Please provide feedback on my SaaS idea

Show Bootstrapped
#1

I’m an independent developer. Like most of us, I’ve produced dozens of bootstrapped products/solutions and games before - mostly not successful. As a startup founder, I can appreciate the difficulty of reaching just the right leads: that’s why I created Find70.

Finding just the right prospects and leads is key to success. Find70 is an advanced twitter profile search platform,
that allows you to find highly targeted leads, prospects and email addresses. You can create your own weighted formula using our filters for: twitter bio/description, number of followers, location, last tweet, language, etc. Find70 makes it easy to search for “founders”, “ceo”, “sales”, “directors” or any job title, interest or industry. You can combine the search filters in many ways to create a powerful refined search. I’ve created several blog entries outlining how to use it, links in the intro message.

Try it out: find70.com

Finding prospects and leads should be a problem that all of you can relate to - although it definitely works better in some industries than others… Give it a shot and let me know what you think. Does my product solve your problem? If so, keep using it. If not, please let me know why - you can be brutally honest with me - that would help the most.

I’m still trying to find product / market fit. And, I’m trying to find the type of customers that would most benefit.

#2

“Authorize Find70 to use your account” – errr… no, sorry.

#3

Have you considered that building the product first and secondly “trying to find the type of customers that would most benefit” is, at a minimum, backwards? Respectfully, I would consider moving onto another idea/project if I were you. This is a product that needed to be purpose built to solve a specific problem for a specific type of customer, and I’m of the opinion that you can’t really do that retroactively.

#4

bears, you have good point and it’s definitely something I’ve thought about a lot.

lead generation is a fairly large problem domain that we all know a lot of businesses are facing. The problem is, I don’t know which ones would benefit most from my solution. I guess I need to do more research on the topic of lead generation and perhaps customize my solution to a specific problem and maybe even start over, if need be.

#5

Don’t worry about who would benefit from your solution. It isn’t a solution at all insofar as you don’t know what the problem is or who has the problem. Your goal should be finding a problem, and preferably a group of people who all have that problem, and then solving it.

Some guidance:
What does the universe of lead gen products look like? Map it out and look for gaps. Are there technical gaps, where the existing products are failing to serve a desired function? Are there market gaps, where groups of people are not using lead gen product when they should? If there are gaps, why do they exist? I would also encourage you to think philosophically about what exactly a lead is, how we define what a good lead is, and how that definition changes depending on who needs the lead.

You can almost always abstract away from something very specific, but you can rarely solve a specific task with an abstract thing.

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#6

Completely valid point, but moot now.
So he might as well see if anyone likes it.

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#7

It would help enormously to show an example of the results of some search.

Not to be snarky here, but how about if you looked for leads to market Find70 to?
And, BTW, part of the challenge might be “how do I define the criteria for my ideal prospect”.

And that’s hard to do for Find70 then perhaps you could try it for something more concrete.

Provide high touch service
I’m finding it very helpful to do 1:1 tours of our software. Helps to sell it but also gives me a LOT of feedback.
Offer the first 3 people that sign up for the free trial to walk them through it if they’ll let you use their info (or perhaps a variation on it so it’s “obscured”) in the above.\

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#8

Thanks for all the great advice guys. Clay_nichols, how can I offer the free tour? How do you reach them with this offer? Keep in mind, the vast majority of visitors aren’t going to hand over their email address. I could popup a sidebar, offering the tour, hoping that someone would click on it, but I don’t think the conversion will be really high. Forum posts, offering a free tour would be considered spam by many, unless it’s in response to a question about leads.

#9

Sorry for not having any feedback about your idea, but the web font you are using looks really bad on Chrome Windows.

#10

Here are some thoughts to help you better position what you’re looking to do.

  1. You need to be able to answer this question: What is the one thing that your product does 10x better than native Twitter search?

  2. Don’t try to find “who might want this”. Instead, find the people that are already using Twitter for prospecting. Reach out to them. Tell them how your product helps them do ____ 10x better than using native Twitter search for prospecting. Ask them to use your product free of charge in exchange for feedback.

  3. Ask them: Was this a drastic improvement over using native Twitter search for prospecting? How? Shut up and listen. Write it down. Ask them if you can use them as a testimonial.

  4. Market to other Twitter prospectors using the messages you’ve formulated from #1 and #3.

If you can’t answer #1, go back to the drawing board. And yes, 10x better.

If you can’t find Twitter prospectors or get them to use your product free of charge, go back to the drawing board - you need to be able to reach a market. This seems like the obvious market. If you can’t reach them, you’re in trouble.

If you can’t get positive feedback from your beta users, ask them for more feedback - what features would they want to see? You can “pivot” using their feedback to create a tool that Twitter prospectors would love to use.

Ideas for reaching people:

  1. Use your own product to find people on Twitter who would fit the bill.

  2. Content marketing and social media sharing. Blog about how to prospect on Twitter. Blog about how to do social media sales.

  3. Twitter Ads.

Hope this helps.

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#11

Couple of ideas:

  1. If you offer a free tour signup with email they MIGHT be willing ot provide their email. If they are not it’s somewhat of a red flag that the problem isn’t significant for them.

2. Free Tours NOW
How about setting aside some time you’re willing to be available on the spur of the moment. Maybe time when you are just watching TV /Reading. Turn “on” the offer on the website: Free Tours TODAY.
BTW, I am planning to do this myself. I offered free tours by appointment. And got some folks to do it. I was doing market research on new features BUT they often converted to Sales…BUT people often forgot about them.
By offering “tours today” you avoid the whole appointment problem AND you create SCARCITY and Timeliness.

Often marketing is the process of removing obstacles (that sometimes we have created).