SaaSHub

SaaSHub has been growing in all directions for the last several months. One of these directions is the number of new products submitted to the marketplace -150,034 as of now. If you checks the timeline here on IH, you can see that my previous similar report was for 100k products in Dec 2019. That's about 83 new products listed on average every day (based on a quick and imprecise calculation).

While that number might not be stunning for some investors, I'm proud of it given that it's a one-man-army show. What is more, I've been told (by an investor) that SaaSHub is starting to make some of the leaders in the space (like Capterra & G2) a bit uneasy 🙈.

With a few days of delay, we have the "Open Startup" stats of SaaSHub for October https://www.saashub.com/open

Monthly revenue: $2,376 - 25% growth (20% of goal).
Monthly page-views: 530k - 3% growth

Last month's revenue growth was 16%, so I'd consider October as a good month. I don't anticipate sustaining a 25% growth in the long run, however, should it happen, I'd reach my goal in only 9 months.

Excitingly, I'd like to share that SaaSHub's public API has its first integration - Runnaroo up and running. It's a new privacy orientated search engine. I'd say it's an alternative to Google and a direct competitor of DuckDuckGo.

Now, when you prefix your search on Runnaroo with "related:", the results will be provided by SaaSHub. With this in place, this new search engine can provide better results than both Google and DuckDuckGo. For example, you could check the top related results for "Indie Hackers" https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=related%3A+indie+hackers.

It is still a very young search engine, yet it is a perfect example of how one can use SaaSHub's API.

Hey mates, I've update the "Open Startup" stats of SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/open

Monthly revenue: $1,896 - 16% growth (and 16% of goal).
Monthly page-views: 513k - 9% growth

If this growth continues, I will reach my goal in 14 months... yet, there won't be growth every month. Time will tell.

I'd like to announce that SaaSHub has a simple public API now. There are two endpoints as of now. In general, that should be sufficient for some basic integrations; however, the API could be extended in the future.

The API is free and, all you need is a SaaSHub user account.

In essence, you can get all the alternatives to a given product through a simple GET query https://www.saashub.com/api/alternatives/__query__?api_key=__your_api_key__

You can find the relevant docs here https://www.saashub.com/site/api

If you decide to use the API and need any help or have an idea how to improve it, please don't hesitate to ping me. Thanks!

I've decided to join the #openstartup movement with SaaSHub/open. Let's see how it goes.

The details I've disclosed so far are:

• Current monthly revenue + goal
• Page views as reported by Google Analytics
• Monthly product views
• Monthly product referrals

This isn't something huge, but for some indescribable reason, I've always waited the moment when a competitor would verify their product on SaaSHub. And that just happened an hour ago. It's the "The Google Cemetery" in this particular case. It's a direct competitor to the Google Graveyard I've built as a feature of SaaSHub.

The next competitors I'd love to see verified on SaaSHub are:

BetaList as a competitor to the SaaS Tribune

G2 & AlternativeTo as direct competitors

SaaSHub supports product verification through the inclusion of a simple "meta" tag on your website now. This is kind of a small feature, yet it will save time and reduce support requests.

Until recently, the way to verify a product on SaaSHub was by providing an email from the same domain. That works very well in most of the cases but not always.

Apparently, many people don't have email addresses from the domain of their side-project or even their business. Setting up email servers or configuring a paid one could be either expensive or time-consuming, and people just don't do it and use alternative email addresses.

As of now, you can add a simple "meta" tag to your website's HEAD section, click a button, and verify that you have access to that product. Hopefully, this will increase the number of newly verified products. The average number of verifications for the last month's been ~ 150/week. I can see that number going up to ~200 in Jan & Feb 2020.

Thanks for taking the time to follow my path of growing SaaSHub.

I reported that there were 77,686 approved products exactly 2 months ago. As of now, I can share that that number is 100,086. Apart from the number of new products, there have been many other improvements:

• New logo (that I believe looks better and more professional)
• A new version of the SaaS Tribune giving focus on new and cool start-ups every day (i.e. this feature is making SaaSHub a direct competitor to BetaList & BetaPage)
• A weekly newsletter featuring some of the top products from the SaaS Tribune
• The approval process (newly submitted products & reviews)
• Better reviews support + a dedicated reviews page per product
• Upgraded the back-end to the latest version of Ruby on Rails ✨
• Stopped accepting reviews and registrations from disposable email addresses.
• Three recurring customers promoting their products

So what's next? Well, apart from the endless list of ideas for small improvements, I will be putting constant effort into improving the quality of lists with alternatives. The end goal is SaaSHub to be the best website where you can find the top and most objectively correct alternatives of any software product.

In the end, if you are building a software product, it's free to submit and verify it on SaaSHub. If it has a modern look and seems useful, I'd be happy to feature it on the SaaS Tribune.

Cheers!

OK, SaaSHub had 10,000 page views yesterday. This may not seem much to many, but it is a big milestone for me. To be honest, I'm not sure what's the exact reason behind the growth for the last 2 weeks; however, the fact is that rankings on Google have increased. I've done a number of small changes here and there and any of them might be the "culprit".

The two most significant changes are:

1. page titles have been renamed from "Top 12 Product Name Alternatives" to "Best Product Name Alternatives".

2. I've removed the "nofollow" tag from a lot of links pointing to relevant external articles.

I have a feeling that the second change could be it. So many websites are using "nofollow" links only and everywhere, that Google may have started giving preference to sites with regular links. Of course, that's just a theory that I can't prove. Anyways, if you think that makes sense, you may consider giving a go to a similar strategy.

And again, if you are working on a cool new software-related startup, please, don't hesitate to submit it to SaaSHub.

p.s. I'd have loved being able to post an image along the status update / ping @channingallen