My experience releasing 3 failed SaaS products

My latest and third product I think so far has been my greatest “failure” but equally the thing that has taught me more than anything. On the surface I did a lot of things “right” but in the wrong way I’d so fatefully find out. After again going through the typical rinse repeat cycle of optimism to total despair with my last product; I spent a ton of time reading, listening, and watching content on how to run a bootstrapped SaaS.

I learned I needed to be talking to people from the get-go, understand them and learn about their problems. Again this next idea was a problem I had, but before coding a lick I started doing customer validation, or what I thought that was.

I was getting a list of users on my niches forums and websites. I was talking to people explicitly about my idea gathering their input again great things to do however I was doing it the wrong way.

I was literally saying to people: “I’m looking to build an X app would you find that useful”. Hundreds and hundreds or responses to my posts were enthusiastically yes I’d love to use that! I got bit by the build it bug and stopped right there in my tracks and started coding away, a huge mistake...

I had spent months working through a fully polished app that had many features. I was sending email updates to my list and happy to see people were engaging. Again I was at the peak of optimism, this was it this is the app that I finally release to get paid users, third time is the charm!

I slowly but surely started riling up my list by sending a sequence of launch emails, engagement was great I was excited to launch.

Then I finally did it. I fired off the launch email to my list, notified the forums of my product, and almost instantaneously the users started flooding in.

It was exhilarating! In the first week I had more users than I’d ever had in all my apps, people we’re using it first a hundred, then two, then three and then it stopped…

Then three hundred and ten, three hundred and twenty a few weeks later nothing. I looked at my metrics and while people we’re signing up almost nobody was actually using the product. Of course the whole time I was getting “great” feedback from my users: “The products great!”, “Great job keep working at it”, “I really like the design.” Nobody though was actually using it? Why was nobody using it? The people who did use it maybe used it for a max of ten minutes before never using it again. Why the heck was nobody using it?

Soon I started getting feedback on forums along the lines of “The product looks interesting but I don’t really want to sign up for it without seeing the product first.” Again this was a free product at the time and all the user had to do was click the Google or Facebook OAuth button to log in, or enter their email but they refused to do so. They didn’t trust me. I started to look deeper at my metrics and realized I had a huge bounce rate maybe over 3k or visitors at the peak and a bounce rate of 80%. I had sustained over 1k users hitting my landing page a day for the first week and only 300 users actually even signed in to use the app and when they did they almost immediately churned, again nobody trusted me enough to actually try my app to begin with or it was a problem that people just weren’t interested in solving.

Of course my first thought as a technical founder was that there wasn’t enough features so I furiously started creating as many additional features as I could. I fired up my email list and told them all about the new features and why they were so awesome. Engagement was bad and it was the first time people started actively unsubscribing from email list, over 10% in my first email after launch, with more coming on each subsequent email.

After getting minimal traffic for a period of a week or two after releasing the new features I realized I needed to market my app to get traffic up. I didn’t even connect the dots on my metrics perhaps it was denial, but I thought if I can just throw more proverbial shit at the fan I’d get more users, which was technically true. I started to “market” horrendously going to more sub-niches again getting a quick little spike of traffic and users to high churn and bounce. I created a Youtube channel and blog to increase SEO and started to actually get involved with learning how to market realizing its importance something I was so happy to dismiss earlier in my entrepreneurial journey much to my chagrin. My ads were useless and the bounce rate only increased after doing outbound marketing, if you could even call it that.

It was then when it happened. To my credit at this time I would learn and do anything to get more users to my site, to the point where I was getting banned from multiple forums for posting after people told me to get lost. I had fully embraced marketing and was furiously reading content and trying to increase my SEO ranking for long tail keywords in the hopes of it driving traffic. It was then when I learned about backlinks and why they’re important for ranking. I put my domain in and to my surprise I had multiple backlinks quite a few in fact. Initially I was stoked! Then my heart almost left my chest, the backlinks looked sketchy and the title of some of the backlinks were offensive. I clicked on the link and it led me to a forum I had not posted on where over twenty or so people we’re just tearing both me personally and my app apart. I will refrain from summarizing but basically it was extremely hurtful. I cried.

It’s then why it clicked why the bounce rate was high and my conversion rate was low people just didn’t want to use my app, they actively hated it to the point of making blog posts about why it was such an awful idea. I felt crushed my cycle of optimism to despair was at the lowest despair I had ever felt. I was working on a blog post the night I found the backlink as I chocked back tears I kept typing telling myself they were just haters and to not give up. I couldn’t keep typing though and I stopped working on it from that day onwards.

I was hurt for a week or so, I kept the site live to see if any of my metrics would improve, a week turned into two. The metrics got worse and worse, and a few weeks laters there wasn’t a sign up in over three weeks. It’s then when I killed the product destroying all my users saved progress for anyone who had actually used the product. It was reliving since the serverless bills had racked up too close to $200 bucks. Let me just say there is no worse fate for a creator than their product to silently be scrapped without even the most minor of eeks or anger from its users. Nobody cared it was gone, people just barely cared when it was there, but people especially did not give a fuck when it was gone.

So why did it “fail”? We’ll it failed because while I got validation of my idea I was doing it the wrong way.

Telling people: “Hey this is my app idea would you use it?” Is a clear violation of the Mom Test created by Rob Fitzpatrick a great book I’d highly recommend. In short just because users or potential customers tell you your product is something they’d use you don’t really know that’s the case without some action from that potential customer, whether its signing up for a beta, or better yet trying to pay for the product before its built.

I had never really understood building a sales funnel before launching a product but after my last failure I totally get it. You want people to try and pay and use your product before you even start building it, that way at the very least when you release it you have paid customers and you also validate its a true problem that people are so frustrated with that they’d be willing to potentially pay you before its released.

People initially told me they liked the idea because I was exposing my ego and it was easier to tell me they’d use it then telling me to buzz off. They also were looking to solve a broad goal which my product could have helped them with but the execution of which lacked to really compel the user to truly use it which would explain why people would use the product for all of two to three minutes then churn.

Another point of not building the sales funnel upfront is when I released my product people who were highly interested it my top demographic wouldn’t even sign up for it because we had not built trust. These people were in the middle of the funnel and I thought they’d just automatically close i.e. sign up once the product was out there. Some did but the majority didn’t. If I had marketed the blog upfront and then built my funnel and sold them later even if the product wasn’t built I would have a had a much higher chance of realizing first if the product was truly worth building because I’d have real data as to whether people would buy it or not.

Also by marketing up front your building SEO months before release so you can hopefully piggy back on some of the small gains you’ve made there to keep the top of the funnel supplied once the big initial spike occurs from your email list. It’s easy to get a huge spike in engagement at launch if you have a list it’s very hard to keep that level engagement going after.

Some customer validation is good but to get real results you need serious effort in understanding your customers problem and empathizing with them. You need to understand your customer intimately you should exactly know whose the type of person you’re building this for and what their trying to accomplish. You should be providing value to them ever step of the way through your funnel. This builds trust and a dialog between you and the customer, they begin to respect you and your offering and think you can help them. Then you actually do. Your product doesn’t need to be polished if it solves the customers problem accurately. This is I think is the main point lost in “ship it” culture. An MVP doesn’t need to be pretty but it absolutely must without a doubt solve your customers problem and it should not be shipped any time sooner or later than when it can accomplish that.

If you actually want to do this spend as much time reading ever resource on sales and marketing you can. Hubspot is a great resource to learn from. If you’re a technical founder let me just say code is evil and you wanting to write it is bad. This is not a side project if you just want to code something go do it but don’t expect it to sell. If you want to actually create a business you need to realize coding is both the easiest of all the things that needs to be done and also the least important. Let me say this again you can run a successful SaaS company with the simplest of Python scripts if you can market and sell that solution. Marketing and selling is the crusp of what it means to be a bootstrapper, think of yourself foremost as a marketer who knows how to code rather than a coder who knows how to market. You should be spending as little time coding and as much time marketing, building leads, optimizing your funnel as much as possible.

Lastly, features are useless if you’ve got a churn problem features wont solve it. If you got a bounce problem features wont solve it. If you have a traffic problem features wont solve it, unless you’re improving SEO. Remember code is evil.

So whats next? We all see everyone highlights real on social media and its hard not to feel bad about failure, but what do you really lose as a bootstrapper when your product flops: maybe some time and ego. I’ve learned so much so far on this journey and happy to be reminded that others have failed many more times before finally getting their “overnight success.” We all see the result but rarely do we see the messy side of how people got where they are. I’m spending a lot of time decompressing and focusing on whatever the next thing will be. Reading as much resources as I can and searching for my next opportunity. If my journey has so far showed you anything its progression. A year ago I scoffed at marketing and sales I thought it was sleazy. Today I have the utmost respect for those professions and and doing my best to learn and get good at them myself. Bootstrapping is a journey of self-actualization its so far been the hardest thing I’ve done in my life but easily the most rewarding and I haven’t even made a dime from it yet! I’m excited to build my next product, only of course after trying to sell it first.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/31H9fLM