to 5000 users in 2 years, and 0 to 1MM ARR with 1k spent on PPC (so basically nothing) — autoklose.com

    As we are in the B2B space, and we have a bunch of data sales contacts and email engines to ship emails, we were big on email right from the start.

    After acquiring the first 50 companies/customers we went on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a massive opportunity so we built our brand there early on.

    We've been part of different communities such as ProductHunt and AppSumo. And along the way, we managed to create our own.

    Podcasts - we've been guests on over 100 podcasts in 4 months. That gave us great exposure to different communities.

    Now we are focusing on our brand via G2 crowd and similar marketplaces. We won the top 50 sales products and the top 100 fastest-growing product awards.

    There are a bunch of nuances obviously - but this came to mind when reflecting back.

    Good luck!

  7. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 1

      HAving a mentor super important. YES

    2. 1

      @Dedupely Wow, inspiring! Great job on getting people to pay for a product before there is a product and also on building a profitable Saas. I am kind of in the same boat as well, trying to get people to pay me before there is a product. I am curious how you did that... care to share?
      Here is my website https://interviewpal.io

      1. 1

        Hey @Beverly21 just checked out your website. Thanks a lot for posting it.

        Literally 30mins back, I was talking to my friend who used to do the interviews at his previous work and we were talking about how it used to kill all his work time. We were discussing about a very similar solution to what you have done with Interviewpal would have been very helpful because emailing candidates, writing feedback and sending the feedback again takes up a lot of time.

        I am right to assume with your price point , you'll be targeting the medium to large businesses/enterprises?

        1. 1

          Thanks Nakkeeran for your feedback! Yes ,the target company size size is mid market, so that means companies sizes between 200 and 1000 employees.

Trending on Indie Hackers
Your build-in-public audience is not your market. I learned the difference the slow way. User Avatar 257 comments Most founders don't have a product problem. They have a visibility problem User Avatar 63 comments Day 4: Why I Built a $199 Workspace Nobody Asked For User Avatar 40 comments How to automatically turn customer feedback into high-converting testimonials User Avatar 39 comments Built a "stocks as football cards" thing. 5 days in, my launch tweet got 7 views. What am I missing? User Avatar 34 comments Spent months building LazyEats AI. Spent 1 day realizing I have no idea how to get users. User Avatar 29 comments