SaaS Growth Struggles (collection)

“yeah the agency search is miserable. my one tip is ask who owns the code at the end. some shops hold your repo hostage basically. dcny was the one I landed on but that question alone eliminated half my list.”

“free tier mostly guarantees people who wanted free. ads on an its-free landing page will mostly buy you that. if youre in website/app builders youre stacked against a pile of other free tools, so they bounce the second something looks nicer. id cut free at something they actually hit (custom domain, export, more than 1 project) and point ads at a paid-looking page. the let me try then maybe convert line is often just a polite no.”

“im also an app devloper how did u grow ur business.. I have my app rn on playstore called habithub”

“yeah thats exactly the balancing act haha funny enough the training ended up becoming more useful than we expected because its actually completely voluntary we dont pay people to sit through it, so the ones who actually complete it are already self-selecting as people who are more serious, can follow instructions, and actually want to do missions properly so yeah it probably reduces raw signup volume compared with a totally frictionless DoorDash-style flow, but for us that can actually be a good”

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“This would be my first free user. I'm continuing to do sales and finding possible beta testers/paying customers. My founding engineers have been pretty efficient in their development thankfully, so I'm not hoping to be in beta for too long.”

“It's an enterprise grade software so one single client would give us some runway to jumpstart our business. I was thinking offering the product for free as we get out of beta and offering half price for the first year of license.”

“heyy, quick question, still pretty new to marketing specifically, not so much to building. what's actually worked for you as a strategy for your SaaS? my case's a bit different, i'm not based in the US but targeting the US market only, not sure if that changes what works or not submitted by /u/andressmerlooo [link] [comments]”

“It’s a 990-member Skool community around business ideas / side hustles. Built mostly through SEO, content and affiliate marketing rather than paid memberships. 715 member emails, 300+ posts, and ~600 members joined in the last year. I’ve moved onto other projects, so I’m considering selling it instead of letting it sit. Feels like it could make sense for someone with an existing SaaS, course or product. What would you ask for something like this? submitted by /u/Businessldeas [link]”

“Building a marketplace where brands/businesses can list products, offers, perks, they want to distribute and business with relevant audience - coworking, communities, hotels etc can discover and distribute offers that are relevant to their customers/members. It's basically distribution through existing business audiences rather than paying influencers or individually pitching dozens of businesses. Ex: a wellness brand could make an offer to gyms, hotels etc who can then choose if they wanna”

I've built a few SaaS products, and every time I need a demo or promo video I end up paying a pro it's kinda expensive. So I'm curious how yall deal with…

“I’m probably one step behind the people you’re asking 😂 I haven’t made money from mine yet, but I’m building my first SaaS right now with basically no traditional dev background. The biggest surprise for me has been that building the product isn’t actually the part I’m most worried about anymore. I spent months focused almost entirely on making it work, and now that I’m putting it in front of strangers I’m realizing distribution, trust and getting people to actually care are a completely differ”

“Building a product buys you a ticket to scalable distribution, not the other way around.”

“Dropping free trials cut my support load, but I’m curious what it did to your conversion rate.”

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“Fair test. The diagnosis was: they thought reach was the problem, but they had never checked whether traffic from their eight completed launches produced signups, emails, or revenue. That meant scaling acquisition would be premature. The experiment was to contact three past founders and ask what the traffic converted into. Success meant at least one reported a real conversion. Failure meant all three reported none or did not respond. Could you still swap in Product Hunt without materially changi”

“Nextdoor is charging now because they need revenue. How would your new free version make money?”

“Okay, let's take my example landing page for a hypothetical micro-SaaS idea, which would fit well within the r/microsaas context and the theme of the original post (getting landing pages roasted). Fictional Micro-SaaS Idea: StreamlineMyBumps.com - A tool for founders to quickly manage recurring monthly billing subscriptions without coding. Comment: StreamlineMyBumps.com offers a clear value proposition for founders.”

“Start with the one person who paid. What happened in their business that week, and why did they keep going when the free users stopped? Then call the people who disappeared and ask them to show you the exact moment onboarding stopped making sense. I’d trust those screens and words more than another landing-page test. If you manually set it up for ten qualified businesses, do they use it after you leave?”

“I'd push back on waiting for organic to tell you what works before running paid. Organic reach on a new account with zero followers is so low that it takes months to produce enough signal, and the feedback you'd get from $50/day on Meta for two weeks is faster, clearer and cheaper than 100 hours of content creation into a void. Your reluctance makes sense but the logic is backwards. Paid is how you find out what messaging works, because you can test five different angles simultaneously a”

“Anyship earns 78/100 for clear deployment positioning, strong usability, and sound technical SEO. Accessibility barriers, slow mobile performance, and weak pricing guidance are the most material weaknesses to fix. More details here https://www.sitelist.co/sites/anyship/review”

“He runs a Product Hunt-style launch platform for smaller SaaS products. After two months: • 20 founders joined • 10 paid $40 • 8 launched • Nearly all came from one Discord community He assumed reach was the problem because that acquisition channel wouldn’t scale. But during our traction interview, something more important came up: he had never asked the eight founders whether the traffic produced a signup, email, or sale. So the first recommendation wasn’t “find another channel.” It was: contac”

“start with the problem, not the SaaS. Find one small annoying problem people already have, build the simplest version that solves it, and get it in front of real users as early as possible. I spent way too much time thinking I needed everything polished before launching. Turns out you learn more from a few real users than from weeks of planning 😅”

“Hi everyone, I'm 22 years old and I own a start up with my co-founder, we both just graduated college and we built a b2b SaaS that's live with 60 users and growing. We've been live since beginning of June.I wanted to post on here because we need help, real help and we don't know where to look or who to ask or how to find reliable people. We see teams like Cluely and Whop and obviously they're billion dollar companies but how do people in start ups find a team like that? Not just employees but a”

“I heard a podcast in which the founder said he had a group 8 to 10 redditors who made a pact to upvote, comment and drive engagement soon as anyone in their group posted something.. i guess reddit is a good place to find such likeminded people needing teh support.. then the group can all do the same in product hunt.. once upvoted and engagement show the number of organic views and engagemnt improves too.. signups Im not sure though..”

“I'd stop thinking about every channel at once and pick 2 for a few weeks. For me that would be SEO + direct conversations with people who actually have the problem. Ten useful conversations are probably worth more right now than thousands of random impressions.”

“the denominator is app-side, not ga4. the 3,292 comes out of revenuecat, so it's devices that opened the app and hit the sdk. a crawler would have to install from the app store and launch it, so i'm not worried about that one. where your check does bite is one step earlier. the 4.66k clicks and 5.48m impressions are web, and there's nothing joining the web side to the app side. no account, no first-touch stored. so "seo brings the users" is inferred from two lines moving to”

“seems I'm with most people here. Launched over a month ago, commented on threads to learn about peoples problems on reddit, and no signups so far. X is tougher as I don't have a branded account and won't pay to be verified. Maybe if I get some traction and recognition and customers then I'll pay, but if no one's answering cold emails or signing up from comments on reddit, no use in paying to still get nothing”

“If most customers use this for an occasional batch rather than every week, I would start with credits or pay-per-generation instead of forcing a subscription. Let them preview the result, then sell small credit packs with a lower unit price at larger volumes. Add a subscription later only if you see a real group returning regularly, and include a fixed number of credits rather than promising unlimited use. Before setting the amounts, ask the 25 users whether they needed one project or expected o”

“Honestly providing sm value for free is impressive but I will work on the UI a bit if I were you especially for mobile”

“do some reach out over LinkedIn and ask people to pick their brain. Most will ignore you (don't take it personally) but a few will. Or use your personal network.”

“Don't let the fear of migration paralyze you here. Switching a social media scheduler is not like migrating a database, it takes 15 minutes to disconnect APIs and reconnect them elsewhere. If you truly only have 10 minutes between tasks, go with Publer or Metricool. Publer has the cleanest scheduling flow and a solid unified inbox that doesn't feel bloated. By the time you genuinely outgrow either of them, you will have hired a dedicated marketer who will want to pick their own enterpris”

“It's always the first 100 paying customers 10 is a very small number especially when the product is having a small ticket size.”

“You right I need to unpussy and focus on gettin customers instead of just being s product led founder”

“What if I don’t have customers to talk too am slowly getting traffic”

“One customer isn't weak demand, it's that you are just worse than nothing at acquiring customers, a monkey could do a better job, most probably . Any product on earth can achieve a handful of customers with relative ease then it gets harder and harder, achieving 100 require more acquisition knowledge but the product is still irrelevant. Reaching 1000 active customers now requires a good product because if the bucket is leaking too fast, it becomes a really tough challenge. If you can&#39”

“Have you actually talked with customers? Or more importantly listened to what they say? Don’t hide behind your keyboard.”

“Hey I’m new here and I’m new to this SaaS thing can y’all tell how to get started in this thing ? submitted by /u/No_Guess_3491 [link] [comments]”

“The offer is unusually clear, and "you approve the wording, not whether it exists" is the best sentence in it. Keep that. On 30 days: from the ops side it's too short, but not for hosting reasons. A case study with real numbers needs cycles, not calendar. An automated weekly process needs 4-6 runs before anyone trusts the numbers; an integration needs at least one month-end close to prove the reconciliation didn't drift. I'd tie the case study to evidence instead of days: &”

Thank you for the kind words. Definitely been very hard. But I will say the product is useless without its customers. So thank you

“That's a great question that I think really helps me dial in our goal. I think firstly, for me it kind of feels like a "shoot for the moon and land among the stars if you miss" kind of situation honestly; I think the goal is to have enough growth for YC to look at it favorably with indisputable metrics like paying subs, but if we're at that point and they say no then it won't be the end of us by any means.”

“Thank you! Yeah I think that the issue is that the problem really still hasn't been solved yet properly, so I kinda started off with just building a tool that helps me. Yeah definitely some great advice on avoiding repetitiveness. I think the way I'm trying to level up my game there is with a nice notion template I found for social media management. I was studying some of the top social media content creators like Jenny Hoyos and a few others and it seems like they all have a similar pro”

My first 100 users for me : X was the best platform.

“This is honestly some great insight. I had a feeling that this would be the primary driver. Thanks for the motivation!”

“How do I get this revenue and understanding for my own product?”

“Building a small SaaS makes it tempting to keep adding things because an idea sounds useful. I caught myself doing that recently. The better question is whether the feature solves a problem users already have, rather than whether it makes the product look more impressive. Scope gets expensive very quickly. submitted by /u/pikwisely [link] [comments]”

“I've been running a small scheduling tool on my own for about fourteen months, currently at 83 paying users. I get maybe 35 signups a week, but most of them poke around once and never open it again, and nearly everyone who does convert does it inside the first two days. I know the reflex answer is onboarding, and I've rebuilt that twice now, so I don't think this is people failing to find the features. What was the thing that pulled yours back for a second session? submitted by”

“Just ship a hypothesis once. Gather contributors for a test run. You need to discover a real pain, set a hypothesis, contact some prospective customers, doesn't need to be existing customers, 5-8 suffice, validate the hypothesis with identifying the pain is real, build a pilot, test that with customers of the brand, 3-5 suffice, and then show the data of the product proofing value. You can do that on your own. Gather ICs who want to take pat on a test run. Sounds like your company doesn'”

“this is a good exercise tbh. one thing worth calling out though, the "manual task" angle works best for bottom-of-funnel content. top of funnel you usually still need a broader problem framing or nobody searches for it in the first place”

Thank you for the feedback. I will focus on that

“How are you dealing with support? Specially maybe during hours your “unavailable” as support? Do you outsource any service hours to third parties?”

“Thank you for the feedback. I just updated the website and added the Demo feature so I am keeping a track of it. For now I am just testing how users and people respond to it and I will keep improving. Looking at the feedback I am positive that this will help people in the future”

“33 years old, currently trying to grow my business by getting more users who will engage with my product. I think I did well to te first 100.. Friends and family resource first led to 40 users and a group promoter. Group promoter pushed the numbers over 100 until mental health put him on the bench. I have heard about Product Hunt and these other things, good and sus.. If you have been in my position and gone beyond, could you share? submitted by /u/ayandakopanogatsha [link] [co”

“I’d love feedback and ideas on how to drive the first 100 customers to https://flypombo.com . It’s an AI native lifecycle marketing platform, designed to help founders build their email sequences, transactional emails and anything lifecycle marketing directly from their AI coding agents. Focused more on email but also adding SMS and other channels soon.”

Thank you! 🙏

“Yeah, scheduling logic can get messy when you’re testing different setups. I ended up using a VPS with Hostinger and Docker made it easier to test things without messing up the main setup.”

Thanks. Let me check this

“Zoft scores 75/100, with strong design execution, usability, and decision-support surfaces. Its most material weaknesses are a 4.1-second mobile LCP, unclear pricing and trust information, and a homepage canonical that points to a redirecting URL. Read more here https://www.sitelist.co/sites/zoft/review”

“Running a small SaaS and fake signups are starting to skew my trial metrics pretty badly. Disposable emails and IP blocking aren't cutting it anymore. Any of you in similar situations, and what do you for it? submitted by /u/No_Honeydew_2453 [link] [comments]”