Problem with user engagement/monetization in SaaS
Hi!
I’m co-founder of Seodity (https://seodity.com). In the last year over 3000 users registered in our SaaS. The problem is - only 3 users bought paid plan. We’ve tried different things to change that, but with no big success so far.
We think that we have a good product, comparing to competition, but maybe that’s not the case?
I know IH community do care about SEO in general, that’s why I have 2 questions for you:
- What software do you use to monitor SERPs, do on-site technical analysis, track your backlinks, do organic/paid traffic analysis?
- Why wouldn’t you choose Seodity over your SaaS of choice?
Hey! I led marketing in some companies and I signed up to help you understand the problem.
These are my thoughts :
Even for a href, even companies I helped and worked (Series B type)....we used to take 7$ for 14 days plan. Because rest everything was expensive.
Pitch as ubersuggest alternative with bit more free tier. I don't like Ubersuggest much but it got free searches so i go there daily.
Get done of traffic with the above approach and then have smaller plans which I don't mind subscribing to. Even ahref had similar strategy.
This field, I believe word of mouth and social proof is critical. The only you can get that is by making ton of people see your product and talking about it. Initially I thought, i don't want to comment here but after experiencing your product, I feel its already better than many existing alternatives.
It needs to be experienced by a lot of folks.
One more thing : Think about different pricing model. I don't think many people in this space have thought of it. Let's say, I pay 100$, and I get these many actions NOT CURTAILED to a month. Call it "bootstrapped package" something like that.
If you have any other specific question, feel free to ping me on Twitter.
Thank you for replying!
About pricing - it's interesting take, will think about it!
Also, thank you for kind words about the product, it gives me hope that we're onto something :)
Noticed one other interesting thing : Do you provide keyword research? For all marketers, that is what they use most.
I couldn't find it or it's not clear.
I want to search a keyword and get its KD, Traffic, and number of backlinks required (estimate). This is the feature, we pay generally for (actually).
Yes, we do! You can also search on what keywords your competitors rank, what articles on their blog get the most traffic. I don't think we lack features. It must be something else.
Keyword research is currently not clear in your product. I want to search a keyword and get its KD, Traffic, and number of backlinks required (estimate).
If you ask me, what is one key feature that is important to marketers : This is it.
Maybe focus on it a bit more?
One thing that immediately stands out is the price. The reason I don't use Ahrefs or Moz is because of the price. I simply cannot afford $90+/m for SEO tools right now. If I could afford that I would still choose Ahrefs/Moz over Seodity because they are much more mature tools.
Could you introduce a cheaper, limited option that might be a sweetspot for those who can't afford the bigger SEO tools?
I find it strange you have an uptime monitor thrown in there. Doesn't seem coherent with the other services. I imagine it's an unnecessary burden that very few users would use?
We've had plan for 9$ with pretty good limits. One person bought it, and after few months resigned. We actually had better results when plans were more expensive(like for 39$ or 89$ for Bronze plan). From our experience so far price of plans didn't really change much.
Yes, uptime monitor was after thought. We wanted to keep users engaged through uptime notifications. We thought about removing it, but it doesn't cost much to run it, so we leave it as is for now.
PS: If Seodity suits you, I'm sure we can make a good plan for you :)
Yes, I also feel you could stand out by price differentiation!
Interesting. I think I am completely disconnected to reality here(no necessarily bad). But my at rocketgraph.io I give a 1 month free trail and then just $39/mo. I have 0 users BTW. But competitors are able to do as low as $25/mo providing RDS. The basic cost of RDS is over $40/mo. The math simply doesn't work. What is your thoughts on this. Is this because of funding/grants?
It really depends on the SaaS you're running. For Seodity costs are also high, though over the years we managed to bring them down as much as possible. Although we have steady stream of new users it didn't really made the difference if we had 9$ or 89$ plan. I don't think price is an issue here.
Ok what is your suggestions on acquiring the first set of customers? There are of course plans to do a collaboration, run ad campaigns. But I would like to do it the organic way first. I have been building in public, been writing to people on Twitter etc. Right now at 0 users. Any tips?
Blog posts really made a difference for increase in organic traffic for us. It doesn't need to be something special, in our case, simple blog posts like https://seodity.com/blog/how-to-find-broken-images/ bring the most traffic to the website.
This is some next level stuff. I mean thanks for showing me a new way to look at it. Tweets are not persistent where as written content like blog is persistent forever. Great idea. I did have a blog, I will add it back. Right now I don't know what to write about because Rocketgraph does just one thing right now. May be I should go more features -> blog -> features -> blog style?
1.) ahrefs
2.) I think SEO highly depends on the right data. And ahrefs often proved to have really good data quality. This would be one of the main things for me to switch.
If you can tell me you have better data and you are cheaper then it can definitely be checked out 😉
We have really good data, I don't think it's the issue here. We could go lower with the price, we did it in the past - with no real difference.
About finding niche - it really makes sense. As a matter of fact that's what we try to do right now(we try to market Seodity as a tool for ecommerce, starting with Shopify). We'll see how it goes :)
That sounds like a great approach! I think Shopify also offers a marketplace right? Maybe tackling something like an app for the marketplace could also work?
Yes, that's exactly what we're trying to do:) App is already in review for Shopify Marketplace :)
In general for pricing and conversion:
It is hard. I think your tool is kinda B2C and B2B (forgot the term) and it is just a very hard market.
Maybe try finding the main pain points of one niche market (e.g. indiehackers, saas founders) and focus PURELY on that. Find pain points via social media, reviews, etc.
I know https://katlinks.io/ did that and I think with some success.
Just my 2 cents on that 🙂
Did you ask your customers what they think? :)
Yes! We made some changes based on our users feedback and/or hotjar videos of our users. Most of them don't want to talk though. Do you think we may have a problem with reaching our target audience?
If they don't want to talk, it probably means your service is too expensive for them and people don't like to confess it :)
We've had plan for 9$, and people didn't want to talk either :(
Have you considered reintroducing $9 (or cheap plan) and then removing the ability to cancel immediately in software? They have to talk to you in chat to cancel for example. That way you can get some actual information instead of guesses.
Separately, have you considered reaching out to Rand Fishkin and other ex-SEO tool leaders for their insight. A LinkedIn search should give you a list of these people to reach out to.
Beautiful UI you have on seodity! What's the tech stack ?
Thank you!
For landing page - NextJS
For app - CRA, with golang on the API side. MySQL + redis for data storage/caching
Hey, Grzegorz!
I'm sure you already know this but 3 of 3,000 users is not a greaaaaaat free trial > paid user conversion. In fact, it's not good either. It's pretty rough.
But the good news is I feel like there's an obvious answer.
If you even had a subpar customer base of 3,000 and your product isn't terrible (I'm assuming it's not), I might expect your free trial > paid user conversion to be 1% without any optimization? That would be 30 paying users.
You currently have 3, which is a 0.1% conversion rate.
To me, this suggests you're messaging and positioning are very off. It means lots of people are signing up for free trials but almost none of those people match the ideal buyer personas of someone who will become a paid user for you.
Here are a few next steps...
ONE!
Brainstorm answers to some of these questions...
TWO
I bet if you do some manual work and a deep dive into your 3 paying customers, you'd see some patterns that make them a bit different than your 2,997 free trial users.
Then you can target more people like this to get into your free trial funnel.
THREE
Email your 3 paying customers and ask if they can hop on a call for 30 minutes. Go through this list of questions with them all!. When you're done, you'll know where to direct your messaging and positioning efforts.
Good luck, Grzegorz!
P.S. If you do think it's simply a conversion issue, let's chat! I run Driftly I'm sure some interactive product tours will turn your free trialers into power users!
I think SEO highly depends on On page after that Off page, like backlinks on high authorities sites
That's right - and in Seodity we analyse on-page issues as well as backlinks etc. :)
The one thing that stands out to me is that you have no social proof on your website. No social proof signals that the app has few or no users. You should really work on building that references, testimonials, etc.
Good catch! We'll definietly do that :)
Are your free users staying or do they leave after a few days?
If retention is low, it might mean you don't solve their problems.
If retention is high, then I'd try to offer limited time free plan 1-3 months and low monthly cost afterwards just to continue using. Even if it doesn't convert much, at least you'll reduce your support/hosting costs.
Most of our users don't come back to the app after first day. Don't know why though.
Then, that's the issue you should look into fixing. If you manage to speak to users that would be awesome to know why.
But, my guess is that it is one of those:
A few things that might be worth trying:
What does the user behavior look like after sign up? Do they make use the the main features? Is there any pattern in when engagements drops that could signal an area needing improvement?
If people are active during the trial, but aren't converting, then it could be an issue with the product or their expectation with the product. Does the experience match what your promising in your marketing. Many things with SEO take time, so if users are expecting to rank high for competitive keywords in 14 days, they will most likely be in for disappointment.
If people aren't using those features enough to get value, then the issue could be more with your onboarding efforts. Does the audience your going after know how to use your product to achieve their specific goals?
I'd be happy to take a look at your onboarding materials and offer some suggestions if you'd like.
Most of the users don't know what to do in the app. They click everywhere and then leave the app. We try to show as much data as possible from the start, but it looks like users don't really know what to do with it.
The problem is people aren't active during the trial - most of them. We have users which use our app heavily, like opening new trial accounts every 14 days to keep using the app, but most of them leave few minutes after register.
That's our next step - we're in the middle of implementing product tour in the app. Maybe it will change something.
That could be part of the problem. Too much information at once can be overwhelming. It's often better to focus users' attention on one thing at a time. A series of emails can be effective. I'd start with something easy that has the potential to give the user a "quick win."
He @gregory90, first let me say this is a beautiful problem to have. It's much better to have this problem than not to have users.
I do have a few observations:
You're getting an average of 10 new users a day. Which is great. You're already better than 90% of the startups out there :). But the devil is in the details. How are you getting these users? Is it paid, or based on word of mouth or your own marketing channels?
New users obviously see value in your product or in your pitch, that's why they sign up.
Are users actually using your features? If they are not, then it probably means, you're pitching something good, and converting to users, but they are not finding it or simply not valuable to them. If they are using the features, and you're retaining them but not getting to payment, then this is a beautiful thing. It most likely means you need to add more value to your product. So keep those features coming and you'll see conversions soon.
Finally, I cannot stress to you how valuable a steady 10 new users per day are for a startup. Be patient, but work hard and do more experimentation, try to understand why users aren't upgrading. For me personally, in my startup, it take over a year of talking to customers and observing their behavior until we figured out the right pricing strategy that works for us and them. And getting there was no small feat.
Good luck!
Yes, we thought that getting users would be the hard part. But it really wasn't. Getting them to pay is :). Most of the users come from Google to our blog. We also advertise on Google Ads, so some users are from paid channels.
They didn't really know how to use the app. We're trying to introduce product tour to the app, hoping it will help with that.
It's really motivating to hear something like that. We're definitely aren't giving up! We've worked 3 years already on this product, and we really believe in it. We didn't do the right things in the right order though. Until now we were building the product and didn't really focus on marketing, what's our target audience etc. That's what we're trying to change. :)
The pricing is too close to the "big guys".
Also, as an indie-dev, $89/month is way too much, especially for a tool that I might rarely use or use only once or twice a month for a single domain.
I think the pricing is then aimed more towards SEO professionals/agencies, but again they would probably go with the more popular ahrefs/semrush.
Our experience shows, that lower price didn't really change anything. We had plan for 9$ and one person bought it.
As an indie-dev would you pay for Seodity for example 9$ a month?
I am not familiar with Seodity specifically, but if it provides the tools I need to track and improve the SEO of my website, I would. Mostly because I am always so close to buying an ahrefs subscription, but their pricing of $1000/year is way too much for the value I get out of it (I still have to spend the time to learn and use the tool).
I'm the founder of www.engageful.io which focuses on improving product onboarding & adoption, and ultimately it all comes down to: Are you giving your users enough value?
By "users" I assume you mean people with a 14 day trial? Let's dig deeper.
This is not a pricing problem, we can conclude that because people see the price before starting the trial.
This could be a product problem, people are simply not seeing enough value in the product during the trial to convert.
Are you measuring product adoption?
Are you focusing on educating the trial users on how they can use your software?
If I sign up to your trial today, do I get enough value in the first hour that makes me use your product again?
Do I get enough value to keep using it for a week?
Do I get enough value to grab my credit card and pay for a plan once my trial is over?
Acquisition is just one part, you need to educate and always move your users to the next step.
You need to realize that services like Ahrefs onboard people way before they start a trial. They do that with their videos, blog articles and more.
This means that during the trial, users know exactly how to use Ahrefs and get value out of it. Do you have a similar education strategy?
GrowthBar
Agency Analytics
Ahrefs
Google Search Console
SEMRush
Moz Pro
Google Analytics
Databox
Google Data Studio
I think that's good advice. We need to know our users better. We need to know what's our target audience is.
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We definitely shouldn't try to sell to everyone. When we started to build Seodity, we didn't know what our target audience was(and still don't exactly know that). So we build for everyone. It was a mistake.
Right now we decided to not add any more features and focus entirely on marketing.
Good catch with social proof on our website! I really don't know why we haven't done it before.