How I Got Pre-Signups for my SaaS, then Failed | Hacker News Reader

How I Got Pre-Signups for my SaaS, then Failed

mattkremer.com

32 pointsacjohnson5524 comments

This is fascinatingly baffling. I'd love to meet the author in person.

I don't know how much existing technology was used, but the feature set sounds quite expansive for 6 weeks of development. Seems like the guy must be a pretty good developer. Aside from the HN shilling, it sounds like the launch marketing was done well.

But then a few surprisingly bad bits: "we had a long heart to heart about 3 weeks after launch". 3 weeks? Just how quickly were they expecting success? Followed by "I assumed that the way I worked on projects (remotely over SSH or SFTP) was how everyone set up their projects" which suggests they did all this without even the slightest bit of market research.

I wish the team good luck in the future. It seems like some smart people made some strangely simple mistakes, but I bet they've got a great chance to be successful in the future.

3 weeks is indeed really quick to jump to conclusions in my opinion, and a lot of people just give up too quickly. In my case, it took around 10 /months/ to experiment and understand how to properly sell my Saas [1], and now we are starting to see a nice increase in sales.

Rob Walling cut a normal SaaS growth in 3 phases: build, learn and scale. The learning phase is about learning how to properly convey the value, tune your message, and find the right channels to sell your product - and it can take quite a bit of time.

Too bad a lot of technical people just stop too early (not assuming carrying on in that specific project would have been a good idea :-)

[1] https://www.wisecashhq.com

Thanks for the replies guys.

I definitely gave up too quickly I think (not saying that how it was would have turned out though, it definitely needs to be reworked).

I think just the sheer emotion behind the other people I was working with thinking I could shut it down, and other personal circumstances is what drove me to "abandon" it for 4 months.

Hopefully what I'm working on now will prove that there is still some substance behind this idea.

Emotionally this is a roller-coaster for sure. Just wanted to point out that your situation is not unusual and not necessarily a failure :-) Good luck with your current work!

You might want to seriously rethink re-working things without talk with your active users.

That's not failing and its not failing hard. People have a very strange idea of what success or failure is and I think that it is mostly apparently based on watching The Social Network or something.

So a lot of people have incredibly unrealistic expectations.

It seems like literally 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 programmers have startups today. In that context getting 2200 signups is not failing hard. Getting people to log in is not failing hard. Getting 9 people to actually use your product is not failing hard.

In reality, that is a story of mild success and I would take it as a solid motivation to keep working on it.

I mean, to be honest, after putting everything into my own startup, if I can't ever get more than a few people to really use it then I am going to be devastated.

But everything that I read about business suggests that getting customers to actually use your product is very hard and requires a long-term effort. Those stories also almost always say that there was an evolution of the product before it gained traction.

You are saying you only worked on it for a month or so. I have been working on different variations of my idea for more like 8 months. I have not 'launched' anything yet. So I have 0 signups.

You are way ahead of the curve man and just need to keep your expectations a bit more realistic and keep going.

I think this was definitely an emotional failure, and not an actual one. The sheer emotion behind the two other people I was working on this with telling me they don't think I should pursue it further is what put me over the edge, and why I abandoned it for a period of 4-5 months.

I think there are legs here, and I have a plan to test out this concept again with a relaunch.

Thanks for the feedback!

You need to find out what you can charge your users to customers. Or what things you can add to the product so they will pay. It's not your product anymore, it's theirs. Unless you piss them off and they leave. Changing bunch of things with consulting them will do that.

Almost every guide for people wanting to build a product begins with one advice - find customers before you even have a product. I wonder how would you confront it with this story - more than 2k pre-signups and after launch almost no one is using it. Yes, he already built the product, but lets assume he didn't - having 2k pre-signups would convince anyone that the idea is good and worth investing time and money. Stories like this just proves my theory that the startup world is one big unknown. You can build a product without any research or marketing, some popular website or even a single person writes about it and suddenly your product is the next hot thing. You can also make a big research, advertise everywhere, collect thousands of potential customers who said "Sure, I would use it", but when you finally build and launch the product - no one is longer interested.

I think all of those bits of advice that people give have some merit, but there is a large amount of uncertainty.

I think that software developers are like people and people are like herds of animals. They will move into a few areas and start grazing based on what the other animals are doing.

So you have flocking behavior that plays a large part.

Like the your product is a reef in the ocean, and the customers are schools of fish that come by.

Except this ocean has many more reefs than there are fish to populate them.

He didn't find customers. He found 2K looky-loos. Customers are people who are paying for the product (or meet some activity threshold in a free product). He found 2K people who were willing to give their email address to learn more about what was being offered.

That is a positive sign, but they aren't customers. It seems like 2,00 people logged in and then found out the product wasn't what they were expecting.

I know this was the case for me. I signed up hoping for a really nice online IDE. I found a bunch of ssh stuff that made no sense to me.

It might be worth talking to the 2000 people and finding out why they signed up and what type of product they were hoping to find.

That's the point - if you don't have a product, you can't sell it. You can collect e-mail addresses, people may say they're interested in your product, but until you build it and users pay for it, nothing is sure. That's why I find the whole advice "sell it first, then build" a bit silly.

Thanks for the input chaddeshon. I would love to chat with you about what you expected vs what you found, and what you would change.

Mind shooting me an email matt@mattkremer.com? Thanks!

So 2,200 signups turned into 9 active users. If those were paying customers, than that is a .5% lead to customer ratio. There are companies that have built large businesses with a ratio like that. I'm not saying that OP should continue the business, his other reasons for giving it up may be valid. But a .5% conversion ratio is really not that bad for a brand new product. Very few products are instant hits.

Exactly - after being featured on HN, my SaaS got around 1k email signups, and out of my head only 15 to 20 translated into paid customers. There is a lot of work to be done to improve that, and it does not mean the product isn't good.

I don't think he did all that badly. Just that he gave up. Maybe people weren't using it for what it was intended for--that's fine. You learn and pivot. Maybe you're not getting enough conversion. Adapt!

Startups are emotional roller coasters. Paul Graham said, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" (www.paulgraham.com/die.html).

All I get is a header and footer with white nothingness between them. Chrome 36 on Windows 7.

Please read his post.

I can't see it; that's my point.

Hey colanderman, you can't see my post or you can't see Kobra.io?

I can't see any body text on any page on mattkremer.com. The header and footer show, space for the body text shows, I can highlight & copy white boxes that, upon pasting, turn out to be text, but I cannot see any characters on the pages themselves.

Have you tried clearing your cache and cookies?

That is really strange, I'll look into it! Thanks for letting me know.

My only Windows machine is at home though, so won't be able to check right away.

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