My experience releasing failed SaaS products

That was a painful read, sorry.<p>My advice for the author is to take a moment and look at the things they pay actual money for. Goods, services, Etc. And how they discriminate between vendors of those goods. (Why buy brand X when brand Y is cheaper, when you need a widget how do you find where to get one? How do you decide which one to get? Things like that.)<p>It is a big &quot;ask&quot; to ask people for money in exchange for access to or to use your app. When is the last time you bought an app for your phone? What put you over the edge into buying something? What things about that purchase made you feel better about buying it, and more importantly what things made you feel worse about buying it?<p>In none of the anecdotes presented, is there a discussion about how you played the role of being a customer for your own product. How did you feel about the &quot;value&quot; of the product given the price asked? How did the installation process go?<p>It can be hard to step out of your own context sometimes and that is where it can be helpful for a trusted friend, who will give you honest advice, can be the stand in for the customer and tell you the answers to these questions.<p>Lastly, in all three anecdotes the author is laser focused on money, money, money. All of their metrics around success or failure are based on money. The problem here is that money is the first derivative of customer satisfaction not the metric. Focus on delighting customers and they will happily hand over money.

Spamming forums, and requiring people to surrender PII in exchange for a trial product, is anti-marketing.<p>Delivering a product that crashes on install, is anti-marketing.<p>Writing a blog-post that is hard to read due to lack of critical editing and poor grammar and punctuation is anti-marketing.<p>There&#x27;s probably a reason this guy hasn&#x27;t given any information about what his failed products were supposed to do: it didn&#x27;t matter to him. &quot;Oh, I&#x27;m not top of the hit-parade after 3 months? Scrap that one, cry a bit, then start again with a new product&quot;.<p>The crappy, spammy marketing will have annoyed a minority of vocal people - people who write bad reviews. Withdrawing a product suddenly, after a few months, while that product still has users, is not likely to win friends. And if you want a &quot;passive business&quot;, you&#x27;d better have a USP and some IP that is hard to replicate, otherwise some other techie is going to come along and eat your breakfast.

Maybe this isn&#x27;t helpful advice, but don&#x27;t take product failures so personally. They are experiments and learning exercises, and most companies fail by default. Of course it depends greatly on your life situation, i.e. do you have a job that can support you while working on stuff as a side-project? Or are you attempting to launch something as your full-time day job with limited savings or income? (10x more stressful)<p>People don&#x27;t have personal investment or insight into your particular project. Most people assume there is a huge company behind every product they use, and wont hesitate to bash it on social media not realizing it may be a solo founder or tiny team with limited resources. Extreme reactions also get faster responses from big companies, so people have been trained to viscerally bash apps when reviewing them rather than posting more measured empathetic feedback. I think you will find that chatting with users 1:1 yields much higher quality feedback than reading reviews.<p>3-4 months also strikes me as a very short time to build, launch, monetize, and then declare a project a failure. In my experience, successful companies take years to build, or at least 5-6 months to start iterating on the initial feedback and building a reasonable userbase.<p>Just my 2c.

I wrote about my experience creating a SaaS product in 2018:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@david_39141&#x2F;after-15-years-im-finally-ready-to-launch-our-saas-product-b9967561ebd8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@david_39141&#x2F;after-15-years-im-finally-re...</a><p>Like the OP, the first version of my service launched to crickets (though I had spent almost two full years building that beta version). The 3,500 people who had signed up for e-mail updates took a quick look, and then left, never to return, when they realized that the service was very bare-bones.<p>The solution in my case was actually to add features, because that first version wasn&#x27;t very useful. I spent another three years adding features before launching paid plans, two years ago. I made sure to have thousands of conversations with users to make sure that I was on the right track.<p>Today, I derive my income fully from this service (Calcapp, an app builder for people needing formula support mostly on par with Excel). I haven&#x27;t gotten rich, and I would have made more money as a consultant, but the income is passive, I still enjoy working on the product and interacting with customers, and I&#x27;m confident that our best days lie ahead of us, with a major update on the cusp of being released (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25389963" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25389963</a>).<p>Launching a SaaS business is the hardest thing I have ever done, but getting people to derive real value from something I have built is immensely satisfying. I wouldn&#x27;t trade it for anything.

I think one of the important lessons that the author is yet to learn is that people don&#x27;t give a shit about your product.<p>You have to realize that even if someone gives you a 1 star review saying &quot;product does not work&quot;, they still probably don&#x27;t give a shit. Even people who use your product more than likely aren&#x27;t going to give you any feedback.<p>The fact the author is focused on things like SEO and is overly emotional about people&#x27;s reactions to their product shows they don&#x27;t understand this.<p>Who cares about SEO if your content doesn&#x27;t make people give a shit, and having people take time out of their day to tell you how shit your product is isn&#x27;t the worst outcome. I would rather people tear me and my shit apart than them not react at all.<p>The fact someone organically posted about your product and it got engagement is actually interesting. Maybe none of their feedback is actionable, but I would still count that as a win.<p>It also sounds like they&#x27;re trying to build generic B2C products, which I think is the complete opposite of what you should be building as a solo bootstrapper.

Am I wrong to think that this post needs a couple of revisions? It feels like it is all over the place. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s just me but the structure and organization feels so off...<p>The tone of the article makes it seem like the maker is not interested in solving the problem, but more interested in getting paid and that&#x27;s all that matters.<p>It&#x27;s also hard for the reader to contextualize anything if the author leaves out the details of his 3 failed SaaS projects.

Much of this seems like useful lessons learned, but this particular section jumped out at me:<p>&gt; To my credit at this time I would learn and do anything to get more users to my site, to the point where I was getting banned from multiple forums for posting after people told me to get lost.<p>How is this &quot;to your credit&quot;? If, as you say, the success of your product depends on getting niche users to buy in and trust that you can provide value, maybe it&#x27;s a bad idea to antagonize those same users by behaving in ways that violate their community norms.

The article betrays a complete lack of empathy for the pain points of the customer - which is probably why he&#x27;s having so much trouble to get people to pay for them.<p>He starts out by citing Field of Dreams &quot;if you build it they will come&quot; but then seems to completely miss that point by building it without validating it was something people actually wanted.<p>&quot;I didn’t care so much about creating a product that would actually make me money, I just wanted someone to use something I built.&quot; perhaps sums this piece up best. He&#x27;s getting into this for the wrong reasons - to be an &quot;entrepreneur&quot; or have a &quot;passive income&quot; rather than solving a problem anyone wants solving.

A rather painful reading experience. The author needs to learn how to edit their thoughts and use punctuation&#x2F;grammar properly.

We don&#x27;t know what the SaaS products were, what he is describing, how much they were, who was the target...<p>I am just fascinated by these type of posts which people can sit down and write longer than I can tolerate to read. I still don&#x27;t know what the author tried to convey. Impressive this got 99 votes here.

Once again this post follows the usual strategy to make sure to fail your startup <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.luap.info&#x2F;how-to-make-sure-to-fail-your-startup.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.luap.info&#x2F;how-to-make-sure-to-fail-your-startup...</a><p>These people are very motivated, are able to start new projects and working hard on it. Unfortunately contrary to what the world wants to make you think. Succeeding is not only a question of working hard, there is a lot of luck involved and also a lot of knowledge. But it is not knowledge you learn reading books, it is a mindset. Some people are better than others to start companies.

As someone who’s created a few mildly successful products in my life, I noticed a few things missing.<p>- dogfooding isn’t that important, but if you’re not you need to test. Even just a few smoke tests on multiple devices will go a long way.<p>- allow customers to leave you feedback in the app and make it easy, don’t even look at your reviews except to respond with “this has been fixed.” It should be easy to communicate with your customers and have a conversation. I’ve always had a few good customers that will email me about things and leave suggestions as I go. These people are valuable to your success.<p>- negative feedback is positive feedback by people who don’t care. In the post, they mentioned a lack of trust. That’s some good feedback! Make it so a sign up isn’t required until it’s actually necessary. Demos, trials, etc can go a long way here.

It was extremely distracting to not know what the SAAS services were. Wasted reading time - too abstract.

&quot;I was literally saying to people: “I’m looking to build an X app would you find that useful”.&quot;<p>What app is he writing about? Is the article fake? How can you write like 10 paragraphs about your failed app without namedropping it or tell what it tried to do.

I&#x27;ve come across recently the JTBD Framework, and I&#x27;m wondering if applying it would have prevented some of these failures<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;review.firstround.com&#x2F;build-products-that-solve-real-problems-with-this-lightweight-jtbd-framework" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;review.firstround.com&#x2F;build-products-that-solve-real...</a>

I have been building and failing multiple websites&#x2F;mobile apps since 2006. To this day, I don&#x27;t think I could ever be in that situation of creating something that somehow takes off.<p>Theres gotta be a place for failed web&#x2F;mobile app developers to get together and figure out a way to make it, anyone know of such a place?

This post could be written better, but a lot of it resonates with me as a solo technical founder who has gone through dozens of failed projects over the last five years.<p>I do have a strong tendency to start with an interesting concept instead of a concrete problem, but I run into a lot of walls taking the problem-first approach:<p>- The problem already has a dozen solutions because the SaaS space is at least 10 years old now and hyper competitive, there&#x27;a almost no good solution you could come up with that hasn&#x27;t been built already.<p>- If all the good or obvious solutions have been tried already, you could try to build something better still. But in my experience I could only come up with marginally better solutions or I would run into intractable technical challenges (intractable for me, at least).<p>- How do you even find a valuable problem to solve? I tried keeping a list of problems I encountered in my day job for a year and the solutions for almost all of them required skills well outside of my wheel house.<p>I think this is because, when I try to take a problem-first approach I tend to think about the solution space linearly. This leads to solutions that are obvious to any reasonably smart engineer, but because they&#x27;re obvious they&#x27;ve been done or are intractable.<p>That&#x27;s why I think there is some value in starting with interesting concepts or solutions, because what you&#x27;re really looking for is a creative solution to a relatively common problem. It seems just as hard to start with a problem and back into a creative solution as it is to start with a creative concept and find a problem you can solve with it.

The moral of the story - sales and marketing are more important than you think. Especially if you are technical.

I am just wondering how someone can build something that people actively hate? And then for people to create a thread where people are tearing the app and the person apart? This just gobsmacks me. Especially since, I&#x27;m building things and no one really seems to care enough to do anything. So they&#x27;ve obivously manage to stroke enough emotion that people care enough to write about him and his products.

One potentially valuable analysis of this issue is Ralph Grabowski&#x27;s Marketing to Engineering ratio. Engineering is required to make a product, but marketing is required to understand potential customers and how to express the benefits of the product. Marketing is like the tires on a vehicle. No matter how good the product it is still necessary to know who is going to buy the damned thing and how to reach them so they know about it. Early on in development successful projects spend put more money and focus on marketing than engineering because customers needs and vocabulary need to influence development as soon as possible.

Great insight - especially the questioning why we do it to ourselves. It is tough creating a business.<p>I wonder how many others are doing the same journey, but not leaning from the experience, and instead making the same mistake over and over again?

It seems that there is a product&#x2F;market fit problem that the author keeps hitting. Or simply, building something that the people who would find it useful actually want.<p>I have had the same problem. One way of overcoming this is to have a co-founder that has experience in a particular market, and knows the problems that need solving and the people who are affected by the problem. Another way is to do more thorough market research.<p>It seems to be a common problem for technical (only) founders.

From what I can perceive, he has a poor habit of not sticking to something. Yes, there are ups and downs in all entrepreneurial journeys. Focusing and persevering as opposed to becoming emotional (both in the ups and downs) paves success.<p>&quot;If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:&quot;<p>-&#x27;If&#x27; by Rudyard Kipling

It might sound silly, but anyone reading his self-reflection should watch the show Silicon Valley. Some of his &quot;failures&quot; actually failed the same way as the products of &quot;Pied Piper&quot;.

This one in &#x2F;new about SaaS building too.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26687212" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26687212</a>

&gt; If you want to actually create a business you need to realize coding is both the easiest of all the things that needs to be done and also the least important.<p>I don’t agree. I understand the sentiment, though. In my experience “the importance” of coding depends on the business.<p>Like the author says, if you just want to code - go do it, you don’t have to have a business! But what they are missing is the compliment: if you just want to business, you don’t have to code!

Why pay tens of dollars per month on AWS for side projects? A 5$ linode is the max I&#x27;ll pay for any side project - especially if it does not make money.

This is a great writeup and thank you for sharing with so much candor. You are light years ahead of everyone who has ideas and has not tried them and learnt the lessons.<p>You learnt experientially what most either never learn or a rare few learn from books like The Mom Test. Even compared those who read the book and get it, I fear it does not translate to a <i>lived earned experience</i>.<p>Take some time to rest, recuperate, recharge and go build #4!!

I don’t understand why when people talk about startups and side projects they almost never describe the actual product

I&#x27;m not sure in which areas the author released SaaS products but what&#x27;s mind-boggling to me is how fast successful SaaS businesses get copied these days, especially if they are rather &quot;simple&quot; (in the sense of being reproducible by a small team without large investment). Privacy-friendly website analytics is maybe a good example. There are literally thousands of companies with almost the same USPs (GDPR-compliant, cookie-less, privacy-first), almost every day a new one tries to launch on Product Hunt. And since everyone is prying for attention it gets more and more difficult to build something that gets noticed at all in those areas. I mean try entering a search term like &quot;GDPR compliant analytics&quot; into Google and you&#x27;ll be presented with thousands of SEO articles from different analytics companies. I&#x27;ve heard the same thing happens on the app store: As soon as there&#x27;s something successful, copycats show up in a manner of weeks, trying to capitalize on the successful app. So on one hand the addressable market for SaaS products gets larger every year, but at the same time more and more companies are pushing into that market.

A little off-topic, but how should one go about incorporating their side project&#x2F;saas? Is it ok to start off as a sole proprietorship and later set up a LLC? I&#x27;m sure a lot also depends on local laws etc.

I’m all of these types of write ups I always miss two things:<p>1. Being an expert in your area and focusing hard on solving the problem.<p>2. Patience and time. Things take much longer than you think.

Is it just me or the article is not opening?<p>(Wonder if it is author regret or something else)

DHH posted this in 2009 on &quot;Learning from failure is overrated&quot;<p>His main point being You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signalvnoise.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;1555-learning-from-failure-is-overrated" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signalvnoise.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;1555-learning-from-failure-is...</a>

What a great reading.<p>I am in my 4th mounth as a bootstrapper. You experience is giving me a lot of thoughts.