Ask HN: One-man SaaS, how do you attract customers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: One-man SaaS, how do you attract customers?

47 pointsskwee35745 comments

I'm struggling with attracting customers to my SaaS, while having to navigate the bullshit advice thrown around by so called "indie-hackers".

Paying for ProductHunt, or building a Twitter audience, probably works if you sell to other indie hackers. But when you have a product that is designed to solve a problem, like I do, I believe a different approach is needed.

I tried to build content around the service, to hit popular keywords, and while it works to some extent, it seems to die off quickly. I tried ads, but the CPC is too high, and since I don't operate on a subscription model it doesn't make economic sense. I also tried so-called passive marketing, i.e., monitoring keywords related to my service on, say, Reddit, and replying with a real (not-AI generated) reply with a link to my service, needless to say, I was banned.

So, one-man SaaS owners, how do you attract customers?

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Scrolling through here I get the sense that these answers are from people who’ve never actually done 0-1.

The truth is when you’re as tiny as you are you almost certainly won’t have any scalable channels. What you need to do is hand to hand combat to secure each customer. Focus on getting 1 paying customer first by any means necessary. Call them, email them, just get in touch and see if this solves a problem enough for them to pay for it.

What’s going to happen is the face to face of actually finding someone to use your product is going to teach you a ton about: the problem and how painful it is, how well your solution solves it, who your customer is, how much you can charge, and how to get to them.

After you’ve gotten 1 paid customer (by any means necessary), now try to get a second one (by any means necessary). Keep doing this.

After the first few you’ll start to notice a pattern in the ways you capture customers: the way you reach out, the medium you reached out with, the types of customers and triggers in their life that made them receptive, the messaging that convinced them to buy, etc

You’ll stumble upon the ways to scale your customer acquisition.

Focus on getting that first customer doing whatever it takes. Get a customer to pay you TODAY. Then repeat

Forget ads, SEO, and social media. Everyone is so used to low-value content and spam that they won't pay attention. And even if your intent to sell your SaaS is legit, it is still spam when you are sending it into web sites that aren't interested.

Instead, think about who your audience really is - where else do they read, listen, and talk? In my experience, the best marketing happens when you can answer that question.

My favorite anecdote is that one of the successful SaaS companies I worked at grew in part due to radio ads on NPR. That worked because our market was education, and people who are professional educators tended to listen to NPR.

It can be that simple - if you reject online ads and presence as a marketing tool, what else is left? That is probably where to invest marketing dollars and energy. Be different, not part of the online noise.

I personally have never had any kind of positive ROI from online ads - I'm skeptical many people do and have a conspiracy theory it's all a scam except for maybe a small percentage of users. I know factually this can't be true, but IME, I cannot fathom how anyone returns a positive ROI from online ads in this climate.

Imagine a marketing/advertising professional said, “I’ve never had any kind of positive ROI from trying to write software.” What would you think their issue is?

But that’s not the promise of this ad software, right? Can you imagine it from that perspective?

Do your best to imagine the hypothetical scenario I posed.

A marketing professional claimed that they’ve never had any profitable success from attempting to write software.

What might their issue be?

That they sucked at marketing. Sure, I do. Your socratic method has been illuminating.

Why would failing to write software successfully mean that they sucked at marketing?

Couldn’t a great marketer be bad at something they’re not skilled at?

If you're going to post like this you should at least be alert enough to notice when your interlocutor sees what you're doing and has anticipated your line, or at least believes they have.

I’m actually quite stupid.

So are sealions.

Sea li on is actually 3 words not 1.

So, now that I answered your question - what’s your point? is your position that most ad buyers see positive ROI? Or that if you don’t, they suck at marketing? Surely the salient point here is that the advertiser with the monopoly (google) is selling a product that doesn’t benefit everyone, and mostly benefits them. This is well supported by what is coming out in the courts eight now. At least that’s what my point was, anyway. Thanks for your line of inquiry.

Again, read the question I asked closely.

I asked about a marketer who had no personal success writing software. Why might that be? Perhaps writing software is a skill they lacked? Why would they believe their skill in one area would transfer to another?

Maybe I’m being too obtuse.

> I personally have never had any kind of positive ROI from online ads

Maybe you personally (despite, presumably having other skills) just really suck at running online ads? But I’m sure you’re confident that definitely can’t be the case.

Why are you ignoring my other responses to this like you didn’t see them? This kind of bad faith trolling is boring.

I’m actually quite stupid.

Forget ads, but what you just described is advertising.

OP, you need to figure out how to grow your user base and ad spend proportionally. Look into figuring out customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). Keep the diff of those positive and in theory you have a working strategy.

>My favorite anecdote is that one of the successful SaaS companies I worked at grew in part due to radio ads on NPR. That worked because our market was education, and people who are professional educators tended to listen to NPR.

Same, although medical instead of education. I've noticed a few different times now when vendors were trying to sell us on big purchases, I've heard ads for them on NPR.

Check out the book Traction, to get a bunch of free marketing channels and a strategy. My favorite is to go after the bloggers that are read by your target customer community.

https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

Is it b2c or b2b? imo/experience, b2b SaaS are the only ones that ever succeed. If not subscriptions, how do you generate revenue? Really it's either build an audience or cold calling. Note: I've never succeeded with any of my startups (for a bunch of reasons) so take with a grain of salt.

It's both B2C and B2B. And it's a one time payment.

So a marketplace kind of app? (if so, you now have to build two audiences!) Do they self host after the sale? (Friction for b2b side). Is it enterprise (eg high touch sales - leads to long sales cycles)? Pay per post?

At the end of the day, it comes down to marketing and sales. Marketing:

  - Craft the messaging around the pain point you're solving
  - word of mouth
  - advertising (there are different kinds, not just cpc/google adwords: guest posts, external content sites/blogs/channels in your market/demographic, etc)
  - organic search (content marketing - this takes time - AND you have to promote the channels you are publishing too)
  - cold calling

I follow a fee for service financial adviser on YT and they have content marketing down: 2 videos every week and a newsletter. These channels show they understand the needs of their potential customers, demonstrate domain expertise, etc

Thanks, I'll try to work on these points

Why is your SaaS a one-time payment? That's very atypical for SaaS.

Because that's the model that works best, and in-fact that is THE one feature that is different from all other similar products in this market.

I'd be very nervous if somebody told me they will host my business data or otherwise provide a service to me forever for a single time payment. Maybe that's what makes your customers go away.

I think you might need to reevaluate a few premises if you want to succeed.

I would recommend never competing solely on price.

Be where your customers are. That sounds easy, but knowing who your actual customers are is hard. Figure that out and then target that group as precise as possible and as hard as possible.

The threads here appear to parrot the old decade “find the people before solving the problems” which sadly is way out of date.

Secondly, people are now so used to online ads that the ads became a background noise to them and most ads are somehow considered “scam”.

Since you built something, it means that it solves a real problem. Now you need to build a community around it or find the community who solve similar problems.

Now about the audience, is your product for technical people(think HN/Lobsters), then do a SHOW HN/Lobsters and offer limited free seats if it does not cost too much. Meanwhile lookout on Twitter(X), Mastodon and other tech channels to promote it covertly.

If your audience is lay person, ads on radio, poster ads, small time influencer(social media) promotion will bring some interest.

If your audience is more specialized, channels like Linkedin has a group of people who will be receptive to your promotions.

Here, my examples are just handpicked.

Aside, indie hacker group is… not a good place if you do not have a large community of followers and I’ve seen most of their products(other than games) are mostly junk that their followers will buy not as a value but as a support for the person they follow and will often refer others due to implicit referral bonuses. Of course there are genuine good products from indie hackers but most of their stuff are life style stuff that do not work unless you have a massive following base and can churn out new stuff every 6 month - 2 year because due to the nature of the products they build, there are no recurring business.

"how do you attract customers?"

You're in a tight spot because you're asking this question after the product was built.

#Who is my customer, where can they be found, how do I reach them, what do they buy now, who do they buy from already, how much does it cost to get in front of them, what modalities do they respond to, how do competitors price, position, and reach them? What is the actual problem, what are the core benefits they seek, what solutions exist today and what do they lack or ignore?

These are questions that need to be answered prior to building anything.

You will have an incredibly difficult time selling what you have now if this research was not performed beforehand. Do this the research and then decide if you can save it. Otherwise, you've learned a valuable lesson and should start anew. Many great projects were built upon the bones of past mistakes.

If you’re alone you basically have only 2 options:

1. Be on a fresh wild and growing market where everybody grows (like ai as overhyped as it is).

2. Be soo good at something, at least in a single critical feature, that every customer you have feels a relief and becomes your word of mouth channel. It’s not always hard, since most b2c products suck. But its not that easy too, because solo founders tend to have b2c mentality where they see for instance a better UX a killer feature. That is often not the case for b2b.

Anything else means basically competing with bigger players for customers. Guess who has more money to win the game?

Jason Cohen built a one SAAS. his blog [1] is a must read and pretty much a free MBA in the business of software.

a lot of manual work is involved which means emailing and reaching out to customers directly

[1]: asmartbear.com

I ran ads on Google and Facebook for years, $1000/month was my budget most of the time. I reached a peak of around $45K/month in subscription revenue from this for my app Improvely.

How long did it take you to break even on ad spend?

Three months -- but this was 2012, and that success is a lot harder to replicate today.

Very nice work.

If you say you solve a real problem, you know it is real because you know people who have that problem right?

Go talk to them to see if your solution actually solves their problem.

The main problem is that as software engineers we start with product first and figure out distribution later once we built it. In order to build successful products you need to have an insight into the distribution to win customers, so it makes sense to figure out customer acquisition plan in advance.

I hate it when we repeat this like it’s true. No, you really do need to have the product built if you’re not selling to a very, very small handful of high-touch customers from the get-go.

That’s right, the product is required in some cases. The plan on how to build relationships with customers is required in all cases. It’s even better if those relationships already exist.

Because ads aren't trusted people will advertise things that don't yet exist. Feels like a race to the bottom.

Who is your target customer?

It’s difficult to give non-generic advice on this question without having some context.

You built a product first and then are searching for the market for it? That's tough. If you do it in reverse, find the market first and then build a product for them, it's 100x easier. Trust me.

Hi OP, I saw your project lists. I think you are on the right track. You are not spending too much time in dev and are experimenting in multiple ideas. You got one notch under your belt. You also seem to be quite an accomplished writer. Thats two.

The next step is to talk to prospects. May be talking to customers was part of your role in your current or previous work? If not, then there are some learnings to do. If you cannot contact your prospects before you build the product, you cannot sell to them after you build. If I were you I would start by reading Mom Test. It will change how you look at things. But it is not a cure-all. There will be lots of learning to do even about how to contact prospects, how to talk to them to get actionable insights and not genial confirmation etc. (I am currently here). If you already have a product, it is still ok to do that. You can ask ppl in your target group for testing your product etc. That is also a great learning experience and can lead to rapid development of your product. You will truly believe you have thought through a lot of UX flows and would have done a great job and still uncover a lot of blindspots.

It also helps to learn to market and sell. This will shape how you build your product and how you talk about it. Are you currently working? Does your current company or your previous ones have sales and marketing roles? Do take them out to lunch, talk to them about their product goals, their day to day activities etc. These are some stuff you will be doing when your product is ready to market.

If these make sense to you and need someone to chat with, ping me. Would be happy to compare notes.

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