We (that is to say my business partner and I) are building SaaS products, but we are really struggling to find enough users. This is an age old problem, but I find it has gotten particular bad after LLMs made it trivially to make apps and services. Whether these products end up good or bad is mostly irrelevant, the end effect is the same: the market just seems so heavily saturated with new products, that it's incredibly hard to break through the constant drone of people vying for attention (the irony of me finding a way to do the same isn't lost on me).
Even briefly mentioning what we are building in a comment on a "what are you working on" thread yesterday, had my inbox filled with AI outreach from questionable SEO, "How to optimize your product", "let me create a garbage video for you" style e-mails.
My conclusion so far are:
- e-mail outreach (and particularly cold outreach) really doesn't work, and I never found it quite ethical to start with
- communities like LinkedIn are also heavily dominated by AI slop and people at corporates who are bored and looking to build an audience (maybe an unfair characterisation and maybe more a view into my feed than the state of the platform as a whole?)
- indiehackers etc I have never gotten to work, but that might be a skills issue
- "being present in forums etc where our users are" seems the best bet so far, but very hit and miss
- we have had some very minor success with influencer marketing
- paid search ads etc have resulted in lots of clicks but absolutely abhorrent conversions in our case, whereas conversions for the more organic channels like forums etc are excellent (maybe a targeting issue...)
Lots of love from Berlin
nifski•2h ago
You’re right about it being a bit more difficult to market in an age of constant AI slop.
Personally I have two products that I have created that actually solve a problem, whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key.
I would advise you start with friends and family first, just to get some valuable feedback.
Influencer ads and TikTok promotion also is promising — atleast compared to cold outreach or LinkedIn
Hunting for discords or telegram channels or finding where your core audience hang out (not necessarily in real life even though that is useful info) so that you can reach these people and showcase the product.
Ps. I wouldn’t pitch the product like a sale or like you need users. I would pitch it by asking if they could help take a look as I am researching. If you lead with research you will get users
probst•1h ago
We have excellent feedback from the users who do find us, so there is product market fit for the subset of customers that have a need for our product strong enough to actively search for it, but maybe that's an issue in and of itself: the fraction might be too small, and furthermore, for the (hopefully) larger segment of the user base that don't have a need strong enough to actively go looking, we need to be sufficiently visible for them to chance upon us...? which I guess drives home the message even more that visibility is key...
Thanks!
fjab•1h ago
> whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key
I feel this is true more now than it has ever been! Ideas used to be cheap, execution the bottleneck. Now execution (of product development) has sped up so much that distribution is the bottleneck.
3dsnano•52m ago
get a 1000 users to your site → 1% conversion → 10 users. if those 10 users have a shitty experience because the product SUCKS, then all of that effort getting them there was wasted.
the alternative is making a GOOD product that people actually WANT to use and can get EXCITED about. you keep it SMALL and work with a limited subset of people who are interested in what you have and are willing to try it in exchange for the PROMISE that it will bring them VALUE. if (and only if) you can truly deliver value for this small group, their excitement and optimism WILL radiate outward. from there, it's about surfing these small waves, paying close attention, and very carefully choosing bigger and bigger waves to surf.
as softwarians we MUST make GOOD products that people WANT to use!!!!! throwing away money on advertisements until you have anything GOOD is a waste of time and effort.