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11 Comments

If you've built something useful for a SaaS founder... + my discovery and question

Hello everyone,
recently I launched a catalog with resources and tools that can be useful for SaaS founders: https://www.saasgearbox.com . Items (or products) can be:

  • some app or SaaS or API
  • book
  • course
  • another catalog
  • podcast
  • blog
  • youtube channel
  • anything else.

I just started so no surprise there are just a small bunch of resources.

If you've built something useful for SaaS founders, can you please check the catalog and maybe you would like to your product (free but registration needed)?

But what I discovered was an unpleasant surprise.
My hypothesis was if I tweet about a resource I published the founder or author of this resource would at least like or even follow me on twitter. It didn't happen.
Another assumption was - if I tweet about a new resource its founder or author would be interested in claiming the resource to take full control over it (it's free). And it didn't happen either.
Just FYI: I always add a mention into a tweet (if an author/founder has a twitter account, usually they have) so they always should see in the notifications (if they look there :).
I understand the catalog doesn't look very appealing or valuable but nobody expresses any interest in it.
Can you help me to figure out what's wrong? I have several answers:

  1. There is nothing wrong, I just should keep adding and tweeting. The quantity will become quality at some moment.
  2. All or some hypotheses are wrong.
  3. The way how I'm validating the hypotheses is wrong.
  4. The catalog looks wrong or unclear or non-valuable.

Thanks all!

on October 25, 2019
  1. 1

    Some candid feedback :)

    • There are 100s of lists online which cover similar things and have a lot more products added. "Totally items: 16" looks bad.
    • At the moment it provides 0 value for me if i go on there.
    • May be focus on one persona from a SaaS company to start with? That might be the founder then you can have all types of products but you will want free/cheap stuff.
    • Also you normally want to launch on PH etc for these types of products to get traction. But at its current state it won't get upvotes.
    1. 1

      One more question :)

      There are 100s of lists online which cover similar things and have a lot more products added. "Totally items: 16" looks bad.
      Which number wouldn't look bad for you?

        1. 1

          Nope!
          This is a directory of SaaS apps ("So my mission is to help you find exactly the SaaS you need to make your business succeed,") whereas SaaS Gearbox is a directory of any tools that can help to launch and run SaaS app. We have absolutely different goals, and maybe my message just was not clear enough...

    2. 1

      Thanks for your feedback!

      There are 100s of lists online which cover similar things and have a lot more products added.
      I know only several and none of them covers SaaS founders' needs. Can you give an example of a similar catalog?

      1. 1

        100+ products, i wouldn't show the number

        I only see 2 products unique to SaaS.

        1. 1

          Yeah, I thought about 100 too :)) a magic number :))))
          I didn't tend to find products unique to SaaS though.

          1. 1

            There are SaaS boilerplates, FB groups, discords, podcasts etc

            1. 1

              I agree there are products unique to SaaS but also there are a lot of others that can help too not being unique to SaaS. I don't think that I should ignore them.

              1. 1

                Of course not any products that bring value to SaaS should be on there.

                A lot of the tools seem to be directed at developers is that the goal?

                1. 1

                  The goal is to gather all valuable tools for development, launching, marketing, running SaaS business.