Introducing WombatDashboard, my latest SaaS MVP

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#1

Hi all,

I’d like to introduce WombatDashboard.com to the community. It’s an IoT-oriented condition monitoring platform. Provides custom dashboards, timeseries database, and triggers for any networked transducers that speak MQTT.

I’m a EE by training, and wanted to make condition monitoring using cheap commodity hardware easier for engineers and other technically-competent people. There are several IoT sensor backends on the market, but they tend to be less full-featured and cater for hobbyists, or catering for large deployments with > 5-figure budgets.

I intend to market initially by cold email to technical consultants to see if the MVP gets any traction. I’ll also be creating tutorial content for technical enthusiast forums.

This is my 2nd SaaS and 3rd “business”. (Both still running, though addressing a dying industry so I need to expand outside).

Critique and questions welcome.
Regards,
Andrew

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#2

I can’t speak to the business idea/concept, but a couple things jumped out at me visiting your site

  1. There is a lot of blank/open space on your home page. I really need to scroll for a while to see any other content (especially with a blurred image). Might be good to some more info higher up on the page. Some images/video showing more concisely what the product does.

  2. $3/month - Is this something you could offer without cost? I know you are just trying to make it easy, but the mental hurdle for trying something out for any price over 0 is huge. In other words, might was well charge 10,15,20…because for most it is either free or not free.

-Scott

#3

Thanks for the comments. Sorry about the tardy reply, didn’t get notification for some reason.

  1. Noted
  2. There are a few (more limited) services that offer free MQTT brokers and some graphing. I think I’d rather offer coupons for trials like VPS providers do.
#4

Is that legal? Doesn’t it fall into unsolicited commercial email (spam) territory?

#5

Is that legal? Doesn’t it fall into unsolicited commercial email (spam) territory?

No. You’ll find various treatises on this subject online. I think this is one of the better ones.

#6

I read the link you posted above (https://www.leadfuze.com/what-is-cold-email-and-is-it-spam/) @Incertitude, and If wishes were fishes we’d all swim in riches. Unsolicited commercial email is spam, period, full stop.

Instead of interrupting people in the hopes they’ll become customers why not offer content that demonstrates your expertise in area? That’s the heart of “Inbound Marketing” and it works.

Cheers,
Bob

#7

Bob, regardless of how you feel about unsolicited commercial email (and respecting your opinion), the reality is that any outreach via any medium is an interruption by definition. You could wait for customers to come to you, but that’s not how sales works, especially in B2B. To illustrate this point, imagine a company’s sales department announcing “We’re no longer making calls or sending emails. We’ll just wait for prospects to call us.” They would, of course, be fired on the spot.

I think you’re lumping all unsolicited contact in the “unwanted” pile (and maybe this reflects your personal preference), when the reality is not absolute. Certainly when I was working for big companies, in charge of their transformation & innovation programs, I would be called or emailed by a salesperson once every 2 weeks. This was beneficial, because it allowed me to keep abreast of the available solutions and technologies, the industry competitive dynamics, and occasionally we used one of the products.

The trick is to avoid making an interruption unpleasant and unwanted, and importantly to realize that neither party to the communication wishes the interruption to be undesired.

You’ll also note that I do offer content in the form of tutorials. Great for SEO.

#8

You see, that’s the core point where we disagree. I believe in HubSpot, and the research they’ve done over the years that that’s exactly how sales now works, regardless of what you are selling. Now, after a person or company has raised their hand, asking for more info, by all means have at it. But the spam cold call is increasingly the kiss of death to a potential business relationship.

#9

Well, rather than presuming that an inbound-only strategy would beat inbound+outbound by theoretical logic, I’ll let the data speak for itself when I’ve had sufficient time to be sure of its statistical significance.