When I got into SAAS, I thought it went like this:
- Build a project you have in your head
- Profit
No one told me about validation, marketing, and sales! And I only figured it out 6 months after coding up my first project, finding 0 users. Why is it so hard to understand the importance of these concepts for programmers? It’s like we insist on only learning them after we fail.
Right? It’s almost like movies are dramatized and use a whole lot of fiction to tell their stories. Wild.
Here are some of my thoughts on X(Twitter) yesterday. I hope they inspire you.
START MARKETING THE DAY YOU START CODING!
In today’s fast-paced tech world, it is realized that building new features isn’t the be-all and end-all.
- Tough but essential lesson: The heart of product success isn’t just in the code; it’s in market fit and user engagement.
- Talking to real users and understanding their needs is more crucial than ever.
- Yes, we love to code, but if we’re building features that aren’t requested by paying customers, are we really creating value?
Remember, stepping out of our comfort zone and facing potential rejection from the market can be daunting, but it’s a necessary step towards true innovation and profitability.
Let’s not just code. Let’s connect!This should be the top comment in this thread.
Most of the SaaS founders that I’ve interviewed attributed their success to priortizing their marketing over building.
Build it (and marketing the sh*t out of it), and then they will come
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You forgot the part where, mark was in university when he was coding Facebook. He had the directory of users because his friend had student emails.
Depends… If I design a solution primarily for myself, and I’m using it, then no validation needed. Your project will have its clients.
cause building is cheap, with ai its going to get cheaper. The money is in the marketing and sales and ux
The thing with that movie and a lot of giant companies today is that they were built at a time where those concepts did not matter a lot. Back then there was (almost) no other service like that to race against. But there were a lot of people just jumping on the web, this can explain the success of some web products.
Failure is often a prerequisite to learning.
Eric Ries book “The Lean Startup” is worth a read - instead of spending months building something, to only then learn that users don’t want it, it explores ways of testing your ideas and learning those lessons much earlier on in the process.
Its a right of passage all of us have to go through 🥲🥲🥲, but if you want my advice maybe try building some micro products and see how that goes, so u can learn all the skills of indiehacking with low investments. These sites should take you like a week or less!
That’s the winner bias. There are thousands of people making different SAAS but you never hear about their stories, because their products fail. You only hear about the ones who make it, and using data from those successful ones might give you wrong ideas.
This is just how everyone thinks by default. Everyone thinks if you just have the right idea you’ll be successful. “Oh if I’d just come up with Snapchat I’d be a billionaire!” But because the average person doesn’t have the ability to implement an idea at all, they never get proven wrong.
Programmers do have the ability to implement a lot of their ideas, so they learn the hard way that that’s not how it works.
Join indiehackers. There you can find tons of posts about validation and marketing strategies. Everyday peole share their experiences and insights on how they are doing it.
People way underestimate how much circumstances and pure luck factor into their success. Was Zuckerberg really that great a coder or was the idea so good and that’s why it worked, or was it the perfect storm of right time right place? Timing matters a lot. The best way to increase your chances of a product success is to launch many products as quickly as possible. Don’t wait for the perfect idea or perfect time. Hopefully you’ll learn something with each one and eventually the stars will align
^^^ that.
The other thing that became evident was in the movie one of his best friends (Severin) had wealthy parents that bankrolled the spiraling server costs in the early days, How many people are going to be in that position?