Rundown
Automated weekly email reports to SaaS customers
Soooo... I ran a few experiments with my landing page to determine if there was enough interest and to get first sign-ups to the waiting list. Tried bunch of things over the span of 2 months - paid ads in Google, Twitter and Facebook, getting featured on BetaList, reaching out to communities on Reddit, Slack and Discord.
The result was 7 signups.
Phew! I'm glad I didn't start by building the product first and do marketing afterwards. It seems not all problems are worth solving.
My main takeaway from this is that paid advertising is probably not a silver bullet, it did not work for me at all. You're much better off getting out there and talking to people (or maybe I just suck at marketing, which is probably true as well). I've gotten far more better feedback by finding people and doing a 1-on-1 video call with them.
I took a looong two and half months' vacation after resigning from my position at a startup and riding The Great Resignation wave. It helped clear my head, focus on what's important in my life, and maybe try a new thing or two.
I doubled down on my idea for easy data visualization by buying a domain and creating a landing page for it.
The best problems to solve are your own, right? It just so happens that I encountered one that I thought was solved years ago.
I was working as a software engineer at an aspiring logistics startup where we were looking for a simple way to visualize usage data for our customers.
After scouring the internet and participating in sales pitches for solutions we were still left without one. Reason? It's too expensive. As an early-stage stage startup, there was no way we could pay from $1k/mo to $10k/mo for a dashboard and weekly email reports.
There had to be another way...
And that's how the idea of Rundown was born.
23 Comments
That took guts! It is brilliant you were able to figure this out before building anything - thanks for sharing
Smart to market before building, definitely lessened the blow of things not working out. That's something I've never been great at 😂
Yeah, really smart.
Have you considered talking to the 7 signups and see if there are any commonalities between the problems they're trying to solve? There may even be other opportunities you can uncover that might appeal to a wider audience.
The best way to get started talking to users, is to talk to users.
Yeah I did try reaching out, I prepared a tally form with questions about how they are solving their problems currently and sent it via email. I guess I could've tried sending more emails, invite them to chat but I already lost interest in Rundown at that point.
As a new founder, this is something I will definitely keep in the back of my mind! I feel this is one of the key indicators that will tell you from an early start if the product is viable or not. Thanks for sharing and good luck on future endeavors!
Fail fast is great!
I am trying to build a financial modeling tool to help founders to kill their projects: https://increnovation.azurewebsites.net/fermi/highlevel
put in some numbers to see if the idea makes sense financially.
Kudos on resisting the urge to build!
Curious how you got to the conclusion that the problem isn't worth solving though. Maybe enough people see it as a problem but weren't convinced that Rundown would be the solution?
Could be all kinds of reasons: ad targeting was off, ad copy didn't convey, landing page didn't convince, people didn't like the waiting list idea.
Asking because I'd 100% rabbit hole myself trying to figure out of any of the above is the problem ... how did you figure that none of those mattered and the problem itself was not worth it?
In any case, thanks for sharing!
Yeah, could totally be any of those things, I'm not ruling them out. But the interest just wasn't there whenever I talked to people. The decision was mostly feeling based since I was tired of banging my head against the wall.
Ah, okay, I thought the decision was mostly based on signups. What you say makes sense, thank you.
This is a good test and thanks for sharing the lesson learn... people said start with the mvp but maybe starting with a waitlist is better.
Thanks!
What was the product about?
Maybe its the landing page design? Can you share a bit?
Unrelated, but I'm confused:
Any idea why on the Rundown product page, it shows that this post was made January 1, 2022?
How much traction you expect to get to validate your idea?
What was the main thing of your landing page? Value proposition or pain ?
I was aiming for around 50 signups, give or take. Landing page did lean more on the value proposition. Site is still up, you can check it out by yourself: https://rundown.so
Well, your (small) niche is limited to Segment it seems. When you bought ads, did you manage to get a high success rate at targeting people using only Segment?
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I have learned a lot.
thanks for sharing, it is brilliant
Yeah, I do think there is a bit of a catch 22 for b2b products and companies who want cheaper products. The cost of sales and marketing to make them aware of and buy your cheaper product means you can't afford to make it that cheap.