RoleUp

Usually I'm just the guy that builds things, so the marketing side is kind of new to me.

Despite all the cautions against it, I did have a bit of the "if you build it, they will come" mentality up until now.

But it's clear that the only way this will succeed is with a lot of content and search marketing.

So that's what I'm starting today. Start creating content: landing pages, blog posts, documentation, etc.

After the somewhat lack-luster response from HackerNews, I launched on Product Hunt.

I prepared better, had a demo setup, nicer pricing, and better graphics.

Despite having a fair number of votes, I got an even smaller amount of traffic than HN, and likely went almost completely unnoticed.

Not the greatest moment.

After a few weeks of going back and forth with the various SaaS providers to approval for the integrations, finally have the initial 20 integrations that I wanted to launch with.

Launched on HackerNews.

Result was a bit underwhelming, but I should really have expected that. Identity Management is not the sexiest field, and my service is basic at the moment.

But still, got some traffic and some feedback, but no customers.

After much more work, and much more time than I expected, I deployed the core version of the service.

This version only included 4 integrations (npm, google, slack, and github). But it proved that all the infrastructure around that worked.

Not happy that it took this long, but that's life.

I had some money saved, and I was excited by this prospect. It seemed to fit my skill set so well from the technical side, and some business owners I had talked to said they would love to use it.

I had been trying to work on it in the background, but it was both distracting, and far too much work for me to get anything useful in my off time.

Took the plunge and Sept 21 was my last day.

The core idea came when we hired a bunch of people in a short time at a previous job, and I found myself going into the same admin pages for the same websites, numerous times a day to add/remove permissions and users.

I figured this had to be a solved problem, and started poking around for a solution.

The only one I was able to track down, was Okta, and after messing with it for quite awhile became kinda frustrated that it was this complicated to setup. On top of that, it was expensive.

So I began to work through the details of how it could work, and how I could build it.