I’m not getting users for my SaaS even though I did customer validation. Why?
Let’s do a Differential Diagnosis, House MD Styles!
Okay, so recently I found this Reddit post where a founder shared that he did customer validation with 50+ users but he’s still struggling.
I am currently binge-ing House MD so thought I’ll do a differential diagnosis for this business!
Stares at the whiteboard
Patient info — He has a SaaS that helps in user interviews. This is what the website copy says.
“User interviews made simple
Continuously conduct user interviews, prioritise opportunities and test solutions in one platform, so you can simply/consistently make informed product decisions.”
He told us that he validated the idea from 50+ Product Managers but now no one is using it.
Or if someone is they’re churning. And not answering!!
Come on! Let’s save some businesses and start with the diagnosis. What could be the reason?
Cameron — Poor market awareness. People don’t know it exists.
Foreman — Messaging could be off. Value proposition is not clear so no one is interested.
Chase — He didn’t really validate the actual idea, just self validated his ego
Okay, Let’s start with validation,
Step 1 — Does the market care about ‘user interview’ …the words written on his website?
Let’s check google keyword volume
“conduct user interview” — less than 1000 searches/month
“How to conduct user interview” — less than 1000 searches/month
“customer interview” — 4.4K searches/month
“tools for customer interview” — 100 searches/month
So, There’s more interest in “customer interview” than “user interview.”
That’s something, huh?
Step 2 — Now lets see if any competitors exist or not.
Searched “tools for customer interview” and no saas had advertised on it.
Interesting.
But the first 10 links were blogs talking about tools.
Found competitors with significant views (100K and 20K views).
So, competitors exist but they probably rank in other keywords?
3. Now let’s check Market Awareness.
Do people know the business of our patient exists?
Checking website traffic…
Oops that’s 0!
4. Now let’s check Messaging and User Experience
Website copy is okay but confusing after the above-the-fold section.
Personal experience: app navigation is confusing, but that might be on me as I didn’t use the tutorial.
Let’s conclude Dr. House style (PLS GET THE REFERENCE GUYS, lol)
Solutions
- First up, the guy needs traffic. His competitors are getting some and he isn’t.
So competitor analysis to see what they are ranking on, and blogs they’ve written.
To do — Need to find keywords to rank on, and write blogs that would fit “How to do customer interviews”
That’s long-term.
Short team, since no one is running ads on “How to do customer interviews” they could!
That’ll buy them some traffic, so we could test further if the problem is the landing page, or the app.
- Need at least 50 users to try before fixing the app/ui.
Reach out to the 50 people who initially showed interest and get them to test the product.
DM people on LinkedIn since that’s where product managers hang out?
Can also check the build in public community and indiehacker to see if founders need something like this.
I’d even go to Product Hunt to fish out founders who recently launched.
- Finally, fix the copy. Add “Customer interviews” instead of “User interviews”
Can do A/B test on both of these keywords too.
Simpler benefit vs feature language
And some clips/ss of the tool
Sneaky idea — Use your own tool to interview your own users.
You’re your biggest cheerleader right?
Well, that’s it.
Hope this helps a founder make money! If you’re struggling with a marketing issue in your business, drop it below and I’ll do a Differential Diagnosis ;)
Cheers!
'Sneaky idea — Use your own tool to interview your own users.'
I'll make a tool for everything haha
The "he needs traffic" part really got me thinking. You're right. A perfect landing page and the jack-of-all-trades product helps nothing if no one even knows it exists.
Knowing how to get initial traffic to your site is hard, but I think most of their problems could be solved with a well-executed ProductHunt Launch and some keyword optimization.
Definitely!
Wow very interesting and helpful
Do you do these breakdowns on any SaaS website?
(www.avarup.com) 😜
I'll get back to you haha! :)
excellent analysis，bro
Thank you!
What an excellent analysis. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
Thank you! :) Glad you liked it. Gonna do some more this week!
Very well done analysis. But I'm thinking, not every Startup has money to spend in this stage. They don't usually have any VC capital yet, it would be pre pre pre seed. If they don't have money, they can't spend in the product.
That's correct but the only idea that spends money is the Ads. And even then you don't need it every week. He didn't have one user, so ads is a good way to test if its a landing page problem, product problem or something else. Can't test anything if we don't have traffic right? Plus, one keyword does not have ANY ads atleast from where I checked, so it would be a bit cheap to advertise on that
If you mean money for ads, almost every startup should be able to spend at least a minimal amount on ads if needed. I spent maybe 30€ on insta ads and got almost 10k views on it. You don't need to spend thousands on ads in the beginning.
Absolutely, but I mean general money. The product is about interviews in validation stage. I believe startups in this stage did not event pitched to investor yet, so there's a high probability they don't have money to spend in interviews. Even bootstraped ones are not wiling to pay for interviews (my opinion only).
Great post, thank you for sharing your insights with us! I would also like to get "diagnosis" for my website.
Since I can't post links in the comments, I will explain my website and it's intention, and hopefully you can find it.
Website is called "DBPass" (with german .de domain) and idea is to sell 1-month public transport tickets in Germany. Main target audience is torusts visiting multiple cities in Germany.
I had a few customers and one returning customer, and they all came from facebook. Website traffic is very low and I am not sure if I am lacking content, keywords, or simply this idea is not interesting to as many people as I thought it would be.
I am struggling to gain first customer for my product: simpleurl.tech
Let's have the diagnosis!
The analysis is divided into three parts
Part 1 - Googlleeee
Okay first up, in the simplest terms it is a URL shortner.
You could say it is something more, but what would a user think when he needs something like your product?
"URL SHORTNER"
And the issue with URL shortner is
You could say I can rank on google but then you'd only get a visitor and not a customer?
Both Url shortner and link shortner has 4K-5K avg monthly searches so it's a good keyword but the competition is high.
You can however cross all that by running an ad.
Don't think of running an ad on google as a way to convert customers but just to evaluate user journey.
You're paying for traffic and experimentation as to what will a user do when they hop on your website.
Okay, so since you didn't tell me about market or customer validation, I'm gonna use my own brain from what you have written here.
I want to see if there is another angle here - other than the "use for all"
I can see it in your website, that the other angle is Slack. That's better since the product is gone specific. So, let's see if people who use slack need any url shortners? And if they exist in the market
Part 2 - Competition Analysis and Niche Down
Google Keyword Search
Didn't see any volume for "Url shortner slack" and "Link Shortner Slack"
Did see "Slack short link" "Slack short url" about 20 searches
So, not really optimistic.
Let's do some comeptitor analysis. Do SaaS like you exist?
So I googled "Link shortner Slack"
hmm, Three things that are ranking
Short . io also offers this integration
Slack App Directory has an app
Zapier integration between slack and url shortner
Short.io - Couldn't verify from 2 sources but one says that the slack integration page of short.io got 7K searches and 4K from organic. If this is true, it's pretty nice. It means people are checking out something like what you have built.
You should DEFINITELY put your app on Slack App Directory
Try to rank in "Link Shortner Slack" . You'd atlease get visitors.
Part 3 - Final Conclusion
I checked out your pricing and it's $1. The problem with $1 pricing is it's neither FREE to get a lot of visitors nor it will make you money. You'll have to convince 100 people to open their wallet and that will give you $100 only. Might as well convince them to give you $10 and make $1000? The point is, the hard part is getting them to open their wallets. After that it's the same mental barrier to take out $1 or $10
Plus $1 signals that you're either not confident, or desperate, or you don't believe it is worth paying.
If you do believe people don't want to pay for url shortner, then I'd suggest you try to rank it in URL shortner keyword and get ads?
Would also analyse short.io and see how it gets traffic and makes money
I'd also change the landing page. simple tech url is just a url shortner (maybe you can make money with adsense). And from there you can link to slackbooster. Since if Im only here for url shortning, I dont understand the slack thing. And if I am here for slack thing, I dont want the rest. Since you have two domains, you can make them both persoanlzied for different uses.
Apart from that, I think you'd have done the obvious to go to slack communities and see if poeple use this or not. I'd even give it for FREE and see the frewuency, cases where people use it. If people don't use a FREE product, then they won't pay for it to use.
To conclude
Hope this helps. Can I use it as a post on my socials? I will remove the url if you want :)
@HeyArunima Thanks you for the detailed analysis, loved it!
Earlier I had both Slack & Chrome extension both on single home page as a Combo, but then I decided to focus on Chrome Extension.
That's why domain name was slackbooster.com earlier as it all started with Slack App. But later I decided to go with Chrome extension and bought new domain simpleurl.tech.
I have not done lot of validation, but niche focus would the people who are Software Engineers, Engineering Managers (Including seniors).
https://simpleurl.tech/ and https://slackbooster.com/ are same? 🤔
Yes, earlier I did not have the simpleurl.tech domain and it was launched on slackbooster.com/apps/simple-url. but i found this link not so efficient so decided to move to simpleurl.tech
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.