10 ms·
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
- bradhe 13y agoYou put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?
- levosmetalo 13y agoWriting a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.
- Romoku 13y agoWell he put the source on Github and it's very interesting to see how some projects come together.
- zrail 13y agoHa! No, no interest in resurrecting it at all, I just wanted to share what I learned.
- levosmetalo 13y agoBy reading my comment again, it may appear a bit bitter, which was not my intention. I just wanted to point out that I hoped that you didn't give up and that post mortem was just a new marketing ploy to resurrect it.
- bluedevil2k 13y agoHe says later in the article he tried paid advertising, but it never led to sale.
- zrail 13y agoI tried content marketing microsites, google ads, reddit ads, talking about it a lot, etc. Nothing really stuck, and then life got in the way and I lost interest.
- tixocloud 13y agoI think you did a really great job in completing the project and launching. Disclaimer: I'm an MBA student so take my thoughts with a grain of salt :) I thought that your marketing was spot on in terms of trying to generate something but I'm just wondering if you tried targeting other types of customers or even zoning in on very specific types of programmers ( beginner level, expert level, etc)?
- bluedevil2k 13y agoThis was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.
- waterside81 13y agoCohen's advice is good for two reasons: 1) Obviously you see if there's any demand for your product but perhaps more importantly ... 2) It forces developers to put on their salesperson hat. Lots of us developers just like building products and just willfully ignore the other part - selling the darn things!
- ronilan 13y agoget 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it. I can't think of any valuable product that was created this way.
- runako 13y agoThat's quite the sweeping dismissal of Kickstarter.
- logicallee 13y agoThe level of work to do a successful Kickstarter is way in excess of "before you even start coding it." I can't imagine anyone who could do a successful kickstarter on a project that hasn't even begun (not even a line of code).
- awj 13y ago...I'd like to see this mysterious Kickstarter page that has had basically no work done in advance.
- MattGrommes 13y ago
- jh3 13y agoReasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer): - I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free. - I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices. - Your service costs me money to do what I do for free. - If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free for me. - Emailing myself notes with tags in the subject in is also free. Why should I spent $5/mo to use a digital journaling service, and then more time to make this service work with the rest of my workflow, when I already have things in place that take care of my note taking problem? I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing. Finally, at least you shipped something. Nice retrospective. Keep at it. Edit: It's interesting seeing this post and "Ask HN: How do you store and organize your startup ideas?"[1] on the front page at the same time :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375
- drewlarsen 13y ago> I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing. Just like the OP, you've generalized your personal experience to other developers. It is an easy trap to fall into. I agree with the takeaway called out in another comment: validate the idea as objectively as possible and as early as possible.
- jh3 13y agoYes you're right. It's the only data point I have, so it's what I went with :) What you're echoing is also correct.
- tixocloud 13y agoIt's funny but your list of reasons are kinda stuff learned in business school. Switching costs, substitute products, etc are common to all businesses in my opinion and a little bit of analysis might have helped the OP to identify his niche. However, that said, the experiences learned from failing will have a huge impact in the OP's success in the future.
- yohann305 13y agoThanks for posting the "behind the scenes" story. You say you built a landing page with mailchimp signups for your new product. Did you get many signups? And I suppose these were just signups, no money involved, right? Did a good chunck turn into paying customers? I would love to know more. Thank You!
- zrail 13y agoI had a list of about 300 people when I launched preorders and about 30% of them converted to paying customers. I was sending out weekly updates with progress toward preorders, and then after preorders started I sent out weekly updates with download links for people who paid and "buy now for X% off, won't last long" messages for people who hadn't. The whole story is here: https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing
- yohann305 13y agoWow! Nice conversion rate! Good job on not making the same mistake again!! And Good luck! I'm reading the "Adventures" post as we speak.
- AznHisoka 13y agoWhat was the initial reactions of people when they tried your product? Did they say they loved it and would want to use it everyday?
- andyidsinga 13y agoits sort of silly, but one thing in the post that stood out for me was the $29/month for SSL and database. It was a significant amount of money for this dev - but it could have been done even cheaper with the aws free tier and getting an ssl cert from somewhere like positivessl / commodo.
- egomaksab 13y agoIt's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert). You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.
- falcolas 13y agoThis is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...
- andyidsinga 13y agocertainly - I think I paid 3 bucks for my cert for a year and amazon doesn't charge me anything extra for turning on SSL with my node code. I use a micro instance ..with swap ;)
- BetaCygni 13y agoSeriously? $29 doesn't register as real money to me. Especially from a business perspective.
- thebiglebrewski 13y agoGreat post Pete, I'm really enjoying your Stripe + Rails book. Keep it up!
- zrail 13y agoThanks!
- heliodor 13y agoI think the right pricing model for this one is freemium. People start using it, get addicted, then you charge them for extra storage once they go over a limit, like Dropbox and Workflowy.
- marincounty 13y agoAgree!
- alkagupta0309 13y agoThe Idea is nice but I wouldn't pay for it mainly because of the reasons stated by Pete Keen and another reason: When I have free tools to be doing the exact same things, why would I want to pay? If I had to launch a SaaS product, I would definitely create a buzz about it amongst my peers and give free subscription for a limited period enough to get the user used to the new idea.
- nonchalance 13y agoI apologize in advance if I sound snarky, but I (and I suspect many others here) hadn't heard of Marginalia until today. How much did you spend on ads and where did you advertise?
- ma2rten 13y agoDon't be silly. When he said he spend a lot on advertising he didn't mean that put up a superbowl ad. He probably spend it on Google Adwords for people who where searching for related terms.
- VLM 13y ago"people who where searching for related terms" I think that would be a strange thing to search for, and I'm not sure it would be a profitable demographic. Sometimes the problem is not just "do people search for something" but who are those people doing those searches?
- marincounty 13y agoBeing on this page was his best advertising--ironic?
- WhitneyLand 13y agoGreat post for you because the honest introspection will lead you to more success. Great post for us because even though these lessons have been written about before, it seems to take lots of repetition for them to sink in all the way.
- WhitneyLand 13y agoGreat post for you because the honest introspection will lead you to more success. Great post for us because even though these lessons have been written about before, it seems to take lots of repetition for them to sink in all the way.
- VLM 13y agoI looked at the original announcement and looked specifically at the technical details list. If I didn't have the stuff on the tech details list available, and had to accomplish roughly the same non-technical task, there are a lot of ways to take notes more or less for free. I can't operate without gmail and I guess google drive so I need not worry about an app built on them. Dropbox is not a negation of my argument, in that they handle the annoyance of keeping a storage service up. In my cartoon mind if gmail is down, then storing notes in gmail doesn't work, but the bigger headache is gmail is down not that I can't access some minor notes. So just use gmail for free. Or github. Or a browser extension to "save email to dropbox or google drive" The other problem is you have a very narrow window of opportunity for a programmers note taker because of habits. The concept of writing README and TODO files and inserting source comments or placeholders, perhaps with tags to search for and ASCII art for markup, has been a part of programming education and tradition for a long time. Could you sell a note taker app to noobs who don't already have a github / text editor habit? Well, maybe, but it'll be harder. So in my cartoon mind I have an idea it gets entered into TODO or perhaps as a TODO flagged comment in the appropriate spot and its done. You need a wedge to fit your process into it. Like if PUSHes to github regularly failed or github filtered out source code comments to "save disk space" or something. But if it works great, something new is going to be a hard sell. Now if you did something unusual once you got the data that might sell. Here's a nice web front end that uses GIT and/or github and/or dropbox and/or google drive and/or gmail as a backend.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoInteresting. I've been throwing around the idea of roughly the same thing for myself. I was keeping a TiddlyWiki, but that's stopped working. Developer solution ... write my own! In general, developers are a terrible market because they think they can do whatever you did better / cheaper / faster, and they won't shut up about it.
- zrail 13y agoI would say that developer tools are a terrible market for that reason. Information products (screencasts, books, etc) can be extremely successful in the same market. Examples abound, including patio11's marketing training[1], egghead.io[2] for AngularJS training, Peepcode[3], Railscasts[4], and various other ebooks [5][6][7]. Most developers that I know have two common traits that make info products an easier sell. First, they're innately curious about their field. Second, they have access to a company credit card that will happily pay for training materials. [1]: https://training.kalzumeus.com https://training.kalzumeus.com [2]: http://egghead.io http://egghead.io [3]: https://peepcode.com https://peepcode.com [4]: http://railscasts.com/pro http://railscasts.com/pro [5]: http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority [6]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments [7]: http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby-threads http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby-threads
- rajbala 13y ago"The next big thing will start out looking like a toy" -- Chris Dixon http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...
- cookiecaper 13y agoAny service that is dependent on network effects needs a plan to cultivate activity before it launches. It's crucial to offer engagement to the Real People that are early adopters on your product, and the reality is that if you go hands-off and attempt to wait for the audience to self-materialize, you'll get a lot of people who drop by, make one post, and check for interaction a couple of times, and then never come back. It's a bad deal for everyone. Get together a group of people -- pay them if you have to -- who are committed to using your product before you do a real public launch, and then new users will immediately be engaged and it will grow from there. Launching without this spells disaster. If you are launching SaaS that doesn't depend on other parties' involvement, you should still gauge interest, but it's OK to start small.
- ggjain 13y agoRightly said, SaaS easy to build hard to sell. Products hard to build are easy to sell, as it has value and willing high value customers. But in all, a product or business without a clear customers acquisition strategy is a miracle.
- johnrob 13y agoAre you still going to use your product after the SaaS version is shut down?
- zrail 13y agoNo, I switched to greener pastures[1] a long time ago. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- njr123 13y agoJust as an aside, if you have a project that you're not sure is going to take off, there is no reason to shell out $29/month for it. Shared hosting will do the job for $5 - $10 a month. No its not super reliable, but if you have no users, who cares? And if you do get popular, my experience has been that they can handle bursts of traffic surprisingly well, until you can move to proper hosting.