Ask HN: How Would Your Market My SAAS Web App? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How Would Your Market My SAAS Web App?

6 pointsamac11 comments

I have just finished developing my SAAS application - Prospect - and would like to market it to a wider audience.

Having signed up some customers on a trial basis, I'd like to gain more to help grow sales and develop awareness.

What should I do? FWIW, I've spent some time as a digital marketer using the likes of Adwords, Email, Social etc but I'm particularly interested in the right approach for SAAS.

The website is usehuman.com, app is called Prospect.

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Well, for one your banner is kind of strange. I don't understand what Secret Escape has to do with Prospect, which without knowing the name of your product is suddenly capitalized in the sentence.

Your billing table is funny, it looks like a product.

Overall, your sales page is weak. I understand it because I'm technical, but it's not something people would immediately swoon and say "I love it." Your current customers -- did you sell personally or did they convert on this webpage? I'm guessing it's the former, and you should think about how you sold them on it.

Just some thoughts: + As a HR person, I wouldn't care about it being a SAAS. Just saying "We're improving all the time based on your feedback". Check out what Taleo and Brassring use for their marketing copy. Odds are it works, since you're in a similar space.

+The "features" page sounds good but lacks information. What the heck is "The service makes it easy for applicants to get in touch plus with built-in security, Prospect ensures you don't get submissions you dont want either." Are you hiding email addresses, doing filtering, preventing spam submissions? What about the security of my applicants' personal info?

+Personally, I want to see what features it has before I scroll down and click the page.

+Mentioning support is good, but you don't make the benefit to me clear. Do you have good hours, fast response times? What if I wanted to upgrade to even faster support?

> Your current customers -- did you sell personally or did they convert on this webpage? I'm guessing it's the former

This is correct - the former.

Overall, you make some great points. Will take these on-board and make changes to copy/layout.

For one - I would rebuild these pages and focus on LARGE DEMO IMAGES rather than something small I have to really focus to figure out what it is you do. Focus on not just pitch but WHY you are doing this and how it can help save company X time and money.

Take a look at some of these sites: https://www.theprintful.com/ http://www.getharvest.com/ https://www.uncover.com/

In terms of marketing - I would start by focusing on the pain points for people, e.g. HR or startup founders. The people who have to do this stuff day in and day out. Leveraging things like LinkedIn compile a list and start reaching out to flush out the sales funnel and answer any common FAQ.

Setup a Remarketing Campaign (http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html) to increase your chances of a conversion post visit.

Build some content that you can promote and pitch at events or even on your site to generate potential leads. Harvest did this with http://www.getharvest.com/field-guides/pricing/ - think about a guide for managers around hiring, etc. Maybe even do a email drip campaign - 10 tips for whatever, send one every Monday for 10 weeks and then just put them in your "MASS EMAIL" list until they unsubscribe.

Find some Joint Venture people in the space either on hiring or job seeking side to KNOW about your product more. Maybe something like http://www.salarytutor.com - See how you could work together to target larger companies.

Lastly - target twitter and CONVERSE - http://wefollow.com/interest/hiring - there are a TON of HR people out there, reach out and ask them what THEY need help with.

Good Luck!

Echoing the grats on shipping, but I think you can do a lot better with a focus on marketing.

1) Sell benefits, not features. "Position Detail With Contact Details" is just describing what the software does. Why does a customer care? What does this do for them? How is this different than what e.g. Monster or CareerBuilder does? Emphasize benefits you provide that sites like that don't.

2) Work on your branding and elevator pitch. What brief phrases explain what you offer and why it's awesome? How can you quickly communicate this in 48-point font or giant colorful illustrations, and then back up with more text addressing a customer's needs?

I feel like your branding/message suffer from Prospect being a common term, and all the Prospect info being hosted under 'Human' (another common word), not being on its own site. Hard to have a uniform top-level message.

3) Work on your pricing grid. This is a key step of your sales funnel; literally no one can become a customer without seeing it. I would flip the grid into the more common vertical format; you can search for "four column pricing grid" for advice here. I would consider naming the 4 plans, offering a discount to those who buy longer plans (and show the discount!), and add a 'start now' etc call-to-action button for each plan. You don't want this grid to be dull or a dead end.

4) Marketing ideas: I might continue to sell personally until you have some decent stats to speak of, in terms of # of jobs posted and # of job seeker subscribers. It's clear that you've done good technical work, but the marketing side needs more focus to be able to scale well.

Best of luck! Report back with your next iteration. :)

Firstly, thanks for the detailed review.

> I feel like your branding/message suffer from Prospect being a common term, and all the Prospect info being hosted under 'Human' (another common word), not being on its own site. Hard to have a uniform top-level message.

This is something I agonized over - Human is my company and I almost launched Prospect on a separate URL. However, I felt that I could better integrate customer service by using the sub-domain. Maybe the name is a bad one but It was short and one that wasn't in use by anyone else in regards to this type of HR function.

> 3) Work on your pricing grid. This is a key step of your sales funnel; literally no one can become a customer without seeing it. I would flip the grid into the more common vertical format; you can search for "four column pricing grid" for advice here. I would consider naming the 4 plans, offering a discount to those who buy longer plans (and show the discount!), and add a 'start now' etc call-to-action button for each plan. You don't want this grid to be dull or a dead end.

Absolutely, I need to improve the pricing marketing. I will work on the grid asap.

> 4) Marketing ideas: I might continue to sell personally until you have some decent stats to speak of, in terms of # of jobs posted and # of job seeker subscribers. It's clear that you've done good technical work, but the marketing side needs more focus to be able to scale well.

Thanks. I can certainly market the number of jobs posted and subscribers for sure though right now, it's nothing to shout about. (Less than 10 customers)

I probably need a designer and in terms of back-end, it's far from perfect as others have pointed out.

First of all: congrats on shipping!

My biggest concern is your proposition. The information on the website is lacking in clarity, it’s a mystery to me what ‘prospect’ does. Is it a job board? Does it search for candidates? Does it have to do anything with jobs on my website in the first place? Ah, wait, I have to click on ‘features’. That’s three clicks away from the usehuman.com homepage, and I still haven’t got a clue what it is you’re selling. How do I implement it? Is it an external service, how can I put it on my website, how can I enter jobs, etc.

So that’s my first point. Make it clear what it is you’re selling, and, more importantly, how I will benefit. After that, explain how it works.

Also, $18 a month seems a little steep to me. Besides, as a business owner, I don’t want the hassle of monthly payments. You could offer a yearly subscription with a discount.

My other concern is this: what’s your target audience? Is it small business owners who aren’t very tech savvy? Most likely they won’t need the $18 a month subscription since most small business owners don’t change staff members that much to justify the cost. A soon as a company gets big enough for putting several job openings on their website, they’ll most likely have some sort of CMS to handle this. Or does Prospect offer something that standard CMS’s don’t?

> The information on the website is lacking in clarity

I agree but it's something I'm struggling with aka how to package what is literally; an outsourced job board service. That's before we look at the benefits of Prospect.

On billing, we do offer 6, 12, 24 month plans. I just haven't made it clear pre-billing.

> My other concern is this: what’s your target audience? Is it small business owners who aren’t very tech savvy? Most likely they won’t need the $18 a month subscription since most small business owners don’t change staff members that much to justify the cost. A soon as a company gets big enough for putting several job openings on their website, they’ll most likely have some sort of CMS to handle this. Or does Prospect offer something that standard CMS’s don’t?

This is a good point - it's aimed at those with a social network presence (i.e Facebook user) and those with a CMS that doesn't integrate jobs well e.g uses a static jobs page.

As you mention, as companies grow, they will want a ATS type solution (Taleo etc) to effectively manage HR. Before then, I guess it's the Fortune 5,000,000 that's the market.

Before you spend money on marketing I'd recommend spending some time improving your landing page and the sales funnel.

The Copy Hackers ebooks are a good place to learn about this stuff: http://copyhackers.com/

I'd also recommend you read this article to learn about the kinds of metrics you should be measuring in your SaaS project:

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

Thanks for the tips on the sales funnel and metrics.

The pain points is good advice - it's not something I've put a great amount of thinking into. The app was created because I could do it and thought it would help those wanting an in-expensive/outsourced job ad solution.

In regards to metrics in particular, it's an area I don't know a huge deal about but I'd love to learn. I bought 'Web Analytics: An Hour A Day' which was recommend to me to start with.

Thanks.

It's extremely common for us builders to spend all our time building something cool and then thinking, hrm, I wonder if anyone would pay for this? That's why I like the advice to do a business analysis first: think out the monetary plan, validate whether people would buy, etc, before writing the code - I totally learned this the hard way.

That said, it's never a bad time to start looking at marketing.

For metrics, you may want to look at web stats, such as traffic levels and sources, to help with your marketing/funnel, and customer stats: which features are used, which are not used, which are started but not completed, etc. This can guide development focus.

One fun metrics idea is, find which feature seems most correlated with whether a user becomes a long-term subscriber. Then tweak your tutorial/tour/FAQ/etc with the goal of getting every user to successfully complete that task.

You need to turn DEBUG off in Django.

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