One of the biggest surprises of building a SaaS isn't writing the code.
It's realizing that your users will use your product in ways you never expected.
Every conversation changes something.
A feature you thought was essential gets ignored.
A tiny improvement becomes someone's favorite feature.
An assumption you've held for months turns out to be completely wrong.
That's why I've stopped trying to build the "perfect" product before talking to users.
I'd rather release, listen, iterate, and repeat.
RovaSpace has changed a lot because of conversations with founders and remote teams.
And honestly, that's exactly how I want it to evolve.
If you're building a startup, what's the biggest product assumption your users proved wrong?
Great
I can definitely relate to this. One thing I've learned is that users rarely explain what they want in the way you expect. They usually describe the problem, and the solution they end up loving is often different from the one you had in mind.
Those early conversations have saved me from spending weeks building features that seemed obvious but weren't actually important.
i wish i knew coding couple years back, i feel too late in this field, now Ai is made it very easy for everyone with simple knowledge.
I'm having some real trouble getting those initial users. How should I tackle that?
Getting the first users is usually the hardest part. One thing that helps is spending time where your target users already hang out instead of trying to reach everyone at once. A few genuine conversations can teach you much more than waiting for traffic to come on its own.
What kind of SaaS are you building?
Dude the biggest surprise of building a SaaS is getting the users 😭 I would rly appreciate any advice on how to get my first 10 users without spending money (I'm a broke student)
i always try to the best, listen to comments on my chrome extension wich is not a saas at the moment, i'm thinking to add a paid option new function to it but the first thing is to get more users & installs, actually around 4100 users for months on different browsers of my free extension "stop-it v2"
4,100 users is a solid foundation—especially for a free extension. At that stage, I think you're in a great position to learn what people actually value before adding a paid tier.
I'd be curious: what problem are users asking you to solve that they'd happily pay for?
Well in 2015 i had 500k users, in 2018 50k users, my first extension was called "stop-it" then again google changed everything, moving from mv2 to mv3, it killed everything that's why i'm with 4100 users... i had to restart from scratch. People are asking for more functions to filter contents on some domains to preventing people to see it. I can't develop it because i lack of money & time, i try to focus on my extensions ans see how i can improve a better ranking in google & more real installs/users.. i dram of having schools & freelancers installing and using it. because it not only filter xxx contents but much more.
Starting over after having that many users couldn't have been easy, but rebuilding to 4,100 users is still a solid achievement.
It sounds like your extension already solves a real problem. Have you thought about reaching out to schools, freelancers, or communities that would benefit from content filtering? They could be a great source of long-term users.
I tried contacting some schools. Since I'm based in Belgium, I reached out to schools and newspapers there, but got no response. Reaching out to freelancers or paying for ads is out of my budget. I also contacted a lot of US parenting blogs & medias, tech sites — also no answers.
I can imagine how frustrating that must be, especially after putting in the effort to reach out and not hearing back.
Have you ever tried getting your extension in front of people through communities like Reddit? I see quite a few discussions where people ask about website blockers, parental controls, and productivity tools. I'm wondering if you've ever explored that route.
Good idea! Start with a simple thought, even if it finally turn out to be wrong . it cost nothing:)
Exactly. A simple assumption is cheap. Spending months building around the wrong assumption is what's expensive. I'd rather learn from users early and iterate than try to predict everything upfront.