SaaS launched to no paying customers 😞
Hello IH community! I wanted to continue talking about the journey of Accountbalance.io which was launched just yesterday. I built Accountbalance.io as a result of scratching my own itch and some careful user testing to make sure it was something that people actually wanted.
The problem that I'm seeing is that people will sign up, but every single person dropped out of the flow when it came time to link their bank accounts, thus bringing my total real conversion rate to 0. (besides myself lol). My first inclination is to lower the price.. And I wanted to ask the IH community what I should do? My initial gut told me when I was first building to charge a lot lower until I read the advice of a lot of veteran Indiehackers saying to charge more, so perhaps I should run some tests where I charge less and less until people start actually linking their bank account? I wanted to pose this question to the community at large because I'm sort of at a loss; I see a lot of interest and traffic but no conversions.
Right now, out of the gate I'm asking for $9.99/mo.. But that just might be too much for this service. I'm going to cut that in half to see if people will go for that. Thanks and would love to hear your thoughts :)
As I understand the value proposition: I pay $59,88 every year to save me 2 click that it takes me to open my bank's online portal showing me my latest balance.
If that's the case, in my view the value is veeery much below the price. Also I'm not sure if I even want to get an SMS with the balance – I imagine giving a friend my phone to look at some photos and then a notification pops up with my balance... feels insecure to have this kind of data exposed like this.
The underlying idea I like: knowledge about your finances is power and gives you control. At the end helps you to make better decisions. But for me finances is so much more than just the pure balance – there could be $20.000, but if tomorrow I need to pay for that super pricey Mac PRO I bought, that high number doesn't mean much. So for me the pure balance needs to be merged with a healthy budget and some financial goals. With that I can actually measure the trajectory of my financial health.
I'm trying to think of a good pivot for which you can use the platform you already build. Will write you if I've got an idea!
Wow, I didn't think of it like that at all - I really appreciate the insight into your thinking.
I can see that there is interest, as people keep on signing up.. But drop off before completing the final step of linking their bank account. Maybe if the price was at a point where it made more sense to the user it could work; but I do see your point and it is pretty clear to me now that the value proposition may be off. I definitely have a lot more ideas for features (along the same lines that you are mentioning) and am convinced that there is a healthy market for a product like this (at the very least there is plenty of competition already out there doing similar things).
Thanks so much for your honest feedback, it is really helpful and I am excited to think about the idea of potential pivots and additional features.
I do love the idea of building in a budgeting tool, that totally seems like the next natural step for an app like this.
The way you react and handle the feedback in this thread is the best indicator that you'll do well. :) Keep it up!
@rubenartus well said. I like this kind of comments, make my feel great to be part of this community!
Just off the top of my head, I think your service sounds interesting but I'm way too paranoid to give somebody access to my bank account. It would take a very large amount of trust and I even only trust my bank itself out of necessity (Canadian banks keep getting hacked, its stressful)
As for how to build that trust... if you find out, let me know!
That makes total sense! The API that I'm using does not in fact give me any access at all to the users' bank account; when a link is created it is the same exact mechanism as using Stripe where the account information is tokenized. Plaid handles communication with the users' bank, and they are a PCI compliant, secure and trusted system (Venmo, Mint, and other well known and much used sites use Plaid to connect users' bank account data to their apps securely as well).
I'm suspecting that people don't understand that my site does not actually receive usernames/passwords to banks and could keep a person from completing the sign up process. Anyhow, thanks for your feedback and hopefully will be able to figure this one out.
I think you need to explain that in great detail somewhere.
I would have the same reaction of not trusting you with my bank account, but knowing that you're using a service which is trusted by banks x,y,z and allowed to connect by them, and a registered AISP, would go a long way. You could talk about Plaid but I'd talk more about the banks that use them, and the consumer companies that use them too. If it's the same tech as x,y,z the customer already uses, then you've effectively mitigated that risk.
You may also just need to do more as well so that the service feels worth the risk of losing all the money in your bank account. Lowering your price is unlikely to work at this stage - people will always tell you it's too much.
Good luck!
Thank you :)
One day is very little time to figure out if your pricing is wrong. How many people actually went through your flow? If it was a few thousand users then yes, maybe the pricing is off. If it was only a few hundred or less than you probably don't have enough data yet.
If you can try to reach out to the people that didn't complete the flow. Ask them what stopped them from completing. It might just be that they think that their bank isn't supported.
I know this is frustrating, but building a sustainable SaaS is a marathon not a sprint. Getting payed users is probably going to require a lot of work at least in the early stages.
Just don't give in, you are doing an awesome job so far 👍
Hi Anze, thank you so much for your words of support! Yeah I do admit I was slightly crestfallen after launching to no actual paying subscribers, but what you are saying makes total sense. It is now literally day 2 of what is, essentially, a marathon. I'm definitely in this for the long haul!
I'm going to reach out to the individual people who have signed up to see if they would be willing to share their experience with me, and from there make adjustments as needed.
Thanks again for the kind words and I'll be keeping at it!! Without the support of a community like this I don't even think I would have tried to do this in the first place. :)
One thing that I am learning with SaaS companies in general is that they have very awful conversion rates.
While you definitely focus on taking what everyone is saying about your SaaS product (and their hesitation) with sharing their financial data with you, you should also be focused on generating a large amount of traffic consistently.
I don't really need this service. So grain of salt.
Do competitors like Mint offer something similar?
Personally I think a homescreen widget would be neat.
Hi there, thank you so much for the feedback. Mint/Digit do have relative similar offerings though Mint does not do any SMS. The initial itch that I am scratching with this is actually providing a clear and easy mechanism of letting family members (people who share bank accounts) how much money is available for spending without them having to log in and check on a bank app.
A homescreen widget is a great idea and definitely something that would be relatively easy to build.. Thanks so much for the killer idea :)
Ah that's a great use case! I've never shared a bank account though, makes sense why you would want this.
The service is too expensive for me. My bank also already provides this (or something extremely close to it). What do you think might have gone wrong with your user testing?
Hey there, thanks for your comment! Yes I am definitely learning that the price point is part of the issue. I am also thinking about offering real time notifications for when there is a debit/credit, and also trigger notifications as well. Would that make this service something more valuable to you? Thanks again for your feedback; it is super helpful for me to learn about what people actually want.
In terms of what went wrong, I'm not sure -- Maybe I needed to have more than a landing page/CTA + email signup form. I'm guessing I should have included the price in a more prominent place, but again that is just a guess.
I don't think I'm in your target audience since I don't watch my purchases so closely and it would bother me to receive notifications about it. My bank texts me when my checking account is below a certain limit. In my case that's all I think I need.
The first rule of any business anywhere in the world: Trust.
Ask someone to give over their bank details, and expect an immediate evacuation.
It's like asking a lady out for a coffee and saying 'mind if I grab a key to your house?'
The greater the level of vulnerability a customer is exposed too, the greater the level of trust required to engage in business. Imagine going to the doctor for a prostate exam and halfway through, he tells you that he bought his qualification from an internet mill.
How do you build trust?
Social proof + credibility (authority).
Good luck. The website has a nice clean and fresh feel to it.
Hey innov8or,
Thank you so much for your feedback. Yeah, it does seem like the trust issue is the most common piece of feedback that I'm getting. How does one develop social proof and authority? I actually started reading Authority by Nathan Barry so I'm definitely looking forward to leveraging some of the knowledge/insights there. Thanks again for your feedback, it is super helpful. ☺️
What's needed is a list of objections, derived from deep customer empathy, and void of pleasentries. Which is not always easy to find but some of the comments here will help.
Answering the question with as much depth as possible, why wouldn't someone enter bank details?
Afraid what will happen to them?
What other reasons would lose users away.
What can be done to overcome that objection?
Get permission to use bank logos on website.
Get quote from bank authority figure to endorse website.
Show other authorities logos .
Link to media article endorsing website and person behind it.
Share your own personal story.
Build up confidence through ... ?
Very cool suggestions, thank you so much! I'm blown away by the amount of support here. I have a lot of work ahead of me as I'm very excited to try all of these points out.
Congratulations on the launch!
Like others have already mentioned, it's about sharing a very crucial piece of information to a brand new website.
Also, you and people in the tech community aware of Plaid know that you don't receive their login credentials. What about a normal Joe?
That said, I wouldn't log in to a site like this with my credentials because I know username & password means nothing BUT Account Number & Routing Number does and you can get that information from Plaid, which can be used to run ACH transactions, not that you will but it can be misused.
Question
Are you on a production plan? Plaid limits our ability to access balance to just 14 days. How do you manage to do it around the year?
Suggestions
Daily balance update via SMS is a feature offered by banks in general in other countries, but not the US. Also, US banks don't send an SMS alert when there is a new credit/ debit on our card/ account, which banks in other countries do. Maybe that's a feature you should add to your product.
Hey there, thank you for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback :)
The idea of adding SMS notifications for each debit/credit would be an easy feature to add without much effort. Twilio SMS outbound texts are super cheap to send so it seems like a win/win. Thank you for the tip!!
I am on a production Plaid plan. With the transactions webhook it makes it easy to have access to realtime balance updates.
Yeah, I do very much understand the security/privacy concerns. My Plaid account isn't enabled to have access to routing/account numbers at the moment since they are used for ACH transactions like you said, which my site does not do. I think the idea will be to provide more transparency about the account handoff process and make sure it is clearly stated.
Thanks again for your response, this is an incredibly supportive community.
First, I want to say I think the idea is good and I don't intend to crap on it unnecessarily, but I have some ideas that might be useful. Here's my feedback:
And here's my big suggestion:
I don't think you can make money from this service. But I do think you can make money from this service if you added a budgeting function and offered a daily SMS balance notification as a perk. For example, a lot of people use YNAB just for budgeting and it's something like $84/year? Maybe charge $5 a month, I could see that + SMS being useful.
Best of luck!
Hi there! Thank you so much for your incredibly insightful response. And crap or no crap, any feedback is better than no feedback lol.
This is the second time I'm getting some feedback that i should add a budget tool into the app.. I do think that seems like a natural place to pivot for something like this. The SMS being a secondary by product would be just an added bonus (but people can disable that if they don't want to be bothered).
I'm going to try some targeted ads for the demographic that you mentioned; it does seem to make sense. I may lower the price more to see if anyone at all will bite, but it just might be the case that I need to developer more features to deliver better value.. Which I have no problem with. Thank you again for your feedback and I'm excited to get to work!
Congrats on the launch!
i actually don't see any pricing on the landing page the first quick glance through (I didn't sign up) -- so maybe the drop off is also due to misalignment with expectations.
i see that you lowered the pricing to $4.99....maybe one thought too is to extend the contract terms to quarterly or annual. lower conversion rates on the sign up, but it may allow for value to be delivered over the long term.
i am actually not in your target market though, as i don't like daily account balance checks (i think it just increases stress for me), unless i am missing the value of it and then that would be a compelling reason to sign up!
This has a lot of promise however with at least UK banks you can set up automatic alerts to text balance at an interval that suits you (mine is monthly), you can also set up alerts for inbound and outbound payments over x amount so I wouldn't see the benefit of paying for a service that I can get for free.
An idea may be to accept incoming texts and maybe link multiple bank accounts (E.g. Which account can I spend $17.99 from?) and then you reply saying currently account x & y have sufficient funds for this purchase. So instead of saving a user to open the app, login in (usually via fingerprint on Mobile) across multiple accounts (and relying on decent network connection speed) they then only need signal (Even edge is sufficient).
Good luck and all the best
Cool and simple site. love it. Chase does this for me for free. It texts me when I buy something over X and sends me balance updates. So, I would not use it.
I'm sure you can get customers, but it's super pricey @ $5 per month.
Right on, thank you so much for the feedback! Yeah I can definitely move the price lower; there is an ultimate bottom but I still have a ways to go! Thanks again.
Cool concept, and congrats on the launch! I am super cautious about who I share my bank account info with so I don't think I am your target audience as It took me forever to get venmo 😅. That being said, your landing page is clean, minimal, and straights to point which helped me learned what your product does in less than 10 seconds. Best of luck!
Thank you! Yeah that is understandable. I use the same API that Venmo uses to connect bank accounts, so it's really no more dangerous than that platform.. But I do not have a huge corporate entity behind this so I can understand how it would be harder to trust. Either way thank you for your feedback and for checking the site out :)
Hey Scott,
Congrats on launching! (Always cool to see another Laravel user too!)
Agreed with many things said here. If you're asking them to link their bank account before you charge them, then one might need to focus on building trust with the user prior. If you are asking them to pay up before linking their account (or at the same time), then it's a bit hard. Consumers might indeed be price sensitive at $10/mo. You can try a few things, like $39 per year, or a few different things. I see you already lowered your price. Sadly the "charge more" saying doesn't always apply to consumers, but more or less B2B.
I also agree that you might need to do some one on one customer development with those who churned out and see what the rub was.
Hey Jimmy,
Thanks so much the great response! Across the board, the common feedback that I am getting from at least a couple of friends who have tried the system out is exactly what you're saying here; essentially I need to build more trust with the user before asking for them to go through the process of linking their bank account.
Perhaps offering more information on the homepage/landing page about the sign up process would help? I can go through the exact steps required for a user to to actually link their bank account. I'm not sure if people are understanding that their account wouldn't be charged on sign up as well since they would just be creating a stripe subscription with a 30 day free trial.
I am going to start reaching out to individual people who signed up to see if they would be willing to share their experiences with me. Thanks again for your insight and tips and I'll definitely report back here to tell you all what I can figure out.
I see you're using Plaid. Could it be that they don't feel comfortable inputting their bank credentials?
I haven't seen your flow, are you asking them to pay after they linked their account or before?
Hey there,
Thanks so much for your response. Yeah, maybe that is the case! I am getting feedback at least from people that I know that they are not feeling trust when asked to link their bank account (even though Venmo, Mint, Digit, etc uses the same exact API/linking flow for bank accounts).
I'm going to be reaching out to the people who signed up to see if they are willing to share any feedback with me so that I can create a more comfortable user experience. I'll figure this out one way or the other! Thanks again for your response.