I launched my SaaS that I developed for ~5 months a week ago and immediately ran paid ads. These are my learnings so far.

I am a product developer. That means that I am conceptualizing, designing and developing apps. I also teach people how to develop user centric digital product. My clients are mostly corporates.

Backstory

In 2017 I was freelancing and doing solopreneur service stuff like webdesign, branding design etc. Back then I needed a tool that was easy to use and let me handle all of my business tasks at once: Project and task management, invoices, a simple CRM to keep track of opportunities and something to send to potential clients that would work as a web business card where people could see my contact and services.

Since I am a fullstack developer and had a little bit of time on hand, I just built it. Back in the days I had 300 users over night after launching on product hunt. It was pretty nice but I forgot to implement a payment processor, so I did not earn a dime (I never thought that it would draw attention but people love dashboards I guess).

The current SaaS

Long story short: In 2022 I rebuild the entire app for the german market, since I am based in Germany with a, in my opinion, better design and user experience.

The development was exclusively led by test users I boarded on right away. That is the same technique I teach my SaaS clients for my consulting business, so did I as well. It's easy once youve done it a couple of times and has a big advantage → Your product is not just something you imagine being nice and also you have real users right away once you launch.

After around 5 months I launched (one week ago) my website (before that there was no landing page but the sign in page) and immediately started running paid ads in the meta ad network (facebook, instagram mainly).

Some marketing stats

So far a lead costs around 13€. People are churning pretty heavily so a user is more expensive. I think it's because of the all-in-one character of the app which is harder to explain as a single usage micro SaaS would be.
We have a CTR of ~3% on the website and around 100 visitors per day.

I quickly implemented intercom (pretty expensive, even the reduced startup plan - but worth every dime in my opinion) and could manage email campaigns as well as a direct chat to my users. People are texting me on a daily basis rn and I am happy to answer questions.

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It seems like the messaging is a huge problem... Okay lets make a cut here and conclude my learnings:

• If you have the money and don't know how to reach your audience elsewhere, paid ads are a good way to go IF you have a marketing expert at hand or if you are one yourself. I am doing marketing a while now but I am by no means an expert but have a really strong partner at hand who is doing the whole ads game for me
• Intercom, or every client communication tool, is handy if your idea is not yet validated. I talked to users since the beginning but buying strange customers via ads is a different game. My test users are coming from related entrepreneur/freelancer facebook groups. I onboarded everyone of them and held a meeting with everyone. TALKING TO CUSTOMERS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING!
• Optimize quickly but give your current stack some time to perform. If you are changing your website every day, you are going to loose!
• Ask churning customers why there are churning. They might tell you.
• Don't ever rely on one acquisition channel. Paid ads is my starting point at the moment, but I also have some influencial freelancer and solopreneur friends that are well connected.
• Stay strong. It pokes my heart every time when a user is signing up for a subscription (I have an automation set up that fires a slack message if a stripe subscription is being made) but churns 3 minutes later. It sucks but people like to test your product. Show them as much as you can beforehand so they know what they are buying.
• Don't be too cheap. Even SaaS that only cost 5 bucks have churning customers. It's hard to gain the first few regular subscribers. If you are not taking enough money, you are not going to survive! We are doing business here even if there is nothing that love more than building beautiful products.
• Make it easy for your users to pay you money. Back in the days i used chargebee, but I love good ol' plain stripe way better.

Hope you could learn some things from my experiences. There is still a lot to do. Next I will do a lot of video content and optimize the messaging. For the sake of self promotion you can visit www.watchwork.co :)