How I failed with my first SaaS. Lessons I learned.

Hi,
I'm a web developer and a year ago a starting to build my first SaaS product.

At my company, I always created many Proposals for clients and as a developer, I think it will be good to create an app that allows me and others to create quickly and beautiful proposals. Of course, I searched on google tools which can do that but no one impressed me. All tools which I saw all was hard to design and this thing confuses me to focus on the content.

So, in March 2020 during the pandemic, I started to work on product ProAgentboard. In the beginning, I was very excited about this project, making financial plans, a roadmap with as many features as possible and at the same time writing code. I ended up working ~ 14 hours a day.

After 3 months I was tired, didn't have the motivation, because I was not satisfied with the result, changing 2-3 versions of features or design per week. I came from Proposals to make the app also support Invoices, and when I made invoices, I said that it must be possible to be paid online with different gateways. And when I made invoices and online payments, I went back to Proposals to change some of their features a few more times. And so it lasted until December 2020 until I was somewhat satisfied with the results.

In January 2021, I launched very excitedly that on the first day when I started working on it. I posted everywhere, on Twitter, Slack groups, Reddit, Discord servers, Betalist...etc. I even made ads on Facebook.

The result was very disappointing. Many arrived on the site but no one registered, only a few users ~8 who have never used the app.

Of course, in the following months, I felt very morally ill and had depression because I put so much work into this project and now I do not see results.
I realized I had failed (

But this April 2021 I recovered and started to study marketing, SaaS business, development strategies, consulted with several SaaS founders and I understood where I went wrong.

So, here’s a summary of what I’ve learned:

• Before you build a product, ask if anyone needs it.
  The big mistake I had did it is I built an app without asking someone if they need this. Don't ask friends or parents, you need to ask your potential customers.

• Don't try to build a big app with many features.
  I think that if I focused only on Proposals and didn't start with Invoices and Payments or other complicated parts of the app maybe I wouldn't be so exhausted and I would understand earlier what I need to pay attention to. Each featured must be implemented with a purpose and it must bring value to the application.

• Analyze your competitors very well and don't forget about UVP (Unique Value Proposition)
  I started doing this after 5-6 months while working on the application and I realized that some functions in my applications are worse implemented than in my competitors and this gave me a state of distrust in the product and thoughts to give up. So your solution must be much better than your competitors.

• Don't keep the development process a secret.
  Talk to as many people(founders, potential customers) as possible about what you are doing and ask for feedback. Understand where the problem is and focus there. It's also called "Audience", I'm just learning how to do that.

I've heard of "Find customers then build." But until then, I don't know how I can do this. As I find out, I'll keep you posted.

• Work more on the Landing Page site.
  This part is very important because the landing page sells your product. If you don't explain a lot about your "amazing/usefully/best-mega" app, people will not understand what is this and they will quickly leave your site.

What next?

Most importantly, I will read more about audience and marketing, not just tech articles.

I will study this niche to find out if this product solves any problems and I will remove the Invoices featured (other applications do it much better) and I will analyze only the part of Proposals. If I realize that it will not work with Proposals, then I will think of another product.

But surely this time I will take into account all the lessons learned and most importantly I will start building in public.