One-man SaaS, how do you attract customers?

Scrolling through here I get the sense that these answers are from people who’ve never actually done 0-1.

The truth is when you’re as tiny as you are you almost certainly won’t have any scalable channels. What you need to do is hand to hand combat to secure each customer. Focus on getting 1 paying customer first by any means necessary. Call them, email them, just get in touch and see if this solves a problem enough for them to pay for it.

What’s going to happen is the face to face of actually finding someone to use your product is going to teach you a ton about: the problem and how painful it is, how well your solution solves it, who your customer is, how much you can charge, and how to get to them.

After you’ve gotten 1 paid customer (by any means necessary), now try to get a second one (by any means necessary). Keep doing this.

After the first few you’ll start to notice a pattern in the ways you capture customers: the way you reach out, the medium you reached out with, the types of customers and triggers in their life that made them receptive, the messaging that convinced them to buy, etc

You’ll stumble upon the ways to scale your customer acquisition.

Focus on getting that first customer doing whatever it takes. Get a customer to pay you TODAY. Then repeat

Forget ads, SEO, and social media. Everyone is so used to low-value content and spam that they won't pay attention. And even if your intent to sell your SaaS is legit, it is still spam when you are sending it into web sites that aren't interested.

Instead, think about who your audience really is - where else do they read, listen, and talk? In my experience, the best marketing happens when you can answer that question.

My favorite anecdote is that one of the successful SaaS companies I worked at grew in part due to radio ads on NPR. That worked because our market was education, and people who are professional educators tended to listen to NPR.

It can be that simple - if you reject online ads and presence as a marketing tool, what else is left? That is probably where to invest marketing dollars and energy. Be different, not part of the online noise.

Check out the book Traction, to get a bunch of free marketing channels and a strategy. My favorite is to go after the bloggers that are read by your target customer community.

https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

Is it b2c or b2b? imo/experience, b2b SaaS are the only ones that ever succeed. If not subscriptions, how do you generate revenue? Really it's either build an audience or cold calling. Note: I've never succeeded with any of my startups (for a bunch of reasons) so take with a grain of salt.

Be where your customers are. That sounds easy, but knowing who your actual customers are is hard. Figure that out and then target that group as precise as possible and as hard as possible.

The threads here appear to parrot the old decade “find the people before solving the problems” which sadly is way out of date.

Secondly, people are now so used to online ads that the ads became a background noise to them and most ads are somehow considered “scam”.

Since you built something, it means that it solves a real problem. Now you need to build a community around it or find the community who solve similar problems.

Now about the audience, is your product for technical people(think HN/Lobsters), then do a SHOW HN/Lobsters and offer limited free seats if it does not cost too much. Meanwhile lookout on Twitter(X), Mastodon and other tech channels to promote it covertly.

If your audience is lay person, ads on radio, poster ads, small time influencer(social media) promotion will bring some interest.

If your audience is more specialized, channels like Linkedin has a group of people who will be receptive to your promotions.

Here, my examples are just handpicked.

Aside, indie hacker group is… not a good place if you do not have a large community of followers and I’ve seen most of their products(other than games) are mostly junk that their followers will buy not as a value but as a support for the person they follow and will often refer others due to implicit referral bonuses. Of course there are genuine good products from indie hackers but most of their stuff are life style stuff that do not work unless you have a massive following base and can churn out new stuff every 6 month - 2 year because due to the nature of the products they build, there are no recurring business.

"how do you attract customers?"

You're in a tight spot because you're asking this question after the product was built.

#Who is my customer, where can they be found, how do I reach them, what do they buy now, who do they buy from already, how much does it cost to get in front of them, what modalities do they respond to, how do competitors price, position, and reach them? What is the actual problem, what are the core benefits they seek, what solutions exist today and what do they lack or ignore?

These are questions that need to be answered prior to building anything.

You will have an incredibly difficult time selling what you have now if this research was not performed beforehand. Do this the research and then decide if you can save it. Otherwise, you've learned a valuable lesson and should start anew. Many great projects were built upon the bones of past mistakes.

If you’re alone you basically have only 2 options:

1. Be on a fresh wild and growing market where everybody grows (like ai as overhyped as it is).

2. Be soo good at something, at least in a single critical feature, that every customer you have feels a relief and becomes your word of mouth channel. It’s not always hard, since most b2c products suck. But its not that easy too, because solo founders tend to have b2c mentality where they see for instance a better UX a killer feature. That is often not the case for b2b.

Anything else means basically competing with bigger players for customers. Guess who has more money to win the game?

Jason Cohen built a one SAAS. his blog [1] is a must read and pretty much a free MBA in the business of software.

a lot of manual work is involved which means emailing and reaching out to customers directly

[1]: asmartbear.com

I ran ads on Google and Facebook for years, $1000/month was my budget most of the time. I reached a peak of around $45K/month in subscription revenue from this for my app Improvely.

If you say you solve a real problem, you know it is real because you know people who have that problem right?

Go talk to them to see if your solution actually solves their problem.

The main problem is that as software engineers we start with product first and figure out distribution later once we built it. In order to build successful products you need to have an insight into the distribution to win customers, so it makes sense to figure out customer acquisition plan in advance.

Who is your target customer?

It’s difficult to give non-generic advice on this question without having some context.

You built a product first and then are searching for the market for it? That's tough. If you do it in reverse, find the market first and then build a product for them, it's 100x easier. Trust me.

Hi OP, I saw your project lists. I think you are on the right track. You are not spending too much time in dev and are experimenting in multiple ideas. You got one notch under your belt. You also seem to be quite an accomplished writer. Thats two.

The next step is to talk to prospects. May be talking to customers was part of your role in your current or previous work? If not, then there are some learnings to do. If you cannot contact your prospects before you build the product, you cannot sell to them after you build. If I were you I would start by reading Mom Test. It will change how you look at things. But it is not a cure-all. There will be lots of learning to do even about how to contact prospects, how to talk to them to get actionable insights and not genial confirmation etc. (I am currently here). If you already have a product, it is still ok to do that. You can ask ppl in your target group for testing your product etc. That is also a great learning experience and can lead to rapid development of your product. You will truly believe you have thought through a lot of UX flows and would have done a great job and still uncover a lot of blindspots.

It also helps to learn to market and sell. This will shape how you build your product and how you talk about it. Are you currently working? Does your current company or your previous ones have sales and marketing roles? Do take them out to lunch, talk to them about their product goals, their day to day activities etc. These are some stuff you will be doing when your product is ready to market.

If these make sense to you and need someone to chat with, ping me. Would be happy to compare notes.