Resources that'll help me brand and market my SaaS to fellow developers
I've been working on https://SkillsMap.io for ~ 2.5 years, with two colleagues, but I only went full-time in January this year. The tool we've built aims to help software engineering teams to easily build, and get value from, growth frameworks.
We're making great progress from a product persepctive, and we've got a handful of enagaged customers who are our helping to drive our direction. So things are going well, but none of us are marketeers and we're not well known in the engineering community.
I've found some great marketing insights on IH this week, and I've started "Hacking Growth" by Sean Ellis, but I was wondering if anyone has any other resoures, or content on here (IH), that will help me to learn a bit more about how to effectively market the tool?
Thanks!
One thing you might want to consider is "engineering as marketing" (a term you can search for) -- it's worked out pretty well for me in getting Write.as out to the world. Basically you'll release small tools that are useful on their own, and then mention somewhere that your company created it.
If you're going after developers, try releasing a small developer tool. For example, I built HTMLhouse, which lets you preview HTML as you're writing it and publish quick little web pages. It's tangentially related to our main product, but I showed it off on Hacker News, and it's spread around to more developers over the past two years.
You can also open up parts of your product to developers, like with an open API (here's ours), and then promote that aspect.
Great suggestion. As a developer myself, there are certain companies I see all the time through their open-source libraries (e.g. Formidable Labs) so providing something somewhat related to our tool, that is useful and free would be really cool.
In relation to the API suggestion, we ran a workshop with a team of 9 devs and one of the first questions they asked was "Can we make our own graphs?". So again, you're spot on, we need to allow developers to experiment and play with the tool.
I think there is definitely some room for improvement on the landing page for starters.
Thanks for the feedback @yojin31. We're planning to make some changes, but if you have any specific pieces of advice, please let me know :).
Hi @charlieharris, there are couple of things I would suggest.
2.The navbar, needs to have larger font.
3.you need to work on some typography, here is a link to read about it https://www.pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-to-better-typography.
6.colors definitely have be changed, you got too many color going on especially different blue. The colors right now just looks really dated.
7.I would consider remove that svg animation from the page, it breaks on mobile , and although it looks interesting it's taking my attention off the title.
Hi again @yojin31, thanks for your feedback. I've taken your feedback on-board and re-built the site. Just in case you're interested in checking it out: https://www.skillsmap.io/
That is really great feedback @yojin31, thanks very much! I'll definitely use your advice and let you know how I get on. Thanks again.