Hi dear hackernewsfolks, vocal contributors and lurkers alike.

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...)

In short: I'd love to learn how you do this and how you think of the role of marketing and how you approach getting customers, particularly now that the very same customers likely have inboxes filled by AI generated outreach.

Lots of love from Berlin