Selling your product before it exists?
Has anyone here made an effort to sell their SaaS app before they have built it? My idea is to work backwards by building a customer base first, then the product so that 0 time is wasted on building a product that nobody wants. I plan on offering a 50% discount as an incentive to those who sign up early before the product is built. If you have made or attempted to make presales, how successful was this approach in your experience?
We made the first 15+ sales at my first SaaS startup with no product.
First ~50-100 sales of my partner's ecommerce store were via a crowdfunding campaign, with no product.
Now, for my new SaaS project PostPerk the first ten sales were made before a single line of code was written.
Focus on the problem you're solving for the customer, not the product itself!
It can be done, but you have to be sure you can deliver what the customer is imagining the product will be. Not always as easy as it sounds unless you have a very accurate prototype. I'd say the sooner you can get an MVP out and charge for that the better.
I did this more or less.
I considered asking for payment up front before building my product but I decided against it because I was a total unknown with no reputation at the time. I think it would have been a hard sell. Now that I have a proven track record, I don't see any problem doing this.
One of the best pieces of advice I've heard recently (naturally coming from patio11) is to consult in the problem space first while building your product, then gradually transition your revenue to a product subscription. This helps hedge the infamous long ramp of death, and gives you great user research. And you eventually save your clients money!
Don't know if that helps in your specific case, but that changed the way I look at starting a SaaS business.
I have. Are you doing this to test the market, or just try and get some pre-sales?
Both-- I figure even if they don't buy the product before it's released I can gauge whether or not they would qualify as leads down the road. How did you do go about this? Were these qualified leads you already knew or did you do it via cold call/email?
I did it to test the viability of a market. I ran an AdWords campaign to get the traffic to a landing page. The landing page didn't mention anything about "pre-sales" etc. I added a strong CTA like, "Buy now" and measured the number of clicks it received. The button didn't do anything except measure interest. I just wanted to know if there was enough interest in the product.
But, looking back, I would not have done it. I was simply testing a market that was already proven. It was a waste of money.
As practice shows, very small part of users ready to pay for "nothing"