Bootstrapped SaaS is slow, we have added services
by Volkan KayaWe have been working on Versoly for 10 months now. We have been sharing it on forums like IHs and have got some paying customers but growth is slow.
To extend our runway we have added a “done for you” landing page service. We have learnt a lot over the 10 months on how to create a landing page that converts. For Versoly we have good numbers for visitors to sign up and believe we can replicate this for other SaaS companies.
Visitors have requested the option for “done for you” but at that moment we were focused on building product, we listened to a lot of advice from VC funded startup founders where the advice is product product product, but we don’t have the benefit of that VC money to extend our runway.
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Bootstrapped SaaS growth can be slow, especially when you’re balancing product development and marketing. One thing that helps is regularly auditing your website to identify technical SEO issues, broken links, indexing problems, and optimization opportunities. I use SerpSpur
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The message "Focus on your SAAS business"
Followed by:
"Easily build a marketing site that converts without worrying about coding, design and hosting."
is confusing.Who is your product for? Is it just for SAAS Business, so you provide a tool to create a marketing site only for them? From those who already signed up and pay are they all SAAS business?
if someone is building a SAAS, there are likely good coders available to work the front end.
My initial impression was that you offered an easy way to start a SAAS (and my mind said this looks interesting), then took me a minute to really understand what you did, and as SAAS developer just set it aside.
just an honest contribution.
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Thanks for the feedback.
When we say focus on your SaaS business we mean you shouldn't have to worry about contacting your developer to change some colors or add a button. You shouldn't need a designer to design you a new section. You shouldn't need a WP developer to optimise the page speed or an SEO expert. It should all just work.
There are currently a lot of companies moving from Wordpress to static site generators but they have their own problems.
The product is for SaaS businesses who don't have a full time developer to work on their marketing site, which is most SaaS businesses. It will be mainly used by the marketing team to change content when they learn new stuff from customers. We also plan on adding blogs so they will be adding content there.
We have a long road map and the end goal is to basically maximise visitor to trial/demo conversions rates for SaaS businesses.
" there are likely good coders available to work the front end." do you think they should be spending time to learn how to create a landing page that converts and basically recreating the wheel? Or building the product?
Hopefully I explained it well, if I missed anything let me know :)
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Beautiful product, very impressed!
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Thanks!
We're working on some new design features so make sure to check in about a week.
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I just paid $650 to get a 5 page website done for my SAAS and has none of the benefits of your service and doesn't include hosting! Gutted!
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Meant to have created this a few weeks ago. Lesson learnt execute faster :)
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If this is your passion, stay alive. That’s the number one advise i can give. Stay alive. A break, a pivot, a key client, something will come if you are alive at the time it happens. If you’re not it won’t.
I caveat this with if it’s your passion. If you’re doing this simply to get rich etc then you’re gonna kill yourself on a quest less than noble.
Without vc you’re at a blessing. You have time to figure things out and solve your customers problems at their core. With vc money you don’t have time, and you need to solve less important things than your customers true pains. Like revenue and raising your next and bigger round. Not having vc money sounds like a blessing right now - don’t sell that short.
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Thanks :)
I love the SaaS niche and I love working with numbers, the current product is just the beginning want to add a few more features, but they all take a lot of time to build so we need that runway.
Yep, we have had investors contact us but we have let them down gently.
https://tinyseed.com/ by @robwalling looks interesting
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Really exciting to see this grow :)
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https://versoly.com/done-for-you is the link for the done for you service, forgot to add it to the post.
If you have any feedback that would be wonderful.
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I've given a lot of thought on new SaaS where I help non-digital businesses with churn prediction & reduction. The reason I've been thinking rather than building this is while it clear to me what needs to happen internal business process side it's not clear how to make a tool where user can both use the tool and understand how to get all the required data into it.
Maybe the right way to go would be productized service, which then slowly morphs into SaaS products for the parts that can be fully automated.
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Sounds like you are comparing yourselves to more established VC/funded companies. This is recipe for despair and giving up.
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Good to know what is possible :), but we understand that we don't have 5 million in the bank or 200 employees.
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I could see myself using Versoly for my next project. Hang in there! Its a long road! Thanks for sharing!
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Thanks! We aren't going anywhere we got enough to pay hosting and other bills so we're fine :)
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This is solid insight. Adding “professional services” to your company is an easy way to make extra cash. So many founders ignore this, because they try to copy what other giant companies are doing.
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Yeah as long as it isn't full custom work. What we will be doing is either using our templates or creating new blocks/templates.
Works out perfectly for us :)
If it goes really well we can buy ads and get to our MRR goal faster.
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Absolutely hang in there! What I can tell you is that I have provided "done-for-you" web development, but the infrastructure to carry this out successfully differs from the infrastructure it takes to build out a product.
Let's face it, we're entrepreneurs. Ideas are always coming to our mind. Especially ideas that could generate extra runway revenue. Be careful not to lose so much focus that your product goes down the drain and all of your resources are depleted on rolling out a done-for-you service.
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Thanks, it will all be hosted with Versoly, so we will get to dog food are own product. Any bugs or features we need I can code during or after the service.
Its like getting paid to test your own product.
100% agree with losing focus I wanted to add a/b testing but that isn't currently part of Versoly and would distract us.
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In that case, keep pushing forward!
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Hey Volkan, earlier this year I came across a DIY tool which helped medium enterprises build custom landing page for their leads.
Something similar could be a potential customer channel. Companies who wish to create landing pages customized particularly to each individual lead.
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We planned on doing something close, we would basically generated 10+ landing pages based on industries you target. Use an API to check the IP and then load the one that matches it.
We can charge 100s for it :), already companies doing similar with Javascript but ours would be faster and no JS to block.
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Targeted content is used by professional marketers for ages. RightMessage for ex. is a SaaS that does this (I know there are a few more). It's an angle worth looking into.
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Yeah there are a lot of them that all use JS, which slows your website down and can be blocked from ad blocks :)
Will 100% be looking into this.
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I think you need to work on the design a bit more and shift your target market. Very few SaaS companies really want a landing page builder... why? Because most of them have a CTO or a technical person and they can simply use a template. Of course there is a small majority that will use a landing page builder, but that's too small to build a business IMHO. Technical founders/devs like to customize/built themselves, not use a 3rd party for such things even if it saves them some time.
It's a crowded space, but targeting marketers(non-SaaS) that don't have tech help should work better, the need is much bigger there. I simply can't see this bringing enough value for a typical SaaS company - my clients are SaaS companies, I work with these people every day for the last 3 years.
About design... for me it's too plain. For a landing page builder I expect the landing pages to look better than most available templates if I wanted to at least give it a try.
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Thanks for the feedback.
We have spoke to a lot of customers so we know there is a pain. Templates are great but hard to edit and co-founders want to change stuff without talking to the CTO. Also CTO's are very busy with actually product.
Working on new blocks and templates as we speak.
We have spoken to customers still using Wix and Squarespace. They don't want to upgrade to Wordpress due to speed, security and other issues.
We have a few other niches that we plan on targeting as well so you're right with targeting marketers.
I was the solo founder of a SaaS company and to be honest the experience of creating a landing page / marketing site was terrible. It still is.
There is also a huge gap and with 30,000+ SaaS companies we can create a solid company.
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50% rule says 50% product dev 50% traction focus
Making something people want = having customer paying for it = focus on tractionTraction book is a brilliat lecture and Bull's eye is a great method
It changed my life, highly advised-
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Great book, problem is SaaS products take a while to get product market fit, plus adding onboarding can take a while.
Hopefully services help us get more clients even without having PMF.
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
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Thanks for the feedback will look at lowering prices.
Great idea about creating pages and doing sales, I can get them done in minutes.
I can also add a feature where they can instantly log in and have the page ready for them to edit.
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago.