My new SaaS journey to $10k/month

[GuestA4319]

Hey guys,

In the last few months I've been working on a new SaaS project which I finished yesterday(programming side). I decided to document my journey here so I can keep the motivation going and get support from others.

I'm not a beginner on SaaS businesses but not advanced either, so I appreciate any business advice from people with experience in this field.


Project: External Live Chat Page(link)
Field: Customer communication, support, feedback
Description:
An external live chat page which allows you to communicate effectively and send surveys, polls and other forms to your customers during the conversation.

It's like Landing Page + Live Chat + Google forms.

Pricing: free on closed beta stage

Some use cases:
For customer support: add the chat page link to your contact page or replace the entire old static page completely. Include chat page link into your emails, twitter, linkedin etc.

For customer feedback and research: You can build forms and send them during the conversation with your client. After they submit you can discuss about their choices.

For customer feedback(email link): You can get a link to your chat page that will enable a form by default. That way, when the users click on the link you included in the email(or anywhere) the form will appear. They can submit the form without needing to chat with you first, and if you are online, you can respond to their submission live.

For lead generation: If you are using outbound emails to generate leads, this is gold. Instead of asking people to call you, better do a live chat first, it's much more likely to agree for a live chat than have a call with a stranger. From there you can escalate to a phone call or close the lead right there. Use the form feature to get the data from the prospect, live.

(Agencies) For client communication: Give the chat page link to your clients. You can set a default form to show when the clients go to the chat page so they can easily submit new requests even if you are offline. If you are online, you can see the requests and chat about them.

Others: hiring, SaaS on boarding and off boarding, etc

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I haven't launched it yet officially, but I opened 10 spots for everyone who wants to try the tool, fastlaners have special priority. So if you want to sign up for free, here it is

Execution so far: Programming done for beta stage, Marketing/Sales none

Next actions: The idea is pretty much validated, but I still need to know who are the best customers. I assume that small businesses with at least 2 people on customer support, however I don't know which markets will use it the most.

My next action is to talk to beta users and see how it fits to their needs. In a few weeks I should get an idea on where to focus my marketing.

If you have any suggestions please let me know.

And lastly, this is my chat page...so you can ask me any question and I'll try to respond live if I'm online:
Chat with us

 

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[GuestA4319]

I've talked with a few users about which route should I choose.

A guy said to zoom-in and sell it as a live feedback tool with chat functionality to avoid the live chat market which is too crowded.

Another user started to include his chat page link inside Reply app, for B2B lead generation(instead of saying "can we have a call" he says "can we have quick chat"). I'm curious how it works for him.

What do you think? What customer segment should i go for...or let it general like it's now?

 

[James Fake]

Kudos on the action.. I like the designs, the transparency over the backgrounds.

My advice would be to not try to figure out market fit quite yet... but just find users. Continue to build that; and observing how they are using it.

Then, once you feel like it's good enough, charge for it. As is, without a specific direction, and just general use. Then observe how the paid users are using it, then dial things in from there.

People can say what and how they use it; but until that dollar comes out of their pocket, it doesn't mean much. There is a tremendous difference between "users" & "customers".

 

[GuestA4319]

Thanks James, I thought nobody is reading this

After talking with more users I'm going to focus on the leads and client communication, more on the first, as a tool to close more leads giving the prospects a more comfortable way to reach you than phone calls and faster than email. It also has the forms feature so it helps you grab addresses, new orders, project details, feedback during conversation with the lead or client.

I want to see if I can position it on the same market as sales and prospecting automation tools. It's a good market with a lot of money and people won't compare me with 1000s other live-chat widget when my SaaS is an outbound communication tool, like email.

It should be featured on betalist today, curious how it goes.

 

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[BrentA]

Great job on the development. Have you tried to put it on Product Hunt? This can be a great place for people to check it out, test, and give you great feed back.

 

[lopatron]

This looks great, congrats on getting the first wave of development complete. Are you able to connect from an IM client? If so, do you use any specific XMPP server or were you able to get by with custom message passing code? Would you have the same scaling challenges as the on-page chat tools (Olark, Zopim, ...)? I considered starting something similar a few months ago so it's exciting to see someone actually doing it.

As for feedback, I think the only thing that stuck out to me was that when you start a chat, you only get a small text field for the initial chat. When I'm talking with support I generally like to give a detailed explanation of what I'm experiencing so that there aren't any miscommunications. Or I copy/paste a block of text. So a self expanding textarea would be more convenient in those cases. Out of curiosity, was making it a small textfield an intentional UX constraint? To encourage people to treat it more like chat instead of email?

 

[GuestA4319]

Thanks for checking it out and feedback guys.

@BrentA Yes, I would like to get featured on PH, but later. I had a website featured there with >100 votes and I got a lot of traffic from it.

@lopatron Currently it doesn't connect with IM clients, I don't know if this will work out. I've seen in-site tools trying to connect with Skype for example, but they gave up later.

The reason for one line text input is the responsive design and I'm pretty sure it makes user indirectly to be more engaged(you get a sense that's a real-time thing). Anyway, it's worth testing.

The more I work on this project the more I realize how much work really needs. I think it will take a while until I start making profits with it. I was used to launch and get profitable right away in the market I know the best, this project is totally different.

 

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[GuestA4319]

Talked with a lot of people yesterday.

Got some good feedback. People understand what outbound live chat is, but it's a totally new approach and many are reluctant to try it like any new thing. We are so used with the old way, email and phone calls that we think they are the best.

An example:
Most of us do emails to ultimately sell something and want our prospects, customers, users etc to be engaged, to ask us questions and get excited by our answers. Email doesn't work like that. Email is not to keep people engaged, it's a static way of communicating which means the engagement is low from the start. Even though they get excited, until you respond the excitement and interest fades away by a lot.

It's like you are going to sell something to a stranger, he asks you questions and you shut up for 2 hours. This is how cold email for lead generation works right now.

Of course you can use phone, but good luck having people call you from emails. There is a need for something in between. Something that it's like email, so people can contact you from anywhere, but with much higher level of engagement. People should have a way to switch to a live conversation instantly directly from emails, and that's what my tool does.

I'm not sure how to explain this simply to people. I know the benefits, but seems too long to explain....