Starting a SaaS? Do you want exposure?

Introductions
#1

Hey Guys,

Background: My name is John Kim, I’ve worked on various different SaaS since 2009 and have gone through hell and back. Today, I’m very passionate about helping people like me, who are boostrapping their SaaS businesses and are determined to make it their full time thing or a profitable recurring income that improve the quality of your life and loved ones.

I want to start this thread to get some ideas about what you guys are working on, and what sort of content you find valuable. I’m going to be starting a blog & podcast. I want to produce content with actionable insights that will make direct impact on your SaaS project.

I’m also looking to partner up with folks to work together in creating content. I’d love to provide a platform for your SaaS through our blog & podcast which we will begin marketing in beginning of December or early Q1.

shameless plug: I started Saasful . com in Q4 this year with 3 other developers & designers. We are a Canadian company helping bootstrapper/entrepreneurs quickly get their core apps to the market and focus on the fun stuff (your core product) by taking care of the “boring stuff” by fully managing your SaaS website from integrating Stripe, user & billing handling, periodic design & content changes, heck, even research questions related to your SaaS. Send us an email and we’ll get it done in 48 hours. /shameless plug

Thank you and looking forward to being part of this awesome community of intelligent folks!

Actionable Item: Post in this thread what you are working on and what sort of content you will find highly valuable. If you want your SaaS featured please send me a PM so we can pick what topic to segway to your SaaS in our blog or podcast.

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#2

Hi John,

Welcome to the forum. I run Find70 a search platform that helps people find highly targeted leads: http://www.find70.com/?t=boots

To answer your question, most people have already read a great deal about general start up concepts such as: do things that don’t scale, finding your ideal user, thinking about your product from the perspective of the customer, solution oriented, talk to your customers, etc. So, my recommendation is that you go deeper and talk about specific examples you can do to accomplish these goals. Most of the people here are on their journey to find Product market fit.

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#3

Hello John, I created PropertyWebBuilder - an online website builder for the real estate sector.

Content that would be useful for me would be something about how to market a SaaS product and find collaborators to work with. I have developed the product on my own but ideally I would like to work with other people to reach a wider market. I am also open to a WhiteLabel version where I rebrand it for someone else to take to a new market.

The other thing I’d be interested in knowing more about are the scenarios where open sourcing would be a good option. The market for building websites for real estate agents is quite competitive and I suspect providing an open source solution could attract some interest but I’m not quite sure how to validate that.

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#4

Hi Ed (I’m assuming this from your username),

Is your end goal to spread brand awareness or land customers?

I’m not sure if open sourcing is a good marketing channel for you unless you plan on spending resources on it. Believe it or not, open source software doesn’t mean it’s free to create although you certainly can. This is especially true if you were open sourcing it to gain exposure. There’s a lot of open source projects on github each vying for the end user’s attention so the competition doesn’t go away, in fact open sourcing will take a lot of marketing effort in itself.

A scenario where open sourcing will be great is if you have a developer-centric product that benefits by being open source such as databases, CRM etc.

Thanks for sharing your idea, I’ll keep that marketing topic in mind when I write a blog post. Please do let me know how you are doing, the landing page looks fantastic (I found your thread on HN).

#5

Hi Find_70,

I’m curious to know how find70 works. How are you gathering the leads through twitter? Personally, the last thing I’d want is to be hassled with marketers targeting me unless I specifically tweet for help on a specific problem that I’m being sold on the solution. How are you solving that problem or am I not understanding your product correctly?

Thanks for that suggestion, I think you’ve address my concern very well. I knew that people already knew the run of the mill advices so it is important to find a unique content that won’t waste people’s time.

As for specific examples, I’d love to feature specific SaaS owners in podcast to do exactly that: dive in to a deeper discussion about the how (since everybody already knows the what).

#6

Hi John,

My end goal is to land customers and spreading brand awareness is one way to do this.

I have not yet found a decent open source project ( other than WordPress plugins ) for the real estate sector and there is certainly a need for it. Initially I expect and hope to attract developers who will use it as a tool to complete project for their clients. In the longer term I expect it to be easy enough to use that non-technical people can still deploy it easily.

I will post an update on how it goes in a few weeks. In case anyone is interested in the conversation on hacker news ( Well done on finding it :wink: ), this is the link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884532

#8

I did go ahead and open source it in the end. You can find it here:

It needs polishing and there are a few features that I would like to add but it already provides a much better experience than most WordPress plugins. It can be deployed in a few minutes to heroku with just the click of a button.

#9

Hi John,

Whatever happened to you? I never heard back from you :frowning:

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#10

Guess he might not get the notification emails from your comment. I’d be interested to speak to him also.

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