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Published Technical Guide to Building a SaaS

In the past few months I've been pushing hard to create useful content about how to build a SaaS application in my technology stack of choice (Django). The content is part of my big picture marketing strategy for Pegasus (a Django SaaS template).

The basic strategy is to create as much great content out there as possible and get it in front of Django developers. I'm hoping this has many benefits including:

  • Increasing awareness of Pegasus in the community and getting the content shared
  • Establishing credibility of myself / the product by showing I know my stuff
  • Creating backlinks that contribute to the site's domain authority
  • (Eventually) ranking on search engines for lots of relevant queries related to Django and SaaS

The Guides page I just made is specifically focused on the last point. I realized that I've got all this content that I've put a ton of effort into and that collecting it all in one place is basically a guide to building a SaaS with Django. And, since I want Pegasus to rank on Google for everything related to "SaaS" and "Django" I'm hoping this page can be the content that achieves that!

It's unclear so far how well this strategy has been working. The content does get shared and appreciated, but thus far it hasn't really converted many people - mostly I think because the type of people interested in reading it would much rather build it themselves than "cheat" and buy a template. But hopefully some of the longer term / bigger picture effects around backlinks and SEO start working for me!

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    Here's a lesson I've learned: Marketing content, even great content, involves between 10x and 100x more effort than you might initially be inclined to expect. It doesn't mean the content is at fault if it doesn't go viral overnight.

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      Thanks, that's encouraging!

      Any suggestions on how best to market? My standard process is:

      1. Share with my audience
      2. Post on relevant communities (e.g. reddit, FB groups, etc.)
      3. Cross publish on other platforms (e.g. dev.to, medium)
      4. Search for relevant discussions on places like Quora and add an answer + pointer.

      Probably lots I'm missing, though!

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        Track each platform and figure out return on your time. I stopped sharing to dev.to since it brought in ony like 5 clicks per article.

        Three tactics I like:

        • respond to comments on HN/reddit that are relevant and drop your link
        • get on YouTube. Easiest source of organic traffic out there
        • boost each piece of content with 100 buck of paid advertising to get the ball rolling
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          awesome, thanks for the suggestions!

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      This comment was deleted 5 months ago.

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        Thank for the shout-out. You do SEO stuff yourself?

        BTW I don't know if you've stumbled upon it, but I have a video summarizing everything I know about SEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOE_sQTyQOo

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          This comment was deleted 5 months ago.

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    Really nice work. I was thinking recently that I should write a "javascript tooling for backend devs" post, since it's been really confusing for me, but I couldn't do a better job than what you did in part 2 of this guide. I wish this had existed when I was just getting started with React a few months ago!

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      Thanks Ben! That is basically the exact reason I created the guide so glad to hear it looks useful!

      p.s. fun to see you on here :)

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    Nice breakdown. While I'm building with Laravel/VueJs, it's good to read about the process on Django 👍

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      Thanks Scott! Haven't had a chance to use Laravel, but I'm also a big Vue fan.

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        Indeed, Vue is awesome!

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    Hey @czue, I'm curious how you handle licenses for Pegasus. Is there a service that handles this for you?

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      Hey - at the moment it's all on a trust system. There's no equivalent of DRM or whatever that prevents my customers from breaking the license terms. I decided that I'd rather operate that way and make things easy for my customers, even if it costs me some money.

      If you're looking for a licensing system I recommend https://keygen.sh/ by fellow Indie Hacker @ezekg

      1. 1

        That's great to know, and thanks for telling me about keygen.sh!

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