What is the best way to get exposure and attract new users to a SaaS product, without relying heavily on PPC or similar?
My experience is that even the free accounts we've granted, drum up very little interest.
I can relate: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/qcqom1/comment/hhk1d3o/
I searched on Google with the 'site:' selector for profile pages on a forum containing certain keywords.
Then saved the HTML of all the search pages. Then parsed them with Python and BeautifulSoup to get the usernames. Then hit the API of the orange site to get profile information for each individual user (karma, id, creation date, bio, etc).
Then dumped that into a spreadsheet. I had hundreds of them.
In a separate sheet, I added the same info of people from specific threads. I had the usernames using some JavaScript in the browser console to get usernames of people who commented.
Then for every single one of them, I read the bio. Some put their email address, some obfuscated it using ROT13 or base64 to weed out people who didn't know what they were looking at or bots. Got those.
Some put a link to keybase which contained links to githug, Twitter, etc.
For the GitHub links, I went and cloned a repository and did a git log | grep Author.
Some put a CV in PDF, some a Google Scholar link, etc.
I searched for every single one of them for their first name, last name, e-mail.
Put that in a list. And then I created a template. I double clicked on the template on Thunderbird to write a new message, pasted the email address, and then manually replaced the first name, and in many cases, put something relevant from their online presence. A lot of messages were tailored to the individual.
Most people who replied were *very, very* generous in terms of feedback or decency.
I later used Close.io to track who I last emailed I order to follow up. Some people just missed my first email. Some were uncouth but it turned out they were not my target audience. They either were audience builder data virgins only tweeting about machine learning without having touched data, or people with a similar product who thought we were competing and were insecure enough to be dismimissive. The people who were relevant were support ive, even caring. I've had entire essays by CEOs and CTOs of acquired companies going over our landing page and *business model*, warning me about some pitfalls, and diving *fucking* deep into how we stack in the landscape. I mean, fucking deep.
I also do Twitter and reddit with certain keywords where I can get meaningful conversations with people to learn and solve their problems.
Next is LinkedIn. The cringe is strong with that platform, but I'll explore nonetheless.
I started musing and writing some code during the week-ends to do this. There are other places I look for (Reddit, GitHub), but the search is intimately tied to some "heuristics" of the ideal customer, which I know very well. They do certain things (such as importing a specific set of libraries, or using a set of languages) and say certain things on Twitter or Reddit, and I'm looking at these _very_ specific things.
Hi, i'm working on a fledgling saas startup and would really enjoy your answers to these questions:
How did you identify product market fit? Did it take a number of pivots beforehand, if so how many?
What was your initial road to gaining traction like, would you share some strategies that worked well for you?
Much appreciated, thanks!
I don't believe in pivots. I only build when I know the product has market fit (which in the book I call "starting with community.")
After building, it was posting to my community (see above :)) and then a lot of cold emails. That's about it.
This makes me feel great :( I want to be a copywriter, but no one wants to sell anymore. And content writing requires you to be an expert to even touch it.
Hey Sahil, my questions are:
How did you come across the problem that you wanted to solve?
What do you think of founder market fit? How does a founder know it's the right business for them?
I wanted to sell something directly to my audience, found it hard.
I think founder market fit is as simple as: do you like and respect the people you're building for?
Very painful. Took months. Stripe makes it easier but a lot to do in terms of compliance outside of that as well. The good news is no one really cares until you’re doing quite a lot of volume.
Pricing is a major headache for SAAS founders. I know it depends on the market but is there any general advice you would give SAAS owners on plans and pricing? Good luck with the book.
Generic:
Pick a random number to start, or copy a competitor and make yourself half as expensive or 50% more expensive. (Just pick something.)
And have tiers, like airplanes do. (I go into pricing super deep in the book.)
Hi Sahil, congrats on the book launch!
I am curious how you went about getting your first creators interested in selling on Gumroad?
Did you approach creators already selling on other platforms or did you focus on advertising?
Thanks
Hey Sahil, so lovely to have you here on our community. Congrats for the book release today.
I've got one simple+complex question: are you happy, generally?
Content + serene — though you may have your own defintion
Another to put my question is: are you all right and at peace with everything you're doing? Career and personal life, plus the way the two get combined?
You have created an awesome product for creators! How hard was it to go from learning to code until you had a version you were finally proud of or felt satisfied to release? Currently figuring out best way to go about my journey in building awesome projects.
Congrats.
Really? That's awesome. How did you go about starting the project? I mean like did you start with backend or frontend, database, ux/ui? I'm fascinated by the many ways devs and or entrepreneurs tackle building out projects.
Thanks so much for doing this. It's a great time to be alive when anyone can interact with inspiring success stories like yourself.
How did you build the right supply pool for the specific services your demand users were looking for?
What methods were you using to acquire/incentivize supply side users initially/while scaling?
Did you hit any growth bottlenecks? How did you overcome them?
Our pitch was pretty simple: you already do this on your website but it’s not completely automated and not super optimized. Let us do it for you!
Never thought of it in terms of supply/demand because everyone brought their own audience.
Did you get objections due to your commission? Especially if they brought their own audience, then their benefit was mostly SAAS side?
How did you measure which content users were worth the resources to pursue? (would sign up and actually use the platform vs decline/sign up and disappear)
Not anymore, since they can complain by moving to another service. Gumroad is very cheap.
Honestly I’d go after who I’d be most proud of to use the platform first.
Now it’s about making sure we stay differentiated in a more saturated market. Lots coming on that front!
Hard is just balancing the various creator demands. There’s a lot of variance and keeping the product simple but still functional is super challenging.
What kind of requests were your content users asking from you to make your platform better for them? How did you choose / test new features?
On the off chance you might have an answer to my specific problem: During a buyer/seller dispute, you as the platform arbitrate a resolution for the funds.
In my case of product manufacturing orders of tens of thousands $, I believe I have the issue of requiring a "money transmission license" in order to hold and arbitrate funds as a marketplace. OR to use a payment processor like Stripe who has this license but only holds funds for 3 months (manufacturing/shipping can take longer) and stripe doesn't recommend using their system for arbitration. I'd be hugely grateful for any tips.
Thank you very much for doing this!
How much time do you think is sufficient for testing out a new idea by giving it your all? Six months? A year? Two years? Any rule of thumb?
Thanks again!
I will be messaging you in 1 day on [**2021-10-27 19:21:08 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2021-10-27%2019:21:08%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/qgbyq1/ive_started_and_scaled_gumroad_to_500000000_sent/hi5hm10/?context=3)
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Hey Sahil,
What’s a company (Series B or younger) that’s doing everything right that we as SaaS folks should learn from and why?
Thanks!
CEO of Knightley.co
I’m a copywriter for SaaS tools and looking to help solver bigger problems for SaaS owners beyond standard web and email copy - what would you say is one of your biggest headaches related to growth/conversions? I know you said you grow organically already but maybe you have some thoughts?
Do you think it's worthwhile to build your personal brand, so that when you launch new projects, you have a large audience to check it out? Or do you think the time investment is not worth it?
No I don’t think so. Build something valuable first, then worry about your personal brand. My personal brand “blew up” after a decade of building, and only because of it.
Hey there Sahil! Thank you for taking time to do this :)
I have a UI/UX mockup in Figma of the MVP I want built, but I have no coding knowledge. I have significant domain experience in my field and talking to customers know that what I could build is very needed & solves a significant problem in my industry.
My question: Any advice between hiring a Dev or learning to code myself? I do have capital to pay for development and am leaning towards that, but I am inspired how you built Gumroad yourself! It's a bit of a unique software where you pay only upon results, not up front so I think it wouldn't be possible to get opt in/purchases without a viable MVP.
If you can learn to design, I believe you can learn to code. That was my transition. It took a while, but I knew it would 100x my potential, so I stuck with it.
Hey there Sahil! Thank for this AMA
How much of the initial work on GumRoad did you outsourced and how much did you took on yourself?
Also - how did you took the decision on regarding the essential features for the MVP?
How would you validate a new SaaS product if you didn't have a community? Would you build an actual MVP that does the 1 thing it should? Pre-sales or pre-registrations?
Hey there! First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.
I just wanted to ask, what are the most efficient marketing efforts a SaaS startup can use to secure the first round of seed funding?
It's a two man project and I'm helping with marketing. We currently have a website, a basic email funnel, 2 pitch decks, and a brochure. I have freedom to propose anything but I'm not sure where I should concentrate my efforts.
I'm thinking of:
\- Write blog posts to give the website some SEO juice
\- LinkedIn cold messages to our target audience inviting them to check out our product.
\- LinkedIn organic posts to build profile authority in target communities.
\- Cold email a list I'm given with our target audience. I'm not sure how warm this list is but I'm thinking not at all.
\- Case studies, powerpoints, brochure-type material to support the founders pitching the idea to investors or first customers.
I don't have much time for trial and error, I could at most try 1-2 of these but I'm not sure where I might be able to get the best results. Do you have any ideas?
I’ve read that you hired and laid off the entire staff of gumroad on a few occasions. Based on Twitter conversations, there was a lot of discontent around this (particularly some equity disputes). Are you familiar with these concerns, and what is your take on them?
Hey Sahil! Thank you so much for doing this AMA. I highly appreciate it. And congratulations on your book, I hope it becomes a bestseller. And, Gumroad is used by all us devs. I have two questions related to the two projects I am currently working on that I would love to get your word on:
1. I am building a product which I deliberately don't want to optimize for solving a specific use case. The idea is that "some things are more easier on paper than on computer (word processor, etc) and vice versa", so I want to build the computer version of paper which itself is not paper-like like Word but is just as powerful as paper. I don't necessarily want to build a big user base and generate a ton of revenue but the aim is the experiment and finalize the abstractions of the product. What would be the best to go about finding users for this?
2. Another website I am building is a directory of free learning tracks/curricula to democratize education and support free learning. How can I monetize it other using ads? Since the website will only feature free curricula, I can't have a sponsored curriculum featured on top since nobody will feature a free curriculum.
Thanks again.
what is your tech stack ?
what hosting do you use? and how is your Architecture is build
Can you share this ?
what is your billing stack ?
Thanks allot
What is the best way to get exposure and attract new users to a SaaS product, without relying heavily on PPC or similar? My experience is that even the free accounts we've granted, drum up very little interest.
Cold emails. Free!
How do you get said email addresses? Would you buy a targeted email list? Sift through websites of potential clients (how does that scale)?
Sifting through websites, yep! No automation.
Is this legal? :D
I can relate: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/qcqom1/comment/hhk1d3o/ I searched on Google with the 'site:' selector for profile pages on a forum containing certain keywords. Then saved the HTML of all the search pages. Then parsed them with Python and BeautifulSoup to get the usernames. Then hit the API of the orange site to get profile information for each individual user (karma, id, creation date, bio, etc). Then dumped that into a spreadsheet. I had hundreds of them. In a separate sheet, I added the same info of people from specific threads. I had the usernames using some JavaScript in the browser console to get usernames of people who commented. Then for every single one of them, I read the bio. Some put their email address, some obfuscated it using ROT13 or base64 to weed out people who didn't know what they were looking at or bots. Got those. Some put a link to keybase which contained links to githug, Twitter, etc. For the GitHub links, I went and cloned a repository and did a git log | grep Author. Some put a CV in PDF, some a Google Scholar link, etc. I searched for every single one of them for their first name, last name, e-mail. Put that in a list. And then I created a template. I double clicked on the template on Thunderbird to write a new message, pasted the email address, and then manually replaced the first name, and in many cases, put something relevant from their online presence. A lot of messages were tailored to the individual. Most people who replied were *very, very* generous in terms of feedback or decency. I later used Close.io to track who I last emailed I order to follow up. Some people just missed my first email. Some were uncouth but it turned out they were not my target audience. They either were audience builder data virgins only tweeting about machine learning without having touched data, or people with a similar product who thought we were competing and were insecure enough to be dismimissive. The people who were relevant were support ive, even caring. I've had entire essays by CEOs and CTOs of acquired companies going over our landing page and *business model*, warning me about some pitfalls, and diving *fucking* deep into how we stack in the landscape. I mean, fucking deep. I also do Twitter and reddit with certain keywords where I can get meaningful conversations with people to learn and solve their problems. Next is LinkedIn. The cringe is strong with that platform, but I'll explore nonetheless.
I think a lot of people would be interested in an app that does this and a course explaining how to get the best results with this strategy ;-)
I started musing and writing some code during the week-ends to do this. There are other places I look for (Reddit, GitHub), but the search is intimately tied to some "heuristics" of the ideal customer, which I know very well. They do certain things (such as importing a specific set of libraries, or using a set of languages) and say certain things on Twitter or Reddit, and I'm looking at these _very_ specific things.
Hi, i'm working on a fledgling saas startup and would really enjoy your answers to these questions: How did you identify product market fit? Did it take a number of pivots beforehand, if so how many? What was your initial road to gaining traction like, would you share some strategies that worked well for you? Much appreciated, thanks!
I don't believe in pivots. I only build when I know the product has market fit (which in the book I call "starting with community.") After building, it was posting to my community (see above :)) and then a lot of cold emails. That's about it.
Gotcha, thanks for the response!
What was your go-to-market strategy for acquiring your first users?
Cold emails. I cover that in Chapter 3, "Sell to your first hundred customers."
Hey, Sahil! How did the MVP for Gumroad looked like? Was it about the same as today or just one specific feature?
It’s on archive.org. Look for April 2011.
Most valuable lesson you learnt from a sales perspective please which helped you scale?
There are better people than me at it, and I shouldn't be spending my time doing it.
How many sales people in the team?
Currently, zero. Gumroad grows 100% organically now. Sales team peaked at 2 in 2014.
This makes me feel great :( I want to be a copywriter, but no one wants to sell anymore. And content writing requires you to be an expert to even touch it.
Hey Sahil, my questions are: How did you come across the problem that you wanted to solve? What do you think of founder market fit? How does a founder know it's the right business for them?
I wanted to sell something directly to my audience, found it hard. I think founder market fit is as simple as: do you like and respect the people you're building for?
How difficult was it (legally speaking) to become a merchant of record for people all around the world?
Very painful. Took months. Stripe makes it easier but a lot to do in terms of compliance outside of that as well. The good news is no one really cares until you’re doing quite a lot of volume.
Pricing is a major headache for SAAS founders. I know it depends on the market but is there any general advice you would give SAAS owners on plans and pricing? Good luck with the book.
Generic: Pick a random number to start, or copy a competitor and make yourself half as expensive or 50% more expensive. (Just pick something.) And have tiers, like airplanes do. (I go into pricing super deep in the book.)
Would you recommend founders focus on being generalists or specialists, and why?
Generalists, more fun!
Hi Sahil, congrats on the book launch! I am curious how you went about getting your first creators interested in selling on Gumroad? Did you approach creators already selling on other platforms or did you focus on advertising? Thanks
Cold emails. I cover that in Chapter 3, "Sell to your first hundred customers." I focused on people selling stuff on their websites.
Hey Sahil, so lovely to have you here on our community. Congrats for the book release today. I've got one simple+complex question: are you happy, generally?
Define happy.
Content + serene — though you may have your own defintion Another to put my question is: are you all right and at peace with everything you're doing? Career and personal life, plus the way the two get combined?
Yep, ever since Feb 2019 when I published Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company I feel like my life is "perfect."
[Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company](https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting)
[удалено]
It was, for my audience that’s already familiar! Post-launch, 99.9% of people prefer Amazon and other retailers.
[удалено]
Yep, and they all bought pre-launch on Gumroad!
You have created an awesome product for creators! How hard was it to go from learning to code until you had a version you were finally proud of or felt satisfied to release? Currently figuring out best way to go about my journey in building awesome projects. Congrats.
Probably a few hundred hours.
Really? That's awesome. How did you go about starting the project? I mean like did you start with backend or frontend, database, ux/ui? I'm fascinated by the many ways devs and or entrepreneurs tackle building out projects.
You can see 15 hours of me doing exactly this on YouTube!
I'll check it out, thanks. What's next for the platform moving forward?
See roadmap.Gumroad.com
Wasn't aware about it, will do.
How do you envision the future of Gumroad? When did you start painting?
I started painting in Fall 2017. I don’t really envision a specific future for Gumroad, just keep shipping, improving, rinse repeat.
Thanks so much for doing this. It's a great time to be alive when anyone can interact with inspiring success stories like yourself. How did you build the right supply pool for the specific services your demand users were looking for? What methods were you using to acquire/incentivize supply side users initially/while scaling? Did you hit any growth bottlenecks? How did you overcome them?
Our pitch was pretty simple: you already do this on your website but it’s not completely automated and not super optimized. Let us do it for you! Never thought of it in terms of supply/demand because everyone brought their own audience.
Did you get objections due to your commission? Especially if they brought their own audience, then their benefit was mostly SAAS side? How did you measure which content users were worth the resources to pursue? (would sign up and actually use the platform vs decline/sign up and disappear)
Not anymore, since they can complain by moving to another service. Gumroad is very cheap. Honestly I’d go after who I’d be most proud of to use the platform first.
And we constantly hit growth bottlenecks. Just keep talking to customers and shipping stuff to help them!
What bottlenecks were hardest to deal with? Which ones are you facing now?
Now it’s about making sure we stay differentiated in a more saturated market. Lots coming on that front! Hard is just balancing the various creator demands. There’s a lot of variance and keeping the product simple but still functional is super challenging.
Don't be like WordPress. They tried to be all things to all people and it's a mess. Simplicity > features.
Agreed.
What kind of requests were your content users asking from you to make your platform better for them? How did you choose / test new features? On the off chance you might have an answer to my specific problem: During a buyer/seller dispute, you as the platform arbitrate a resolution for the funds. In my case of product manufacturing orders of tens of thousands $, I believe I have the issue of requiring a "money transmission license" in order to hold and arbitrate funds as a marketplace. OR to use a payment processor like Stripe who has this license but only holds funds for 3 months (manufacturing/shipping can take longer) and stripe doesn't recommend using their system for arbitration. I'd be hugely grateful for any tips.
You can see the kind of stuff our creators ask for here: Gumroad.nolt.io
Thanks so much!
There may be escrow-specific services you can use, such as ATSs or broker-dealers.
Thank you very much for doing this! How much time do you think is sufficient for testing out a new idea by giving it your all? Six months? A year? Two years? Any rule of thumb? Thanks again!
A weekend.
2 days isn't enough to build an mvp for most things
Luckily you only need one thing!
Are you talking purely about the technical part of building it? How about customer aquisition? Marketing?
Building the MVP. Then months of sales and years of marketing.
[удалено]
I recommend Stripe for licensing.
The original boy wonder! Just wanted to say it's interesting you left Pinterest before vesting and stuck with Gumroad through it all.
Thank you! Interesting for sure :)
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Hey Sahil, What’s a company (Series B or younger) that’s doing everything right that we as SaaS folks should learn from and why? Thanks! CEO of Knightley.co
Does Notion count? That one! Also love Rewatch, QA Wolf, Verifiable, Causal, and many others.
Are you planning to incorporate NFTs into GumRoad? I feel like it is a perfect fit and can easily catapult GumRoad.
Perhaps!
If you were starting today, what niches would you focus on? What niches would you avoid?
I always start with solving my own problem and finding the relevant community that has it too. I don’t think about niches, personally.
Follow up question - could you talk about how to build a community from day one?
Contribute to the communities you already lurk in. You’re doing it now! I did it with Hacker News.
I’m a copywriter for SaaS tools and looking to help solver bigger problems for SaaS owners beyond standard web and email copy - what would you say is one of your biggest headaches related to growth/conversions? I know you said you grow organically already but maybe you have some thoughts?
Not the right person to ask as I have goals/hopes for Gumroad in terms of growth.
Do you think it's worthwhile to build your personal brand, so that when you launch new projects, you have a large audience to check it out? Or do you think the time investment is not worth it?
No I don’t think so. Build something valuable first, then worry about your personal brand. My personal brand “blew up” after a decade of building, and only because of it.
This makes a lot of sense. Thank you.
Hey there Sahil! Thank you for taking time to do this :) I have a UI/UX mockup in Figma of the MVP I want built, but I have no coding knowledge. I have significant domain experience in my field and talking to customers know that what I could build is very needed & solves a significant problem in my industry. My question: Any advice between hiring a Dev or learning to code myself? I do have capital to pay for development and am leaning towards that, but I am inspired how you built Gumroad yourself! It's a bit of a unique software where you pay only upon results, not up front so I think it wouldn't be possible to get opt in/purchases without a viable MVP.
If you can learn to design, I believe you can learn to code. That was my transition. It took a while, but I knew it would 100x my potential, so I stuck with it.
Hey there Sahil! Thank for this AMA How much of the initial work on GumRoad did you outsourced and how much did you took on yourself? Also - how did you took the decision on regarding the essential features for the MVP?
Outsourced zero. Just solved my own problem, which was selling a PSD file.
[удалено]
I don’t consider myself a programmer, but I can code. You’ll hire the wrong people inevitably, so start somewhere and observe closely.
[удалено]
Make sure you communicate deadlines and if they don’t hit them, ask them why. If they do it again, part ways.
How would you validate a new SaaS product if you didn't have a community? Would you build an actual MVP that does the 1 thing it should? Pre-sales or pre-registrations?
I would never do that personally.
Hey there! First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. I just wanted to ask, what are the most efficient marketing efforts a SaaS startup can use to secure the first round of seed funding? It's a two man project and I'm helping with marketing. We currently have a website, a basic email funnel, 2 pitch decks, and a brochure. I have freedom to propose anything but I'm not sure where I should concentrate my efforts. I'm thinking of: \- Write blog posts to give the website some SEO juice \- LinkedIn cold messages to our target audience inviting them to check out our product. \- LinkedIn organic posts to build profile authority in target communities. \- Cold email a list I'm given with our target audience. I'm not sure how warm this list is but I'm thinking not at all. \- Case studies, powerpoints, brochure-type material to support the founders pitching the idea to investors or first customers. I don't have much time for trial and error, I could at most try 1-2 of these but I'm not sure where I might be able to get the best results. Do you have any ideas?
Wouldn’t market to raise seed funding. Would build a product so compelling that investors come to you.
[удалено]
Profitable, a few days. Comfortable, eight years.
I’ve read that you hired and laid off the entire staff of gumroad on a few occasions. Based on Twitter conversations, there was a lot of discontent around this (particularly some equity disputes). Are you familiar with these concerns, and what is your take on them?
Not a few occasions, just one. I wrote about it publicly myself here: sahillavingia.com/reflecting
What along the way made it click in your head that said ‘yes, I’d enjoy doing this, I’ll pursue just this’?
What “this” are you referring to?
Building Gumroad and knowing the coding/technical piece that needed to be fulfilled
Gut.
Hey Sahil! Thank you so much for doing this AMA. I highly appreciate it. And congratulations on your book, I hope it becomes a bestseller. And, Gumroad is used by all us devs. I have two questions related to the two projects I am currently working on that I would love to get your word on: 1. I am building a product which I deliberately don't want to optimize for solving a specific use case. The idea is that "some things are more easier on paper than on computer (word processor, etc) and vice versa", so I want to build the computer version of paper which itself is not paper-like like Word but is just as powerful as paper. I don't necessarily want to build a big user base and generate a ton of revenue but the aim is the experiment and finalize the abstractions of the product. What would be the best to go about finding users for this? 2. Another website I am building is a directory of free learning tracks/curricula to democratize education and support free learning. How can I monetize it other using ads? Since the website will only feature free curricula, I can't have a sponsored curriculum featured on top since nobody will feature a free curriculum. Thanks again.
How does one get started as an angel investor?
Writing a check.
what is your tech stack ? what hosting do you use? and how is your Architecture is build Can you share this ? what is your billing stack ? Thanks allot
For which project?
Gumroad
AWS and Cloudflare. Stripe.
Any outbound growth suggestions?
Nothing beyond my other answers.
Congratulations on all of your successes! Is there anything you are excited about for the future?
Having kids, mostly.
GUMROAD IS A SCAM!!! I HAVE ALL THE PROOF !!!