How I launched my first saas and lessons learned

Editing Team -

After 4 or 5 years of working for a company I was laid off last October. So, I thought this is a good time to get back into building my own products as I had good savings and could afford to take a year off. If nothing else, you learn a ton building your own projects and it keeps you up to date with current technologies.

I didn't know what to build so I just decided to play with AI, learn what it could do and see if there is opportunity. It actually blew my mind and I felt (still feel) it unlocks a whole new world of possibilities.

While testing its capabilities an idea came up and I started working on it. Now, this wasn't my first project, so I knew how important and hard market validation and promotion is. However, I then had this "Nah, this time it's different, this idea is really cool and will work for sure" rationalization not to do marketing.

WRONG!

I had a minimum working version in February, which I showed to friends and family. Their reaction was this seems cool but not for them. Again, I rationalized that they're not my target audiences. So, instead of launching this version, I doubled down on developing more features. The constant lie I was telling myself: "oh, I need to finish this feature and people will love my product"

AGAIN WRONG! This is so obvious in hindsight

I launched my product a few weeks ago. It had all the features I wanted. I was sure it will be success. You can probably guess where this is going. I had traffic in thousands, sign ups in hundreds, which wasn't bad. However, less than a handful converted to paying customers. And of those few, half cancelled their subscription.

So, I made a whole lot of bad decisions. But I do not regret them as I learned a ton of stuff too and just wanted to share them with you. Most are repeated here (and everywhere) on a weekly basis.

Lessons learned:

  • Start marketing on day zero. We've all heard this advice, probably many times.
  • If you don't have an audience, you will probably have to pay for an audience.
  • ProductHunt - not sure. I don't have an audience so my launch there wasn't successful. However, it may work if you have an audience.
  • Newsletters work. Find relevant newsletters and reach out to them. It may cost money but it works.
  • Your product will break at first contact. I consider myself a pretty good developer. However, no developer can predict how users will use your product. Stuff will break. Have good processes in place to catch those bugs and fix them. Have good processes to communicate this with your users. Also, why you should launch early.
  • Focus. There is a famous quote by Steve Jobs on focus: focus is about saying no. I knew it was true. But it's so easy to fall into trap of "developing one more feature". Focus on one thing. Make it work. Battle test it.
  • It's a journey/adventure. Creating and launching products is a journey where you are blindfolded. You don't really know where to begin, where to go, you will most likely stumble a lot. Unless, you are super experienced. Have fun, don't worry too much. Observe what's working, fix or remove what's not, learn and adapt.

What's next for me? After talking to a few users, I still believe there is an opportunity for my product. I will be stripping all the features and focusing only on one thing. And marketing of course.