What was your initial product launch strategy?
Wondering what creative ways did my fellow indie hackers use to launch their MVP/first installment of the SaaS product?
Would be great if you briefly share what is your product about and how did you come up with the ideas to go to the market with it.
PS. Looking for ideas for my own product launch which is due in a couple of months :)
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I'm starting design on demand service, so launch strategy is quite simple:
That's great. You got all the right platforms to market your service for sure.
Curious to know how you are building audiences on Insta and Twitter. I have been posting on my social pages and haven't got much traction there.
Hey, one of the most challenging issue for startups and the thing that I spent most of my time. Here is my case study about launching a product https://eyupcanpoyraz.com/case-studies/launching-product
I converted my SEO internal tool to SaaS and it made $11,000 in revenue and $450 MRR in 7 days.
That's pretty cool.
Curious to know how you did it.
I would start with a product concept. Before putting in all my resources in, I would launch a quick survey designed for product concept tests. Just to ensure that there are users who would be interested in the concept and find out what features are attractive.
From there I would get the general direction of what my next steps should be.
You could check out the One-click test by Conjointly. It helped me with my own product lunch.
Hope this helps 😃
I guess the problem I am facing is not being able to get to the people who are my ideal audience. That's the barrier I want to overcome first.
can you share the survey that you used for product concept test?
Yup sure. It would be helpful to gain insight on your ideal audience. That way you would know which areas you can work on/
Here is the link: https://conjointly.com/products/product-concept-test/
You can enter your product concept, and it will be launched automatically.
So it automatically creates a questionnaire for you and send it to the defined audience to gather feedback and provides validation results...
Is that correct?
Yea. They have a set of questions that is focuses on product concept test. After they've collected the data, they will send you the results.
Our very first launch was very scrappy. We weren't even sure people wanted what we thought about building, so we didn't put too much effort into it. My cofounder built a prototype, and we posted it on reddit. 3 strangers paid us $29 within a week!
(Caveat: We think launching doesn't have to be just once. We have launched our product multiple times in the past months.)
I wrote about it here: https://dashibase.com/blog/dashibase-beta-free/
This is solid advice and thank you for the Reddit reminder. I'm working on an MVP and I currently have a prototype. I've seemingly self validated the idea, but this not enough for validating it with users.
My method of self validation was an epiphany k had while being an avid user of creative consumer products, like Fiverr, Upwork, and even Youtube and Twitch. It was a common theme based on reactions, or methods of promoting themselves.
I just listened and learned. Hopefully I'm not too far in a hole.
Great point. It feels like there needs to be an validation launch and a "real" launch
I think you nailed it with the validation launch and real launch.
So you can say I am at my validation launch, though my product is for a market that already has players earning millions. So the idea is already validated. just need to make our space in the market.
And there can be more launches after the "real" launch! Every major feature is a good opportunity to tell people about the product again because our launches wouldn't reach everyone all the time.
That's the perfect way to phrase it.
That's pretty awesome. Would love to see where and what you posted on Reddit.
Haven't launched yet, but plan is to do direct sales to 20 users, then figure out the similarities and make content around that.
Do you already have 20 users signed up? How did you acquire those users?
Direct sales. Talked to people who I thought would be interested. None have paid yet, so take that with a grain of salt. :)
Any software startup that decides to outsource software development should become familiar with the most common mistakes made in the process.When starting a software company, any mistake is an additional risk the founders can do without,u can read more here https://www.socialmediamagazine.org/outsourcing-software-development-and-how-to-avoid-them/ One of the main factors determining the success of your partnership with the outsourcing team is your level of understanding of the goals and scope of the project.
Hey! Good luck with your launch!
Here is the resource that a lot of early startups found pretty useful - 47 great tactics to achieve growth without marketing budget
Additionally, go to sub-categories on the same website and choose 'Launch' - I believe you will find many exciting resources for you.
Thanks. It took me to Knowledge Hunt's homepage instead of the resource.
But the website look like a whole reservoir of great resources. I'll definitely check these out!
I just launched a small e-commerce store as a side-hustle. Since I work with marketing our Marketing Plan is quite extensive but one thing I do that is free, easy and seems to work so far is:
TLDR; Find your competitors social media, follow their followers.
This can be replicated on a few other platforms too (Twitter, for example) and you are basically piggy-backing on your competitors hard work to gain followers =)
I guess your target market in B2C. And Instagram is really a good place to sell to people. Thanks for the good tips.
I'll see if I can make this work in my situation.
It's true that our target market is B2C. But you could extend this to B2B as well by looking at B2B profiles in social media. If you see people following Zapier on Instagram for example, it's likely that these people are interested in workflow automation and could be interested in related products.
I think I can replicate this process on LinkedIn. That's a much better place for my SaaS product, which provides time tracking & project management solutions for remote teams and organizations.
Thanks for the idea.
Would you do this on your personal or brand profile? Only asking this may seem a bit unprofessional to new users in my opinion, especially when your follower to following ratio will be one sided at the beginning (more following than followers is a bad look on the account from my experience ).
On the brand profile. And yes, it might look half-bad having less followers than you are following. But it works.
And starting out you have to be scrappy and do things you necessarily wouldn’t do later on I think.
There’s also tools that lets you unfollow people who does not follow you back, so the ratio can be adjusted once a week or so.
With bannernote.com I just put it out on twitter: https://twitter.com/sharlsz/status/1361420676012204032
I also shared some insights in a thread
I really like the way you have pitched your product with proper pain points.
I would love to see what else you did besides this tweet?
good post
I built my MVP in public and collected a list of interested users.
When the MVP was released I dmed them, got a bunch of feedback and iterated on my products, which brings me to present day!
I wrote more on this in this post
What do you mean by "in public"?
I was constantly tweeting what I was doing and my thought process behind it along the way.
I go into more detail in the post I linked above :)
After failing with a SaaS, we decided to launch a WordPress plugin. I already have a platform in this space we could leverage, and the plugin repository has served as an excellent acquisition source.
Launching an app without using any kind of marketplace is REALLY tough. I'm impressed by anyone who can pull it off. I would highly recommend using some sort of marketplace, even if you're just adding a small extension to the Chrome app store. This can get you a flow of new users every day. Otherwise, you'll probably need a significant social media following or a lot of patience for SEO to pay off.
I see. Not sure if I can find a marketplace for my SaaS product, as it is a standalone product that offers time tracking, project management and productivity insights solutions for remote teams.
We are already create a lot of content to lift off on the SEO front.
But thanks for your answer. I hope you get more success with your plugin.
There are still some marketplaces you could leverage for this product. For instance, you could create an app and publish it on the app stores. That could become a solid new acquisition channel. You could also create a browser extension that people can click to launch the timer. And while they're more like directories, you might be able to get some leads through G2 and Capterra.
Maybe I am stretching the definition of "marketplace" here, but I basically mean any two-sided site where you can publish a product in front of an audience.
Opinion on the cold email?
We haven't tried that yet, but it's probably not a good tactic for us as a freemium product. From what I know about cold emailing, it usually works better for high-ticket items that require a demo or concierge-style onboarding.
I see, gotcha