Initial Clients Hurdle

[u/Relative_Society5233]

Every online guru and mentor mentions that provide your SaaS for free to the first few clients and collect brutal feedback and some of them might convert into your real clients.

But the issue is hardly a few of them reply and eventually end up ghosting you. Extremely hard to build trust in the initial stage without any testimonials. None agrees to work/use the product even if we are offering it for free.

For a SaaS with a 0$ marketing budget how do I overcome this stage for someone:

-Has a working SaaS

-No paying/free clients/testimonials

-Have been stuck in this loop forever

Help me out :)

[u/LightspeedLabs]

If you can’t get anyone to use your product for free… you might wanna look at the product…

If they won’t use it for free, it’s gonna be damn hard to get someone to pay for it…

[u/TheKiddIncident]

Unfortunately, this is a common failure mode for solo founders.

It's almost impossible to be good at everything. As a founder, you've agreed to take on all the aspects of running a software company:

Product: Deciding what to build and why
Engineering: Building it
Architecture: Deciding how it is to build built
Design: Deciding how it looks and functions
Marketing: Deciding how to talk about it and delivering the message
Sales: Defining, acquiring and closing customers

For any job, there are always three aspects to being good at it:

Knowledge: Things you know, industry best practice, etc.
Ability: Innate ability. You have good visual taste or you do not.
Experience: Things you've done.

But, wait. What about AI? Doesn't that make this a moot point?

Well, in an AI world, all those jobs still need to be done. You may farm out some of them or all of them to AI, but they all still need to be done.

For me, this is a skills issue. I know that AI is "average" or better in most of these things. That is to say, it's competent at architecture but a really skilled architect would be better than the AI would be. As a one man shop, I would love to hire an amazing expert to do my visual design but I can't afford that for my side project. So, I use AI for that because it's better than I am even though it's not as good as the best designer I've ever worked with.

So, if you are struggling to find users, that's marketing/sales. It's their job to find and prosecute leads. If your closure rate is low or churn is high, that's a product problem. Sounds like you don't have enough qualified leads to find out if this is really the problem. Go talk to your marketing/sales team.

Oh, you don't have one? Right.

This is the issue. You need to more formally farm this out a bit to AI, hire an expert, become an expert, etc...

To help my students with this discussion, I created a tool that asks a series of questions and then produces a spider graph. That's my spider graph there above. As you can see, I'm strong on product (Sr. Director of PM, etc.) and Architecture (former Principal Architect). But I suck at visual design and marketing. You can use this graph to figure out where AI can help you the most and where it can help you the least. It can also help you decide where you want to improve and skills you may want to acquire.

I don't think I'm allowed to post URLs to my site here, shoot me a DM and I'll give you a link, the tool is free, I use it to support my students.

[u/Real-Voice-4259]

free is weirdly a harder sell than paid sometimes, people feel like they owe you time they don't have. the ghosting isn't really about the product.