Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips?
The background: two of us built our first SAAS service over the past 6 months. It's a poll and survey SDK for mobile developers (think a survey monkey 2.0, for mobile)
We made it to scratch our own itch - two co-founders are an game dev and app apps.
The handful of customers who have deployed it so far really love it and are use it every day now..
BUT… we're struggling with getting the word out.
Naively we thought if we build a great product traffic would just grow by itself (I know silly in hindsight).
So far we’ve tried posting about it here and product hunt, but not much traffic. We tried some direct emails to developers emails from App Store but low response rates.
It' quite frustrating - any suggestions?
EDIT: the service is https://polljoy.com
13 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] threadRegarding marketing the app, here are a few (unsorted) ideas off the top of my head:
* You said that you developed the app in order to scratch your own itch. So basically, you need to find more people like you (or rather your co-founding developers) that are in need for such a solution. Where do these people "hang around"? Where are they looking for help with their work, where would they look for such a tool? How can you get in touch with them?
* Contacting developers directly would be one of my first ideas, too. How many developers did you contact? Did you get any feedback at all? Did you add tracking to your mails so that you can estimate open/click rates? Maybe you need to improve your cold pitch mail...
* Are there any conferences or game development meetups in your area where you could spread the word about your service?
* Did you think about performance marketing, e.g. AdWords?
"You said that you developed the app in order to scratch your own itch. So basically, you need to find more people like you (or rather your co-founding developers) that are in need for such a solution. Where do these people "hang around"? Where are they looking for help with their work, where would they look for such a tool? How can you get in touch with them?"
We're thinking to start in stackoverflow and unity forums, and try to figure out other sites and forums. Challenge is that we don't really post or have accounts there so we're starting from scratch and concern about being spammy?
"Contacting developers directly would be one of my first ideas, too. How many developers did you contact? Did you get any feedback at all? Did you add tracking to your mails so that you can estimate open/click rates? Maybe you need to improve your cold pitch mail..."
We got pretty low click rates, about 5% and then low conversion on the homepage. We guess that they just get bombarded with so many messages from ad networks etc the tendency is to delete everything?
"Are there any conferences or game development meetups in your area where you could spread the word about your service?"
We're in Hong Kong and no travel budget, so not really :(
"Did you think about performance marketing, e.g. AdWords?"
I checked out the rates, seems really too expensive for adwords, maybe the VC backed ad and analytic companies are pushing up the keywords for everyone. Not really an option, have to figure out how to grow with no/minimal marketing spend..
Appreciate the help
Do you think we should write content on our blog, or write it on other places? eg- other sites for guest posting, or linkedin etc
Should we be worrying about SEO for the articles and keywords etc?
There are tens of thousands of mobile developers building all kinds of apps, which group of devs actually need to add different polls / survey in their app every week ?
You made it to scratch your own itch.. but what exactly was your itch ? And how frequently did you want to switch the poll, survey that you conduct ?
When a user has a pain-point then we need to evaluate the following as well i.e. a user with a pain-point by itself is not sufficient, we have to check for problem-solution fit as well ~ 1. What are the alternative solutions and what do they lack in and how much more value does our offering create in comparison to the alternative ? 2. How often do users face the pain-point ? 3. When do users face the pain-point ?
- we wanted to know why players are leaving at certain points but all we had were guesses, and stats didn't tell us why (bored? confused by a UI? difficulty too hard? etc) - so we built a way to ask them directly and find out
it works well for us and our early adopters, and it's an ongoing thing - you're always trying to improve your game in this freemium/games as service world
other secondary benefits - being able to collect email addresses, being able to ask those who like your app to rate it 5 stars, giving extra virtual currency to people etc
Based on the feedback I think game developers particularly would find it useful and get benefit out of it if they used it..
but how to reach them effectively, educate them about it and get them to take the leap and try - that's what we're facing now..
some ideas we're thinking: - revamp homepage to make it more about use cases and get them to select who they are and show content relevant to them (lot of web work) - spend cycles on content marketing, writing articles on our site with content related to what we do, but not always mentioning us to try and get inbound traffic (though we're noobs at SEO) - lots of commenting on developer communities, with our fresh accounts (we forgot to create accounts at the start on all those sites so we'd be coming in pretty fresh)
any thoughts?
1. What are the alternative solutions (can be dev coding it themselves) and what do they lack in and how much more value (approx. time saved in coding this functionality as a percentage of time taken to code the rest of the app) does your offering create in comparison to the alternative ?
2. How often do your users face the pain-point (i.e. how often do they need to create a different type of survey) ?
So say a free game app has a 100K users playing the game and you know the location ( enable GPS in your SDK) of these users and the times when they are active (start tracking that too) etc then those users could answer a quick survey for larger brands (who pay per survey completed). So the survey is not about the game users are playing, but about a new movie that is launched or a new Xbox Game title that is launched etc. The free app could continue to be freely used if the user answers 1 survey every 20 times he or she plays the game. Survey can even allow you to show a relevant targeted ad next time or promote some other app game too.