My experience building a second SaaS after the first one failed

Words like this make is easier 🙌 thanks so much

Thanks for the insight & the wishes!

We've had a relatively similar experience so far. The photographers we've interviewed so far are aware there are ways to improve their process, but aren't fond of replacing/improving them with an alternative one.

Is the startup still going at it?

Super grateful for taking the time to comment on the post.

This is extremely valuable information at this point for us, so thank you for providing it!

I'd love to take on your offer and ask for some additional things. Will reach out soon.

Thanks once again!

Hey, sorry for the late reply.

Here are the things we've used in the marketing process. However, keep in mind it's a learning & evolving process, so things change.
In a nutshell, you don't need to go overboard with the initial research phase, but to establish this customer-centric mindset to building.

The frameworks/templates/concepts we've been using were:

➡️ Miro for organising everything in one place
➡️ Value prop canvas: https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-value-proposition-canvas
➡️ Functionalities breakdown: mapped all the features and though about for which type of user it's meant, the pains it solves and we tried to simplify the messaging for these as much as possible
➡️ Mapped the process of photo proofing with or without an app: tried to visualise all possible outcomes and scenarios on how it's being used in practice
➡️ Setting hypothesis(https://medium.com/agileinsider/forming-experimental-product-hypotheses-85b1d41541c4): what assumptions we want to test with the beta launch an how we plan on testing them (research, surveys, feedback, interviews)
➡️ Competitor research: googling + chatgpt + platforms for closest competitors. Writing down their USPs and focus. Here we try to find a gap in the market and figure out the positioning
➡️ Keyword research: testing the assumption that people are searching for such solutions. Using a tool like Ubersuggest, Moz or Semrush to see search volumes
➡️ Forming surveys & interview questions: here we lean upon the hypothesis we've set prior and map out exactly which questions validate which assumptions. We used a combo of email sequence questions, outreach, in-app surveys & live interviews.
➡️ In-app tracking: we've implemented heatmaps, surveys and tracking in the app. We were tracking key button clicks and actions through tag manager.
➡️ Planning roadmap for marketing, based on what was just mentioned here
➡️ Using a simple CRM in Google Sheets to keep all the user data from the outreach & based on their usage, qualify them for further questioning.

Probably forgot some stuff but that's the gist of it all. Hope it helps

hey @samiralibabic,

KIA ❌

Let me elaborate:

as mentioned in the post, we've surveyed about 70 people and had some other informal talks with people about the pain point and overal there were some signals that this problem exists for other people as well, but people were just not willing to pay anything to solve this problem.

Me & my partner who was working on this, still personally think this is a cool idea, but if we can't get any real proven commitment from people, it would be very hard to start, let alone scale this. But the vision of what Unidate could have become is still something that pops up in my mind every now and then and I feel some regret for it still.

Saw you are a SW engineer. Connected to that, we saw an interesting pattern emerge from the few SW engineers we've had in our survey.

Their results from that cohort had a common pattern of not needing such a tool and claiming that date & time conversion is simple for them (when asked about what tools they use to convert time they said they use UNIX timestamp & do it by heart which is not connected to this and I really doubt you can do that by heart).

So that's really interesting to hear, that you liked the idea. I'm personally very happy to hear that :) One could argue, that we could have pushed on a little longer, but from what I'm familiar with about idea validation & PMF signals, we couldn't find any noticeable signals from the market that we could monetize this, because people really weren't ready to pay for it.

For now, this is on pause and I can't provide any info on whether we will continue working on this or not. But if you still think this is a good idea or/and maybe know other people who also think alike, you can join the waitlist and we'll notify you if something changes in the future (https://www.unidate.io/).

Thanks for your feedback btw!

🙏

Many thanks! And thanks for pointing this out. You're right, there seems to be a bug on Safari. We'll get that fixed.

Thanks, hope so too :)

The first time we quit halfway, so we didn't actually have a working MVP, more like a half-assed prototype. And doing prior research didn't give the right signals and that's why we stopped pursuing it.

This time, we actually actually have a working MPV, but we're actually still in the problem validation mindset. We're all in, collecting as much feedback as possible, with an actual landing page to verify if there are any signals that would indicate PMF.

It didn't take a long time to get this to work (approx 200 hours of dev), It started as a side project but turned into a potentially interesting product.

I would say it depends. In an indie maker's situation, building something for 1 month max. is still acceptable IMO, especially if you still have another source of income. There's always an investment involved, either sweat equity, money other resources.

But doing this in a more corporate setting (like for clients ex. innovation departments where companies are testing new ideas/products) I would go down a more research & validation route and leave the building for after. It's a lot more expensive for a bigger company to invest its resources & focus on a potentially wrong product than it is for a solopreneur, where most of them in this space are focused on building digital products.

There are exceptions to this as well, as developing a physical product has usually a higher barrier of entry due to the costs involved. One of the makers in our team has gone through the process of making his own high-end keyboard and it is quite of a painful process, as is any entrepreneurial journey. But that's a completely different story :)

Thanks a lot, nice to hear that!

We're not going full-out build in public & no ads or stuff like that. Only some personal outreach with our IG profile.

This is our rough lead time for the biggest chunks of work, for a team of three people:

Dev was cut down using as much 3rd party's for handling functionality as was reasonable to do (like mailing). The whole architecture is centered around containers, CI/CD pipeline builds & deploys the images to Google Cloud for scalability (premature optimization, I know).

Ruby backend: 3 weeks
FE: 1 week
Landing page: 3 days
Research (ideal customer profile, value props, survey creation, survey funnel, outreach, interviews with users): 6 weeks so far
Tracking setup & in-app surveys: 2 days

As you can see, we invest most of our time in marketing, as it's an ongoing process now. Basically main goal of marketing currently is to get as much feedback as possible in the beta stage.

Thank you!

Thanks a lot!

Not sure what you mean by that. Can you elaborate?

Thanks!

Fingers crossed 🤞 at least we learned a ton on the way, so we can make complete new mistakes from now on 😅