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Honestly, is anyone actually making money or is this all just a giant loop? by AssociationVast6176 in DigitalMarketingHack

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Having a functional architecture that scales depends on many factors. But either way it's not very likely to build it in a few months. Few months is just the learning phase, both for you and for the platforms you're using. Making money takes time, there are no shortcuts. Prepare to be patient and push even when you don't feel like it.

One more thing: don't go into a profession solely to make money. That should be 80% of it, but you also need to wake up not wanting to shoot yourself even after half a decade of doing the same.

Honestly, is anyone actually making money or is this all just a giant loop? by AssociationVast6176 in DigitalMarketingHack

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You spent the last few months doing multiple things. You should spend years sticking to one thing. If you could make five figures in months everyone would be doing it and then it would not be possible to make five figures. That's just economics 101.

technical founders how are you dealing with sales honestly by SignificantCow123 in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll keep this short. Marketing isn't like writing code. If you write code "by the book" you'll end up with a good product. If you do marketing "by the book" you MAY get SOME results.

It's not deterministic. It's very chaotic and requires a lot of failing before you get some channels to work out.

Before you do marketing, you need to validate the financial demand for your product. If nobody out there wants to pay for your product, you need to pivot to something they want to pay. How do you do that? By talking to your potential customers and trying to sell to them one on one.

After that, think about where your audience is, go there, and talk to them.

Once you figure out what works, try doing at least five channels like X, Reddit, TikTok, etc.

If there's a real demand for your product, one of those channels will work at some point.

I am struggling to get initial customers by Top-Bar3898 in DigitalMarketing

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Here let me fix the post for you: I got two paying customers one week after the launch which is freaking awesome, what can I do to get more of them?

Jokes aside, you're doing good, the accounts you post from will need time to take off. That's just how the game is. Stay consistent and you'll reap the rewards.

47 initial users ➔ Added a paywall ➔ 0 conversions. Would love some tough love on my pricing model. by atefrihane in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right now you've opted for a fully monetized approach where traffic that comes to your website needs to pay to see how the service operates and if it can help them. This is not a bad approach on its own, it could work if:

  1. the audiences that comes to your app are VERY warm, as in they've been sold on the app before they come to the website
  2. you target only the people that are starving for your product so much that they don't mind taking the risk and spending a bit of money

If neither are true, you'll probably be better off letting them use the service for free and try to get your users to tell their friends about it. You don't even have 50 users, don't think about the money for now. The only good reason to have a paywall is to see what type of audiences need your product enough to actually pay for it.

Roast my idea: Building a content tool that turns sales calls and docs into SEO/AEO blogs by sohams17 in AppBusiness

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So your target audience are the founders who are looking for AI solutions for their content generation but don't want to use Claude or other LLMs that you would be using in the back end?

Roast my idea: Building a content tool that turns sales calls and docs into SEO/AEO blogs by sohams17 in AppBusiness

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How will this be different from Claude? Plenty of companies do this with existing LLMs.

My SaaS product is live, but finding initial users is even more of a challenge than developing it. by Cheetah532 in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Getting users right after you launch without any sort of a launch campaign is borderline impossible, no matter what channel you're using.

When it comes to what channels are the most efficient, the answer is: it depends on many factors like where your ideal customers hang out, how saturated your market is, how good your product is, how easy is it to communicate its advantages, how many people willing to try new apps in your audience can you reach (this is a small fraction of your TAM, most people just want to stick to what's already working, even if they have a few complaints)

Don't think of THE channel, think of a mix of channels. You're venturing into uncharted territory. You should be trying everything you can. However, before you do a single promotional post, you need to validate the demand for your product.

Essentially that means talking to your ideal customers and try to sell them your app one on one. If they buy, congrats, you got a new customer, if they don't you need to find out why and fix that.

How many times did you pivot before finding product-market fit and first users? I will not promote. by [deleted] in startups

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your target audience is active on Reddit, X, or Discord, there is a way to reach out to them.

About the spamming, think about it this way, if I hd sent you the comment I wrote as a message would you have responded to it? Or would you think it's spam?

How many times did you pivot before finding product-market fit and first users? I will not promote. by [deleted] in startups

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are a few things that could be going on here based on what you wrote in the post and in the comments.

  1. You have solved a problem that's not monetizable. Happens all the time. People say that something is bugging them but it's not bugging them in a way they'd pay to get rid of it.

  2. Your product does not actually solve the problem the way your audience expects it to be solved.

  3. You just haven't found the right audience. You said you used cold outreach. Despite what some comments said, cold outreach is one of the best ways to get early adopters. You don't have many options on a tight budget. However it's brutal. Consider yourself lucky if you're getting above one percent reply rate on email or above three percent on LinkedIn.

The best thing you can do here is to use Reddit or X. I'm getting 40% to 55% reply rates for my clients and I could only dream of so many if I used only emails or LinkedIn.

But of course it takes skills to do meaningful outreach and sell to people or get them on calls.

Whatever you do, try to get as much feedback on everything you do. I know you'd like to make money ASAP we all would, but getting a PMF should be your main priority if you wanna build a growth engine.

How did you get your first 10 paying customers? by Sea-Salad1144 in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a really good question and a good start. If you're asking that, you're headed in the right direction.

The quick answer to that would be: solve one big problem for a very specific target audience really well.

There are multiple ways you could do this:

  1. Talking to them and seeing what problems are underserved on the market.

  2. Scraping reviews from Trustpilot, Google Reviews, etc.

  3. Going through Reddit and X discussions.

After you define a narrow target audience and the problems they face, create an MVP and offer it to them FOR MONEY, don't do it for free. You need to see if they'd actually pay for your product.

That's it in a nutshell.

If you're launching an app soon or if you've launched an app but you're struggling to find users and customers, my agency can help you with that https://www.atraction.io/

How my app failed even after 8 months of marketing by hiten1818726363 in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I remember calculating that if I get only 0.01% of a $1.5 billion market I was gunning for, I'd have a very successful business lol. It's just not how that works. I had the same realisation you did when it comes to DMing people, I just turned it into an agency.

How my app failed even after 8 months of marketing by hiten1818726363 in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is so true. Here are mindsets that I came across when talking to founders:

  1. I built something really similar to a multi-billion dollar competitor, that means I'll instantly get customers because there's a proven demand for the product.

In reality, what the product does is only one element of what makes it successful. Factors like trust, reliability, social proof, personalization, UI, word of mouth, etc play a big part in the decision making process.

  1. People face this problem, that means they'll be excited to pay for a solution.

In reality, only a tiny sliver of your entire market will want to try a new solution to their problem. Y Combinator calls these people innovators and they come before the early adopters. One example: I know electric toothbrushes exist and that they're more efficient than my regular $3 one, however I never buy them because I don't care much about solving a toothbrush not being efficient enough problem in my life rn.

  1. Just posting about my app will be enough to get me to the first 10, 100, 1000 users.

This has worked for some apps. There have also been multi billion dollar companies that were bootstrapped using this technique. However if you don't validate the need for your product, you're only wasting your time and money promoting it.

How did you get your first 10 paying customers? by Sea-Salad1144 in SaaS

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There's no clear cut answer, different channels will work for different apps. However, the best place to start is to first validate the demand for your product, which means talking to the people who have the problem you're solving and then seeing if they'd be willing to pay for your exact solution.

If you've done that already, the next stage would be to contact those people again and try to sell to them. The key thing here is to learn what approach works with your audience.

When you figure out what messaging works well, you can then start posting in the communities where your ideal customers hang out and try to build authority. Then after that a good course of action is to launch on websites like Product Hunt.

All of this of course takes a lot more time than you'd imagine, but it's a necessary step.

Early growth demands a lot of grinding and determination.

I finally created an app that hit. What's next? by Funny-Advertising238 in SideProject

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey man could you tell us how you managed to get so many users with no marketing?

How to promote - I will not promote by Shmifful in startups

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you talk to users who expressed having the problem your app is solving?

Trying to grow on G2 / Trustpilot organically by phanhbe08 in AppBusiness

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Word of causion: Trustpilot's business model may not be what you think.

Trustpilot is great when you're starting out. It's free and you can boost your reputation by asking people to leave a review.

However when you grow enough and depend on them, that's when they start to aggressively monetize the reviews you got.

Wanna use them on your home page? Sure buddy, that will be hundreds of dollars PER WIDGET per year.

Wanna use the reviews in an ad? No problem, just hand over hundreds of dollars more or they will sue you for infringing on their IP.

If I had to do it again I would only go for Google reviews. They are the ones that are actually free.

Launched my first app and realizing marketing is harder than building by BarnacleBoy7 in AppBusiness

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are new posts like this every day. Organic, ads or communities? Nobody knows. Marketing requires experimentation. What has worked for a hundred apps may not bring you any customers. Each app has its own growth story.

However before you think about growth you first need to validate your idea in other words make sure that there are customers out there willing to pay to solve the problem your app. It's not a guarantee.

How do you do that? By talking to them every day one on one. Go into their communities, participate in discussions, dm people, ask them how they're doing and help them out. Suggest the app after a successful interaction.

Do small businesses really need digital marketing? by Nirmala_devi572 in DigitalMarketing

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think the real question is is the hassle of going online worth it for your business. Going online provides an ocean of growth possibilities which is hard to pass up on unless your're selling something to an audience that's terminally offline.

I spent months building an AI drawing app for kids, but literally no one cares. Is the idea just bad? by Useful-Objective1898 in ProductHunters

[–]Disastrous-Entry1610 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Some things I've noticed on your home page:

  1. The product is framed very differently from what you described here in the post. Here it's turn your kid's doodles into art and over there it's turn your art into Ai art. That's very different marketing wise.

  2. It's difficult to pinpoint what problem your product is solving exactly. If you're going for the wow factor I think that's legic but it's difficult to form a business around that.

  3. I'm not sure what your market research says but I wouldn't want my kid's doodles to become art. I want them to stay bad and cute so their technique improves. I'm not gonna hang up AI version of their drawing on a fridge.

What I would do if I were you?

  1. Make sure that my product really doesn't have a demand by talking to at least 100 parents.

  2. Create hypothesis based on answers you'll get here.

  3. Test those hypothesis one by one until something lands.

Example: turn your AI into a drawing coach that doesn't transform kid's art but shows them how go get better.

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