How do you actually build a SaaS?

Me and my friend tried our 1st SaaS but it didn't do very well, lesson learned was our market research was flawed. We targeted small business who said they would like this problem solved but what they ment was they would like it solved for free. No one was willing willing to pay and as our target market was small, we couldn't expand easily so it quickly shut down.

For our 2nd SaaS we tried a different approach, We jumped into a proven market with proven demand hoping to capture a small chunk of it.

Our initial launch was pretty good, customers were trying out the platform, there were a couple hundred registration but there were no returning customers. They came they looked for few days and then never returned, we dropped from weekly 500+ visitors to less than 50 (google analytics report).

Market was saturated, we knew that in advance but the initial push gave us good hope which is kinda dead now.

So reaching out r/SaaS community, people who have built and successfully did customer retention and got paying customers:

  • What kind of market did you target and how did you reach your customers?
  • What did you do differently to get customers to keep coming back?
  • How did you reach your first paying customers?

+ people who have launched SaaS into proven/saturated markets:

  • What helped you compete against established players?
  • What was the biggest factor in getting traction?

Would really appreciate hearing from people who've been through this themselves. We're trying to figure out what we got wrong before taking another shot.

Author: just-another-guy-XO