My first $165 with SaaS without any experience - My story 🚀
For the past two months, I've dedicated myself entirely to my SaaS project and have recently welcomed my very first customers!
Though the earnings are modest at $165, with $116 being recurring, it's not a fortune-changing amount, yet it fills me with immense excitement as my debut venture. The joy of receiving that initial payment was so overwhelming, I found myself dancing in celebration for an hour :)
Website: https://socleads.com/
Offering: The service specializes in extracting emails and phone numbers from platforms like Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, utilizing specific keywords and hashtags for targeted searches.
Total Revenue: $165
Self Funding: $2800
Launch Date: January 15, 2024
My academic journey in quantum physics and a five-year stint running my hackathon event agency have equipped me with a broad perspective on web development, management, and marketing, though I hadn't ventured into SaaS development until now.
The concept of creating a marketing tool to streamline lead generation for my hackathons was conceived back in 2020, but it wasn't until early 2024 that the idea came to fruition.
Fortuitously, I found a developer capable of creating a minimum viable product (MVP) in just two weeks for $1300, utilizing Vue 3.0, Node.js, and SQLite. My understanding of development, albeit from a high level, made the process manageable for me, though it might pose a challenge for those without any IT background.
Attracting our initial clientele proved to be more arduous than anticipated. Attempts at cold emailing were unsuccessful, leading me to undertake Google search advertising myself. My lack of experience resulted in a broad keyword match without geographic limits, attracting an overwhelming number of inquiries from India and Bangladesh, most seeking free services rather than paid engagement. Eventually, I employed a freelancer who refined our advertising strategy, successfully drawing in a more targeted audience.
The $500 investment in Google ads ultimately generated $165 in revenue. While not a monumental success, the fact that four customers made purchases suggests a genuine market need for our offering.
I've come to realize that marketing is significantly more challenging than development, and creating a sellable SaaS product from the outset is a complex task. I am now in search of financially viable marketing strategies.
I'm open to questions and eagerly await any marketing suggestions or product feedback you may have.
For products like this, Google Ads usually turns out to be a hard-to-scale channel because of CAC & low volume. I think you'll find more luck doing some outreach to companies.
This is exactly what I'm trying to solve now
Very honest! Thanks for sharing and congratulations on your achievement. This is a big step!
Thank you! I will continue to share my story!
Well done, Thanks for sharing :-)
Congrats on your launch and first sale. Where were you able to find a developer for such a low cost with high speed? I am also in the process of finding a developer but it's been hard to pick the right one.
Yes. I'm very lucky with my developer team
Where did you find your developer?
Congratulations~ I made 3 products, but now I haven’t made a penny yet
hahahaha~
Good luck. I hope you succeed.
Wow so cool! Is the video of the product intro on your page AI-generated? How did you make it? How much did it cost? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICFnEK3-zvU&t=24s
Good luck on your venture!
Yes, It's AI-generated by Heygen. It costs $24 per month for about 8 videos.
Hi!
Congrats on the early success. It is such an amazing feeling when you get that first-paying customer!
Going to chime in with some advice that can hopefully help you out (I work with early-stage SaaS founders like yourself to help them take their products to market).
I recommend avoiding paid advertising at this stage. You are going to end up burning through a lot of cash and not getting the ROI you need. Once you turn off the ads, the leads will dry up.
Focus on your messaging and brand positioning. This must be strong and more solidified before trying any sort of advertising. Ie. What is the product, what pain points does it solve for your customer, and what are the benefits.
With your GTM planning, don't be everything to everyone. Niche down to the top markets you think are the right target audience. Start small, do tests, then you can double down on your efforts that are working the most.
If you want to chat more about what you can do or just get some advice, visit my website in my profile or my linkedin. The intro call is free & I always give out some advice during it . 😀
Good luck with everything!
Scott
Thanks for the advice! I'm doing this right now.
Great! Looking forward to hearing how it goes.
Hi Evgenii
Great stuff and I’m kind of where you are now but on the other side of the fence, being in sales and marketing for many years I’m setting up my own consultancy and when I got my first client a few weeks back even though it was $150 I felt like I’d hit cloud 9!
I’ve started drumming up my own leads via LinkedIn mainly where I ask for a connection to my ideal target persona include a short note saying if we connect I’ll send you a brochure, once they connect I send a brochure and have got calls in diary.
For you though selling SaaS product which I did for many years the key is to get your ideal target avatar/client, find 50 of them and email,LinkedIn and call them to give them a trial, and craft a sales offer they can’t refuse, do you have a competitor analysis and a crafted pricing offer?
Whats different to what your services do vs me paying someone on Fiverr for 100 contact leads?
Here’s a checklist in my opinion of what you need before you even start a sales/marketing plan
And yes of course if you want some guidance happy to jump on a call or ask me on here. And for transparency I can help you write all this stuff up for next to nothing 😅
Best of luck !🤞
I haven’t worked out a marketing plan in such detail yet. My service is better than a freelancer from Fever in that it is more transparent and works 24/7. Like any replacement for a person.
Congratulations buddy on your first paying customer!
Inspiring!!
Congrats on a promising start. Just out of curiosity, could you also write a little bit about the legality of scraping data from the platforms you have mentioned such as Instagram? I was under the impression that most of scraping scraping-related activity is not allowed which might prove as a challenge as your product becomes more and more popular.
This is allowed if you scrape open data without authorization. Meta already dropped a similar lawsuit yesterday. You can read it here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/26/meta-drops-lawsuit-against-web-scraping-firm-bright-data-that-sold-millions-of-instagram-records/
In my case, I scrape open data without authorization too.
Got it. Thanks for sharing the info.
Congrats on the launch and revenue. Is your app focused towards B2B Marketing or End user consumer Marketing?
My hypothesis is that it is more B2B Marketing
Thanks for sharing all this, and congrats on your first few customers
I was just curious did you try outbound yet? Or all four customers came from google Ads
I try to send 500 cold emails a day, but they don’t even lead to visits. All clients from Google Ads.
Are you using your own tool to find these 500 emails for outbound?
I used Apollo.io and my service. The results from my service were better (3% reply rate), but this did not lead to visits to the landing page.
I'm thinking about CTA. Now I offer 50 free leads for a trial in the first email.
Sounds great, I'll also try it out for my next campaign