

Ask HN: Struggling to market our first SAAS - any tips? - hkyeti

TLDR - Built a SAAS early adopters like but struggling to get the word out… any suggestions?<p>The background: two of us built our first SAAS service over the past 6 months.  It&#x27;s a poll and survey SDK for mobile developers (think a survey monkey 2.0, for mobile)<p>We made it to scratch our own itch - two co-founders are an game dev and app apps.<p>The handful of customers who have deployed it so far really love it and are use it every day now..<p>BUT… we&#x27;re struggling with getting the word out.<p>Naively we thought if we build a great product traffic would just grow by itself (I know silly in hindsight).<p>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.<p>It&#x27; quite frustrating - any suggestions?<p>EDIT:  the service is https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polljoy.com
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frobfoo
First of all: Despite not being in your target audience, I really like your
landing page. It looks fresh and professional to me. Maybe a nice key visual
(e.g. a screenshot of an actual survey) in the hero section would make it even
more compelling and help understanding what polljoy does in the very first
moment.

Regarding 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?

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hkyeti
Thanks frobfoo for the feedback.

"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

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vishalchandra
Checked out your product. It looks like a really good implementation of a
"poll and survey SDK for mobile developers".

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 ?

~~~
hkyeti
Valid questions - basically our main pain point was:

\- 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?

~~~
vishalchandra
I thought some more about it and I think the issue is that the value
proposition of your product is not strong enough to get traction. One of the
ways you can improve it is by converting it into a monetization channel for
app developers.

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.

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tarikozket
The only tip that I can give you guys is, don't change your name but change
your slogan with "survey" to reach more people. Here is some science:
[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=mobile%20survey%2C%20...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=mobile%20survey%2C%20mobile%20poll)

~~~
hkyeti
Good practical, suggestion thanks! Any other suggestions from the homepage?

~~~
hkyeti
Update - switched the headlines (we're a/b testing a few) over from "poll" to
"survey"

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poweribo
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-
pursuit-o...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/in-the-pursuit-of-
traction-have-you-considered-all-verticals.html)

~~~
hkyeti
Thanks for the share. Much of this is not feasible due to lack of budget and
being outside the US. We're trying to figure out what would be the best use of
our cycles for the two of us to get more traction with no spend..

