Unable to understand what's happening with my side hustle
Hello Everyone,
I am new here and but really liked the discussions going here and decided to ask one doubt which i have from many months.
I have created a side project ( a SaaS tool) and i am seeing very unexpected behaviours of our users. After a month i launched(without any paid marketing), i had around 16 paying customers (average plan $29/month ). After 10 months, i have around 4 customers (paying $99/month each, enterprise users).
Since i am purely a technical person, i asked few people from marketing field to promote my product and they all said this domain is now staurated and no one will buy your product anymore. I also told them that i have users who are paying to me but still none of them are interested.
I don't know what to do. Should i move to building next product or stick to this product and keep adding new features? Any suggestions or guidance will really help me.
Any idea why the initial users churned out? I’d recommend speaking to current and previous customers and trying to figure out how happy they are with the product, why they like it, and how it could improve. This will not only help with product decisions, but with positioning and marketing.
In terms of being in a saturated market, it seems like you’re still managing it attract customers so there’s room for you. Instead of trying to find a marketer to work with you, try grow the sales yourself. There are plenty of resources to help and it seems you’ve done well so far.
Thanks for response...i tried reaching out to few users via mail but they did not reply back. One thing i have noticed:
On sending email, they rarely reply.
As I understand you are contacting the people after they decided to leave, right? I think this is too late. I probably wouldn't reply as well after in that situation.
Maybe it's better to already send them a personal email after they signed up. You can tell them that they can directly contact you if they have any problems. Then send them another email after a month or so asking for feedback.
Do you have any in-product telemetry helping to show what they are using, and where they drop off? Sometimes the best way to understand their motivations is to track the key elements of what makes them successful using your product.
If you haven't built it in, there are several 3rd party product analytics stacks you can hack into your stuff. App Insights (Microsoft Azure), New Relic and Retrace from Stackify are such beasts. There is some money involved with some of those though.
Another option is to use something like FullStory (www.fullstory.com) and use session replay to see what customers are doing, and where they drop off.
Again, if you want to know how customers use your product and you can't ask them (as they have churned out) get some telemetry data as a backup. Customer interviews are ALWAYS the best way, but have the data to back it up.
Hi Vishal - interesting product - I can imagine a lot of companies valuing a tool like that.
If I understand correctly, it sounds like you have made very few sales over a 10 month period.
To really oversimplify things (and ignore churn rate for now), it sounds like you have one of two issues (or both).
If you know how many sales you have made, define that by the number of unique visits. 10 sales, 100 people = 10% conversion rate. The number will be a lot lower than 10%
It's possible to have an excellent conversion rate, though not enough visitors mean that the conversion rate doesn'tt translate into many sales.
Do you have those numbers to hand? Unique visitors and conversions? If you're happy to put them here happy to help.
Both issues need a different strategy to solve.
Hi David,
I have all the numbers. Can we have this discussion over email? I would love to share details with you. My email id: vishal.2947@gmail.com
Thanks for your response.
Some things to check:
Is your product only useful in a single phase of business? E.g. funnel analytics is only required until my onboarding is optimized
Are these early users only signing up for large free tier/subscription? Once they consume it they are gone.
I would look at GA and other usage metrics closely. How long did those early 16 paid users stayed? If stayed less than one month - product probably didn't deliver what was promised. If longer, your feature set was fine but UX/bugs was a turn off.
Whatever you do, don't build new features in the dark. Find what's causing the churn. Talk to users, not responding is common, follow up on emails. Put the product in front of few new users. Measure what clicks and what doesn't. Only build/remove features based on market data and signals. Good luck!
Thanks for wonderful insights. I offer only 14 days trial and afterwards, users buy the subscription. Average time of their subscription is around 6-7 months though some are using it from last 10-11 months and still active.
Also, check the competition. If your competitors offer a product with much more features for the same price scheme you can either reduce the cost or differentiate, adding stuff they don't have.
Thanks for the input. I have tried to keep pricing as low as possible and nearest competitor is offering this feature at much higher rate. Looks like i need to add more stuff to make it more valuable.
You can also copy-cat your competitor features and then offer a "similar" product at a lower price. There must be a lot of users which were interested in the service but were discouraged by the high cost.
Can you share a link to your project?
Sure. It is: https://www.oneupapp.io
@vishal2947
We just launched our service that helps developers in your exact position figure out what steps to take next. We take you through the process of CustomerDiscovery to truly understand your users, why they use your product, and how to reach them.
At the end of the day, we help to direct your efforts in marketing, sales, product roadmaps, revenue strategy, and business model validation.
If you're wondering what your next steps are, I'd love to help get your project to the next level.
Check out https://www.elevationlab.io if you're interested. Or email me at julian@githustle.com. I'd be happy to walk you through a free consultation and give some advice on your situation.
I will give it a try.
lovedev is elevationlab B2B only? Do you have any B2C case studies?