SaaS Founders Can't Crack Distribution
SaaS founders are struggling with the practicalities of distribution and user adoption after product development. They lack clear guidance on how to effectively market and acquire users, and face challenges in achieving consistent usage and network effects crucial for their product's value. The ease of building is contrasted with the difficulty of getting users.
SOURCES (60)
“wasting money is not positive. Think of sales a tax, if companies would give honest up front pricing and were not trying to inflate prices via a sales team things could run smoother”
“Jump from 1 to 10 usually comes from talking to that first group of users. Learn why they bought, what problem they were solving, and find more people with same pain”
“nice idea! lmk when you have it up and running and I can try to put it on the site”
“meta changes apis every month. built one of these platforms, spent entire year chasing broken endpoints.”
“Do market research, noone here can reliably claim that without knowing much more details about your case. Check similar apps, check their growth rates, find out potential. Check online for, as another commenter said, people acutely complaining about budgeting problems and ask them what they would be looking for in a solution so you know some things to implement that people are actually looking for. Then go from there.”
“As the headline goes, currently building plugins in a software tool (Figma), i'm getting users but they're not converting to paid users. Any tips? or help with this? i'm fairly new to microsaas creation and i'm not sure as to what are my next steps... submitted by /u/Own-Statistician1899 [link] [comments]”
“My SAAS hit 600$ mrr. I know its not much, couldve been much more, but I just dont know how to set up the marketing strategy for it. The fun thing is its kinda new to the market and I dont even know who to copy, some people told me to test, but testing takes a lot of money. Any experienced SAAS owners who shared this problem? submitted by /u/Necessary_One_1720 [link] [comments]”
“Welcome to our series of sharing 30 actionable SaaS tips in 30 days. On Day 3 , we’re talking about one of the most overlooked parts of referral marketing: timing. When referral programs underperform, most founders look at the reward first. They increase the incentive, change the commission, or redesign the landing page. But research and real-world SaaS experience point to a different problem. Customers are far more likely to refer others after they’ve experienced a meaningful success with your”
“I am the "marketing manager" of an app me and my friends are building, but I'm not performing very well - the question is: how do you market apps? (It's a budgeting app for the EU market, we are collecting people for the waitlist, but its going really bad) Launching it very soon (~5-6 months), but without users, it would be a waste of time What I tried: posting in subreddits (banned from 2), we are doing social media (avg 100 views) I don't want to hear that I should quit,”
“6 signups but 0 paying users usually means distribution was the issue before the product got a real test. Though the paying gap is worth noting too, that usually means wrong audience or the problem wasn't painful enough to pull out a card for. On validate vs build, neither extreme works alone. Conversations without something concrete get you polite agreement, everyone likes an idea when there's nothing on the line. Full build before any validation risks months on nothing. What actually w”
“It's not "reach", he has incredibly valuable and useful lessons on digital marketing on YouTube, for free. Look for his long videos from a few years back”
“..and get your first 100 users from there. As u already know many successful startup stories begin from twitter, if u have the right audience. but everyone gives the same vague advice about growing on X. "post consistently." "provide value." "engage with your community." cool. thanks. means nothing. and so I went and read the actual ranking code X open-sourced, because they literally published the weights they use to decide who sees what. turns out the whole game is”
“That makes sense. I don’t have a traction number that would tell me it’s working, but the core metric I’m trying to move is number of paying customers. How would having a traction number in mind help?”
“I spent months building.W When I finally launched, almost nobody saw it. A few friends upvoted it, I posted on X, submitted it to Product Hunt... and then everything went quiet. That's when I realized something. We spend months building products, but only a few hours thinking about distribution. Launch day lasts 24 hours. Building lasts years. So I started wondering... Why isn't there a place where founders can keep sharing progress after launch? New features Revenue milestones Customer”
“Congrats on the launch, these numbers are great context to see broken down like this! A few questions if you don't mind: Outside of Product Hunt, did you push exposure through any other channels (Twitter/X, Reddit, newsletters, Discord communities, etc.), or was PH pretty much the whole distribution play for launch week You mentioned skipping cold DMs to hunters and going through networking instead. Could you unpack that a bit? Why? Do you think having a hunter was actually necessary for hit”
“i want to build my product as well .. From Reddit posts and comments of users and SaaS founders. i got motivation to build something .. for that i have to identify the problems and for what niche i'll build that product. It's easy to see the comments, but it's hard to comprehend and execute...”
“I go for strangers (reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn). Because people I know may be nice to me and just tell me what they think I want to hear (which is not helpful). And with strangers, I don't take it personally if they say that it's a bad idea. I ask things like : - please describe how you do X - which steps do you think is a waste of time / difficult ? - what's your favorite feature in Y? - where do you spend a lot of time in the process and why ? Then I describe what the solution I ima”
“I am a PhD Mathematics student and I’ve been working on a retention product for SaaS company and wanted some honest feedback from founders here. The problem I’m trying to solve is not simply showing churned subscriptions or failed payments. You can already see that in Stripe. I’m trying to catch the less obvious changes happening before a customer leaves. Things like: A customer is still active, but has slowly stopped using the features that originally gave them value An account looks healthy, b”
“The biggest beta risk here is not navigation. It is marketplace liquidity. I would test in one city and one narrow business category first, then manually seed both sides. Give businesses a simple template for a real paid brief and ask creators to apply. Measure time to first relevant application, not just onboarding completion. If the marketplace feels empty, usability feedback will be misleading. CrowdWis could also help you ask separate questions to local business owners and creators by intere”
“Built a niche specific MicroSaaS tool for a Pharmacovigilance and clinical trials. Small but real market — teams at pharma/biotech/CRO-type companies need this kind of training for staff, currently handled via internal SOPs and manual onboarding. Trying to decide GTM path: Option A — public deployment, open signup, self-serve subscription, let SEO/word-of-mouth/Reddit-type channels bring traffic in. Option B — direct outreach, pitch individual companies (LinkedIn, cold email, warm intros), get 3”
“Everyone keeps saying "just go talk to your users" like it's the easy part. Honestly the hard part is finding people to actually talk to in the first place, especially when you don't have a product yet and you're basically asking strangers for a favor. Right now my process is cold DMing people, kind of begging in communities like this one, and occasionally paying for one of those User Interviews type panels, which feels way too expensive for something as early as just valid”
“I have a question for which i dont see info on your website, is it AI on the backend which is actually doing research and writing the article and publishing it ?”
“I'm still very new to app publishing, so I don't really have a benchmark for whether these numbers are good, average, or below average. After roughly 2 weeks, here's where I'm at: 📱 ~120 installs 👀 ~360 Play Store listing visitors 📈 ~33% install rate from store listing visitors ⭐ 12 reviews 🌟 4.2 average rating Most of the installs came from testing communities and a few Reddit posts rather than organic Play Store traffic, so I'm still trying to figure out how to grow fro”
“Interesting, distribution is honestly the hardest part for most of us solo builders. 1200+ customers over two years is solid social proof. Will check out the premium tier, curious what "more sales-oriented features" ends up meaning.”
“most of them. building is the easy part. getting someone to find it and pay for it is the whole game every dev i know has a perfectly working product with zero users”
“Before global expansion, i will grow it in AU and NZ so that i can make them my home base for everything and Yup, i am exactly targeting the pin point of the problem and solving it which saves both time and money for them, and in return , we both make profit out of it , but i have no clue what to do next, if u have any idea kindly guide me through it. 🫶🏻”
“Hey everyone, am here to ask some genuine advice from docterpreneuer’s or from people who have already made a successful saas or have experience in this thing. To begin, I don’t know nothing about saas, but still i thought to give it a try because of the potential in this thing. To be honest , i know nothing about how to code, or what is coding, or frontend or backend or anything. But still am here doing this thing and after a month of getting to know what front end and backend means , i made a”
“Yeah it’s been quite insightful going through the whole thread, going to go talk to our current customers and partners, get their feedback and build a plan and go forward”
“For me validation is basically selling before coding. I put up a rough page, DM 10-15 people who clearly have the problem, and try to get either a call or a yes to a scrappy manual version. If nobody will take that tiny step, I assume the pain or positioning is off and I don’t build yet.”
“the pain point is real and specific, thats a good sign. one thing id focus on early is figuring out whether your buyer is the agency or the end client, because the messaging and pricing model will look pretty different depending on that”
“Is create an account the only option on that landing page? I found that once I built a dedicated page, separate from the rest of my site content, account creation increased by 58% over 12 months. I can't claim cause of all of that to dedicated page/single button labeled "create account" and only alternative to close the window, since I was building brand and increasing outreach over those same 12 months. Based on my team's best-effort isolation and data analysis, I could attrib”
“4 products shipped solo. All worked. All made $0. Building was never my problem. The killer is spending months on something, launching, and finding out nobody wanted to pay always after the time's already gone. So here’s my questions Before your last build, did you check whether people would actually pay? What did you do and did it work? submitted by /u/Advanced_Form3520 [link] [comments]”
“Thank you! I will look into that! What was your biggest struggle getting to 500K users? How much of the work are you able so do solo or at what point did you have to hire outside help?”
“You need to focus in on those who are paying. Why are they paying? Identify those prospects and market specifically to them.”
“Some feedbacks and advice of how getting more traffic and turning it into paid users? submitted by /u/thecodevision [link] [comments]”
“IMO if you’re getting paid users then something is working. You can optimise the free -> paid funnel. You can keep the free users so long as they aren’t costing and you get a good enough conversion rate. Try reducing the features / time limit of the free users to incentivise the paid option. Good luck”
“I'm in a very similar position, building something I'm not sure has mass appeal but I need it for myself so can't stop. Just checked out pickd. Lovely idea anyway! I'm definitely open to something that helps me pick a movie. I'm also a streaming service hopper so really appreciate being able to select only the few channels I currently have active subscriptions for. Actually that alone is an interesting feature especially since I always have arte, ZDF etc. and I was actually s”
“Honestly, mine's the opposite of the usual story here. The code was never the wall — I shipped a working product end to end. The wall was that "marketing" isn't one skill you dread, it's the slow grind of talking to actual humans one at a time, and there's no workflow or automation that shortcuts the part where you don't have users yet. What I've found is that the founders stuck in the private-repo trap usually aren't bad at marketing — they're avoiding”
“The first version of FlawCue was already built when I killed it. I then made what I thought was the responsible decision: open a waitlist before building the new direction. The waitlist got 0 signups. The problem was not only the copy. I was asking people to wait for a product with no clear launch date and no current result. So I changed the offer. I’ve spent more than six years building web applications, and I’m opening a small number of founder-led, tool-assisted founding launch reviews. Each”
“this is basically the whole reason indiehackers exists as a graveyard of finished products lol. the marketing wall is real but I think the actual failure point is more specific than "marketing is hard" — it's that most of us default to cold outreach or generic posting because that's the only playbook we know, and both feel awful and don't work. you DM strangers, you get ignored or flagged as spam. you post your launch and get crickets because nobody in that thread was actua”
“Funny responses... since a bunch of successful products (including this one) are free.”
“yo. be honest. how many of you currently have a finished (or 90% finished) web app / app just sitting in a private repo because you have no idea how to get users? you spend months perfecting the database, fixing every bug , and polishing the UI. but the moment you have to actually market it, you hit a wall. marketing feels like screaming into an empty void. so you launch to absolute crickets, get discouraged, and start building the "next" project instead to avoid the distribution phase”
“yo. be honest. how many of you currently have a finished (or 90% finished) web app / app just sitting in a private repo because you have no idea how to get users? you spend months perfecting the database, fixing every bug , and polishing the UI. but the moment you have to actually market it, you hit a wall. marketing feels like screaming into an empty void. so you launch to absolute crickets, get discouraged, and start building the "next" project instead to avoid the distribution phase”