Stuck at a crossroads with our SaaS & Looking for Advice on what to do next.
Hey Everyone, I'm Nic 👋.
Just over a year ago, I began writing my Substack newsletter and was looking for new ways to grow my list. I read a blog post about Morning Brew getting 30% of their subscribers through a referral program, and began looking for a way to run a referral program on my Substack. I found that all the tools out there advertised that they didn't work with Substack, or they started at $50+/month (too much for a new Substack writer).
I became obsessed with figuring out how to build a tool referral program tool for Substack, and found others on Reddit looking for the same. At that time, I had just met my co-founder on r/SaaS, and we decided to partner up and build Subshark.io .
Fast forward to today, we have roughly 125 free users, and 2 paid users. And we're not sure what to do next...
We've only marketed this to Substack Writers, but we think we may open up interest from new users by changing the copy on our landing page, and advertising it as a referral program for all email lists. We also just started building a new advertising products (database of newsletters looking for sponsors), but signups have been much slower than expected.
So that brings us to the crossroads, and decision on what to do next:
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We're contemplated selling Subshark.io on a site like TinyAquisition, but we're not sure we'd be happy with the price it would fetch, considering the amount of hours we've put it.
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Or should we just put our heads down and keep pushing? This would likely involve launching on product hunt (haven't done yet) and/or finding a strategic partner to help with marketing/distribution.
Any advice?
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SunnyCee, good luck with your decision!
I agree with austif, you might want to spend some more time validating this and really seeking out the pain.
On a semi-related note, I have a friend that just setup a referral program for his indie hacker startup. There's definitely some pain that goes into setting up a referral program. (giving discounts to the existing users that did the referring, tracking who is signing up that's new and who referred them, etc.)
It seems like you've nailed it for SubShark but the audience might not be what you want (you'll have to dig into that more) is there a similar audience like my friend where you could provide a one stop shop for setting up referral programs for us Indie Hackers to tie into our business at the click of a button? Is that too hard of a pivot or would there be some re-usability?
Here's another thought - Indie Hackers want to
I would be curious how many indie hackers have a newsletter - I currently don't, nor does my friend who has 250+ paying customers after his first 3 months. A great way to jump start your first news letter would be by doing a referral program. I wonder if your niche is less people with existing news letters, but more of people with existing customers.
If my friend was convinced that he should use SubShark, (and your referral program) to start his first news letter, that could be a good idea for him! He could launch his news letter to his existing 250 paid users, and have a referral code in there that, if they get X friends to subscribe to the news letter, gets them $Y off the next month's payment. Suddenly, he's launching his news letter with a large number of his 250 users getting other people to join the news letter (and hopefully eventually sign up for his product.)
Basically, I think you should switch the people you're targeting from existing SubShark users to newly started Indie Hackers that may have their first 10-300 paying customers and are switching from direct sales to spending more time on marketing.
Thank you for all of this insight! These are some great points. Like @austinf mentioned, a lot of our users have a chicken and egg problem. Referral programs work best for large email lists that are already making money, but growing an email list to the point where a referral program works is a tough process.
I think your idea of potentially pivoting to a SaaS referral program is super interesting. Its pretty different than what we offer right now, since it involves more tracking, and actually payments/discounts. We've actually looked at adding one to Subshark, but all of the solutions out there seem expensive/geared towards enterprise apps.
It sounds like you haven’t validated if there is even a real need for this. Or maybe you aren’t reaching the right people?
Knowing hardly anything about newsletters, I would assume this would be something only large mailing lists would benefit from.
You're exactly right. This has been a major insight for us. Referral programs work best on very large lists that are already making money, but typically these newsletters are using more of an enterprise solution. On the other hand, solo creators just getting started are looking for ways to grow their list with tools like a referral program, but it's not as effective with a small audience.