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We just launched our SaaS service for bloggers last week (after 9 long months of work). After seeking an answer to this question myself in the past, I think I'v
by Huhty 10y ago
We just launched our SaaS service for bloggers last week (after 9 long months of work). After seeking an answer to this question myself in the past, I think I've learned enough to partially answer this question.
Here's a few takeaways:
1. Definitely prepare for launch DURING development, and ideally start on day 1 (or ASAP). Set up a pre-launch page and explain your upcoming product. Collect as many emails as you can. This gives you ample time to ensure that you don't launch to crickets when the big day comes.
2. If you are not famous or well known, it will be 10-100x harder to gain traction, but not impossible. Luck also plays a bigger part if you are unknown and/or have little to no connections.
3. No one will understand your product/service better than you. You need to outline all the benefits your service provides via blogging, landing page, explainer video, etc. We hired a video creation company to create our explainer video, but ended up re-writing the script ourselves and basically produced the whole video (other than the graphics, music, and voiceover).
4. You can hire a PR company, but they are very limited on what they can do especially if working with a limited budget. In this case you still need to give them interesting things to write about, since like I stated above, no one will understand your product/service and its benefits better than you. PR results OBVIOUSLY can be hit or miss and don't guarantee any results.
5. Long-term growth is usually a fairly standard procedure, and most successful companies follow a similar common formula. Have a blog and regularly post blog posts that would interest your potential market. In our case it's bloggers, so our blog will contains posts that bloggers find interesting. Blog content also drastically improves SEO. You can use your arsenal of blog posts and share them when the time is right/relevant (on Quora, Reddit, HN, Linkedin, etc). Over time, organic word-of-mouth growth kicks in (along with compound growth), but until then, you have to do things yourself. Remember: a bunch of little wins = Success. Finding these little wins is hard and time consuming and no one will likely do it for you, especially in the beginning.
To answer your question, I think there's just too many moving parts to outsource all of it to a "growth/traction company" but doing it yourself is very possible as long as you put legitimate time and effort into it.
If you're curious about what service we launched, it's at http://blogenhancement.com http://blogenhancement.com
- joshmn 10y agoJust checked out what you made, looks neat. Kind of an aside: Please don't ask users to send their password over plain-text in 2017. That's terrifying.
- jordz 10y agoAlso, it would be good if it used https by default, the sign-up link on the latest version of chrome registers as insecure due to "This page includes a password or credit card input over HTTP. A warning has been added the URL bar.".
- bvi 10y ago> Collect as many emails as you can. How would you go about doing this? I'm at the pre-launch stage myself, and this is proving to be a harder than I thought. I've only tried Facebook Ads as of now, with limited ROI.
- Huhty 10y agoWe used Kickofflabs to get a quick solution. We chose them because they also include a mini "referral program" so after someone enters an email, they can spread the word and get a discount or even free premium with enough referrals. To get traffic we used all sorts of sources, like Twitter, Reddit, Linkedin. No spam, and we made sure to follow all the rules (mention it in proper context etc.) We also got featured on Betalst.