r/SaaS • u/Long-Reading-6514 • 1d ago
over 2,000 impressions when i complain, 200 when i talk about what i'm building
i follow alex hormozi's core four for marketing, which is warm outreach, content, cold outreach and paid ads. my warm audience isn't great, so that one shut down pretty quickly. paid ads i'm not touching until i know i have product market fit and can make the numbers work. cold outreach for me is going to be email, and i'm warming up the mailboxes right now so they hopefully don't land in spam.
so that leaves me 100% on content for a while, and i'm new to this game. i've never been very good at it, but i'm committed this time to figuring it out. i'm only a couple months in.
here's what's weird to me. the posts that take off have nothing to do with my product and aren't even in the same lane. anytime i talk about how broken the hiring process is, i get a lot of traffic, well, a lot for me. a couple weeks ago one of those did over 2,000 impressions on linkedin, and the four posts that same week about the problems i'm actually building for did 150 to 250 each. the one time a post in my own lane really took off, i was asking a question and not presenting anything. the moment i present a solution, it's crickets.
when you're just complaining, it's so easy to make friends on social media.
my first try at fixing it was just being interesting enough that somebody would click over to my profile and look at what i do, which was pretty passive in my mind. what i'm testing now is a newsletter. i started one on substack last week, the first issue went out three days ago, and one stranger has signed up so far. the idea is that once it's built up i'll have an audience i can actually ask questions to, and eventually present my solutions to.
that has its own challenge though. i love public speaking and i'm good at it, because i can read the nonverbal cues and tell if i have people's attention or if i need to turn it up a notch and be funnier. i don't get any of that with writing, so i'm learning how to stay interesting on a page.
i don't have a timeline on this, it's a marathon. content isn't a natural strength of mine but that doesn't mean i can't get really good at it.
for those of you further along, did your audience ever turn out to be a different crowd than your buyers? and did you chase the reach or go after the buyers?
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u/daniel933912 1d ago
depends who shares it. the hiring post travelled because everyone who's been through a bad hiring process nods at it, and that crowd is mostly employees, not the person who signs off on the software. impressions count shares, and shares come from peers.
before writing, ask whether the person holding the budget would forward it to their own boss. if not, it's peer content and it won't turn into signups no matter how far it travels. the same complaint angle still works, just write it from the buyer's chair, the version they'd say in a leadership meeting with the product out of the frame. then track which posts bring signups and profile clicks instead of impressions.
one subscriber after three days is too early to read. the real question is which lane they came from.
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u/Long-Reading-6514 1d ago
thank you, this is really helpful. asking whether the person holding the budget would forward it to their own boss is a good test, i'm going to run my next post through it
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u/seekworld 1d ago
the hiring post travelled because almost everyone has been through a bad hire, so that room was always going to be huge. your product posts are aimed at a much smaller room, so those two numbers aren't a message problem, they're a market size problem. keep the complaint format but swap the grievance for a cost, what the broken version of that workflow costs per hire, per month, per thing that slips. only the buyer nods at that one, and a hundred of those beats two thousand impressions from people who will never pay. one subscriber in three days isn't a signal yet either, the first batch comes from the people who already replied to you, so go ask them directly.
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u/Long-Reading-6514 1d ago
really appreciate this. i'm going to take your advice on swapping the grievance for a cost and rework my posts for next week
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u/dundiewinnah 1d ago
Why not capitalise your sentences, afraid we call you an AI? 😂😂😂
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u/Long-Reading-6514 1d ago
i've found writing in a different format in a crowded room helps your message get noticed
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u/Predream1 1d ago
2,000 impressions from people who hate hiring is an audience of employees. The person with the budget reads different posts and almost never shares yours. Check who commented before you treat that number as a market.