
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product - zrail
https://www.petekeen.net/marginalia-postmortem
======
bluedevil2k
This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after
wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". _Launching without an
audience means nobody shows up._ It's a very true statement. One of my
favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to
pay for your product before you even start coding it.

~~~
jenius
Just this weekend, I started coding up a tiny "saas product" that I thought
about last week. Nobody knows about it, and that certainly has no launch page
or audience. I got most of it done over the weekend, and really enjoyed
putting it together in my favorite stack (sinatra, roots, marionette) and
doing some design work, which I don't often get a chance to do.

I'll probably launch it late this week or next week. I have no audience, and
don't expect massive profits either. I made it mostly because _I_ want it.
Since I plan on using it extensively, I honestly don't care if I have huge
profits or a gigantic audience. I spent $5 on the domain name, am hosting it
along with 10 other sites on a $5/month digital ocean box. I put in some great
work this weekend, and am now going to end up with something that will fit
nicely into my workflow.

It will ship with a decent free plan, and a $5/month pro plan with some
expanded capabilities. If one person signs up for the pro plan, that covers
the cost of hosting for this site and 9 other sites (bonus!) If 2 people sign
up for the pro plan, it's profitable. If zero people sign up, I paid a very
small cost for something that's going to be really useful to me.

Sometimes I wonder why so many developers gravitate towards huge ideas that
they think other people might want rather than starting small, with things
that you want. With this little thing I'm making, there's no risk. I've
already won.

~~~
bluedevil2k
What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's
anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing
expectations)

~~~
nmcfarl
I’m not sure - I’ve coded several "micro-businesses". They make small amounts
of money, and cost small amounts of money to run, and take almost no time.

One for example makes about $500 revenue with $200 expenses and 2 hours a
year. It’s profitable, I’m not doing it because I like spending time on it -
or I’d spend more time on it.

These aren’t traditional businesses, but they sure aren’t hobbies. They are
services I think need to exist, and that I can create, without "wasting my
time".

~~~
Oculus
I think the distinction Bluedevil is trying to make is you're going into this
SaaS app with no intention of it being hugely profitable or successful. You're
scratching an itch and if other people decide to pay you to help scratch their
itch as well, then that's just a sweet bonus.

In contrast, a business would be going in with the intention of the
service/app being successful (profitable or popular). Maybe hobby isn't the
best way to describe it, but I agree your way of looking at things is closer
to a hobby then a business.

~~~
nmcfarl
In my book If you don't enjoy doing it not a hobby. If you care about ROI, and
profit it is a business.

For me weather something is a business or a hobby has more to do with outlook
than anything else. A few lucky people have insanely profitable, and scalable
hobbies with 1000s of employees, and plenty of kids are struggling to keep
their lawn mowing biz afloat so they can afford a new video game.

Over the years I've been told that company I founded 8 years ago, and has been
my and several other peoples's day job ever since, is a hobby for many
reasons, including not enough W2 employees, revenue and so on. Which, even
though these things were said to prop up the speakers egos, made me think on
the topic - and this is what I've come up with.

\---

edit: totally rewritten

------
heliodor
I think the right pricing model for this one is freemium. People start using
it, get addicted, then you charge them for extra storage once they go over a
limit, like Dropbox and Workflowy.

~~~
marincounty
Agree!

------
yohann305
Thanks for posting the "behind the scenes" story.

You say you built a landing page with mailchimp signups for your new product.
Did you get many signups? And I suppose these were just signups, no money
involved, right? Did a good chunck turn into paying customers?

I would love to know more.

Thank You!

~~~
zrail
I had a list of about 300 people when I launched preorders and about 30% of
them converted to paying customers. I was sending out weekly updates with
progress toward preorders, and then after preorders started I sent out weekly
updates with download links for people who paid and "buy now for X% off, won't
last long" messages for people who hadn't.

The whole story is here: [https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-
publishing](https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing)

~~~
yohann305
Wow! Nice conversion rate! Good job on not making the same mistake again!! And
Good luck!

I'm reading the "Adventures" post as we speak.

------
JabavuAdams
Interesting. I've been throwing around the idea of roughly the same thing for
myself. I was keeping a TiddlyWiki, but that's stopped working. Developer
solution ... write my own!

In general, developers are a terrible market because they think they can do
whatever you did better / cheaper / faster, and they won't shut up about it.

~~~
zrail
I would say that developer _tools_ are a terrible market for that reason.
Information products (screencasts, books, etc) can be extremely successful in
the same market. Examples abound, including patio11's marketing training[1],
egghead.io[2] for AngularJS training, Peepcode[3], Railscasts[4], and various
other ebooks [5][6][7].

Most developers that I know have two common traits that make info products an
easier sell. First, they're innately curious about their field. Second, they
have access to a company credit card that will happily pay for training
materials.

[1]: [https://training.kalzumeus.com](https://training.kalzumeus.com)

[2]: [http://egghead.io](http://egghead.io)

[3]: [https://peepcode.com](https://peepcode.com)

[4]: [http://railscasts.com/pro](http://railscasts.com/pro)

[5]:
[http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority](http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority)

[6]: [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-
payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

[7]: [http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby-
threads](http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby-threads)

------
jh3
Reasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer):

\- I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free.

\- I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my
machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices.

\- Your service costs me money to do what I do for free.

\- If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free
for me.

\- Emailing myself notes with tags in the subject in is also free.

Why should I spent $5/mo to use a digital journaling service, and then more
time to make this service work with the rest of my workflow, when I already
have things in place that take care of my note taking problem?

I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a
bunch of other developers thought the same thing.

Finally, at least you shipped something. Nice retrospective. Keep at it.

Edit: It's interesting seeing this post and "Ask HN: How do you store and
organize your startup ideas?"[1] on the front page at the same time :)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585375)

~~~
drewlarsen
> I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a
> bunch of other developers thought the same thing.

Just like the OP, you've generalized your personal experience to other
developers. It is an easy trap to fall into. I agree with the takeaway called
out in another comment: validate the idea as objectively as possible and as
early as possible.

~~~
jh3
Yes you're right. It's the only data point I have, so it's what I went with :)

What you're echoing is also correct.

------
VLM
I looked at the original announcement and looked specifically at the technical
details list. If I didn't have the stuff on the tech details list available,
and had to accomplish roughly the same non-technical task, there are a lot of
ways to take notes more or less for free. I can't operate without gmail and I
guess google drive so I need not worry about an app built on them.

Dropbox is not a negation of my argument, in that they handle the annoyance of
keeping a storage service up.

In my cartoon mind if gmail is down, then storing notes in gmail doesn't work,
but the bigger headache is gmail is down not that I can't access some minor
notes. So just use gmail for free. Or github. Or a browser extension to "save
email to dropbox or google drive"

The other problem is you have a very narrow window of opportunity for a
programmers note taker because of habits. The concept of writing README and
TODO files and inserting source comments or placeholders, perhaps with tags to
search for and ASCII art for markup, has been a part of programming education
and tradition for a long time. Could you sell a note taker app to noobs who
don't already have a github / text editor habit? Well, maybe, but it'll be
harder.

So in my cartoon mind I have an idea it gets entered into TODO or perhaps as a
TODO flagged comment in the appropriate spot and its done. You need a wedge to
fit your process into it. Like if PUSHes to github regularly failed or github
filtered out source code comments to "save disk space" or something. But if it
works great, something new is going to be a hard sell.

Now if you did something unusual once you got the data that might sell. Here's
a nice web front end that uses GIT and/or github and/or dropbox and/or google
drive and/or gmail as a backend.

------
cookiecaper
Any service that is dependent on network effects needs a plan to cultivate
activity before it launches. It's crucial to offer engagement to the Real
People that are early adopters on your product, and the reality is that if you
go hands-off and attempt to wait for the audience to self-materialize, you'll
get a lot of people who drop by, make one post, and check for interaction a
couple of times, and then never come back. It's a bad deal for everyone.

Get together a group of people -- pay them if you have to -- who are committed
to using your product before you do a real public launch, and then new users
will immediately be engaged and it will grow from there. Launching without
this spells disaster.

If you are launching SaaS that doesn't depend on other parties' involvement,
you should still gauge interest, but it's OK to start small.

------
bradhe
You put it on HN and when it didn't move you gave up? What else did you try?

~~~
levosmetalo
Writing a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it
again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.

~~~
zrail
Ha! No, no interest in resurrecting it at all, I just wanted to share what I
learned.

~~~
levosmetalo
By reading my comment again, it may appear a bit bitter, which was not my
intention. I just wanted to point out that I hoped that you didn't give up and
that post mortem was just a new marketing ploy to resurrect it.

------
njr123
Just as an aside, if you have a project that you're not sure is going to take
off, there is no reason to shell out $29/month for it. Shared hosting will do
the job for $5 - $10 a month. No its not super reliable, but if you have no
users, who cares? And if you do get popular, my experience has been that they
can handle bursts of traffic surprisingly well, until you can move to proper
hosting.

------
AznHisoka
What was the initial reactions of people when they tried your product? Did
they say they loved it and would want to use it everyday?

------
andyidsinga
its sort of silly, but one thing in the post that stood out for me was the
$29/month for SSL and database.

It was a significant amount of money for this dev - but it could have been
done even cheaper with the aws free tier and getting an ssl cert from
somewhere like positivessl / commodo.

~~~
egomaksab
It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint
not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert). You can always piggyback
on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.

~~~
falcolas
This is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx
frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...

~~~
BetaCygni
Seriously? $29 doesn't register as real money to me. Especially from a
business perspective.

------
rajbala
"The next big thing will start out looking like a toy" \-- Chris Dixon

[http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-
start-o...](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-
looking-like-a-toy/)

------
ggjain
Rightly said, SaaS easy to build hard to sell. Products hard to build are easy
to sell, as it has value and willing high value customers. But in all, a
product or business without a clear customers acquisition strategy is a
miracle.

------
WhitneyLand
Great post for you because the honest introspection will lead you to more
success.

Great post for us because even though these lessons have been written about
before, it seems to take lots of repetition for them to sink in all the way.

------
alkagupta0309
The Idea is nice but I wouldn't pay for it mainly because of the reasons
stated by Pete Keen and another reason: When I have free tools to be doing the
exact same things, why would I want to pay? If I had to launch a SaaS product,
I would definitely create a buzz about it amongst my peers and give free
subscription for a limited period enough to get the user used to the new idea.

------
nonchalance
I apologize in advance if I sound snarky, but I (and I suspect many others
here) hadn't heard of Marginalia until today. How much did you spend on ads
and where did you advertise?

~~~
ma2rten
Don't be silly. When he said he spend a lot on advertising he didn't mean that
put up a superbowl ad. He probably spend it on Google Adwords for people who
where searching for related terms.

~~~
VLM
"people who where searching for related terms"

I think that would be a strange thing to search for, and I'm not sure it would
be a profitable demographic.

Sometimes the problem is not just "do people search for something" but who are
those people doing those searches?

------
thebiglebrewski
Great post Pete, I'm really enjoying your Stripe + Rails book. Keep it up!

~~~
zrail
Thanks!

------
johnrob
Are you still going to use your product after the SaaS version is shut down?

~~~
zrail
No, I switched to greener pastures[1] a long time ago.

[1]: [https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-
wiki](https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki)

