My previous SaaS project failed.
Reasons ->
1> I got entrapped into best tech stack v/s just building something and pushing it out. Wasted a lot of time on setting up the perfect tech stack which killed the time I could give and killed motivation as building software doesn't pay until you push it out to customers.
2> My freelancing projects which pay very well always took the higher priority and pushing work on the SaaS project further and further meant I did not do the work needed.
3> Partners. Having partners is great if everyone does the work, but over time I ended up becoming the developer to my partners as clients. They were not developers and I couldn't ship out the MVP and they didn't contribute more than they needed to.
I mentioned the reasons above not to rant but to remind myself not to repeat the mistakes I made.
Many years ago, I also had built another software product which I was selling licenses for. But the market was tiny and it was very niche and the number of sales and returns did not justify the amount of man hours I was putting into it. So I eventually nuked it.
So here comes attempt #3.
I have the basic idea for a new SaaS project in mind. Right now this is just an idea. Here the next steps.
1> Research competitors for market validation. I saw one big company but haven't done enough research on what the competitors offer and how many are there.
2> If research convinces me that the idea is scalable, then launch a landing page for building an email list.
This time I am not going to spend days and weeks building something or worrying about tech stack. I will simply write the best product offer I can on a landing page and generate traffic to it. I need to see how many people would give me their email list for my "Coming soon, huge discount for early adopters, join the waitlist" landing page.
3> Need to figure out a way to direct targeted traffic to the landing page. I think adwords, but because I have never run an adwords campaign of any significance (just some random tests), I feel I will be throwing out money. An alternative is to perhaps build a free product first. My product idea is a plugin for a specific use case in a larger software ecosystem. I could release a free version but then I will be again entrapped into building software before knowing if there's a market for it. So this is a chicken - egg kind of situation. I need traffic on the landing page to validate my software idea, but I need to build software to generate traffic for the landing page!
4> An alternative is to perhaps do an Adwords course to better learn to run targeted ad campaigns. I don't have the budget to hire someone for this. I would rather spend all the money I can on the ads themselves. Any suggestions if there is a high roi Adwords course out there?
The quickest path to launch seems to me to build the landing page with the offer and find ways to direct targeted traffic to it. If I can get a good number of email signups I would be motivated to quickly build the software knowing customers are waiting to pay!
Will keep this thread as a hopefully daily log.
Reasons ->
1> I got entrapped into best tech stack v/s just building something and pushing it out. Wasted a lot of time on setting up the perfect tech stack which killed the time I could give and killed motivation as building software doesn't pay until you push it out to customers.
2> My freelancing projects which pay very well always took the higher priority and pushing work on the SaaS project further and further meant I did not do the work needed.
3> Partners. Having partners is great if everyone does the work, but over time I ended up becoming the developer to my partners as clients. They were not developers and I couldn't ship out the MVP and they didn't contribute more than they needed to.
I mentioned the reasons above not to rant but to remind myself not to repeat the mistakes I made.
Many years ago, I also had built another software product which I was selling licenses for. But the market was tiny and it was very niche and the number of sales and returns did not justify the amount of man hours I was putting into it. So I eventually nuked it.
So here comes attempt #3.
I have the basic idea for a new SaaS project in mind. Right now this is just an idea. Here the next steps.
1> Research competitors for market validation. I saw one big company but haven't done enough research on what the competitors offer and how many are there.
2> If research convinces me that the idea is scalable, then launch a landing page for building an email list.
This time I am not going to spend days and weeks building something or worrying about tech stack. I will simply write the best product offer I can on a landing page and generate traffic to it. I need to see how many people would give me their email list for my "Coming soon, huge discount for early adopters, join the waitlist" landing page.
3> Need to figure out a way to direct targeted traffic to the landing page. I think adwords, but because I have never run an adwords campaign of any significance (just some random tests), I feel I will be throwing out money. An alternative is to perhaps build a free product first. My product idea is a plugin for a specific use case in a larger software ecosystem. I could release a free version but then I will be again entrapped into building software before knowing if there's a market for it. So this is a chicken - egg kind of situation. I need traffic on the landing page to validate my software idea, but I need to build software to generate traffic for the landing page!
4> An alternative is to perhaps do an Adwords course to better learn to run targeted ad campaigns. I don't have the budget to hire someone for this. I would rather spend all the money I can on the ads themselves. Any suggestions if there is a high roi Adwords course out there?
The quickest path to launch seems to me to build the landing page with the offer and find ways to direct targeted traffic to it. If I can get a good number of email signups I would be motivated to quickly build the software knowing customers are waiting to pay!
Will keep this thread as a hopefully daily log.
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