Doubting myself due to slow growth. Am I working on the right idea?
After the intial launch the growth has been slow and now I am doubting myself that I am working on the right idea or not. This is my first product and I think I am just bad at marketing but sometimes I doubt the idea. Should I continue or not? Here is the link madhur-ai.com
I'm an entrepreneurial scientist who studies marketing for a living. Unfortunately, academia has done an EXCEPTIONALLY bad job of communicating research outside its little bubble.
As a result, and I see this constantly, people just don't understand the definition of marketing, let alone how to use it.
From your question, it seems that you (as almost everyone in the maker community) equate marketing to distribution.
You make a product, ship it, then you start "marketing" to find customers.
This is completely wrong. It's not that this can't work or that it can't be a valid approach (e.g. you're just interested in shipping product X), but this isn't how marketing was designed to be used.
If you need a heuristic, I'd much prefer you to equate marketing to research instead. Especially qualitative research as a small indiehacker.
In 1968, Professor McCarthy simplified an existing framework into what's now know as the 4P's of marketing: product & price, place & promotion.
As you can see, the development of "product" is in there. It's one of the levers that can be used after the diagnostic & strategic phases are done.
At the most fundamental level, you as a founder + marketer, have 3 jobs:
## i. You need to diagnose a well-defined market segment.
There are many people that could benefit from your idea. This large amorphous collection can be subdivided into subsets of customers with similar preferences. This is called a segment. But since you don't have the resources to cater to all segments, you pick one to serve. This is your target segment. (I call this "your audience" when I'm teaching my students.)
Now that you have a target segment, you can study them to find out what their expensive problems are. An expensive problem is a problem that is serious enough that they'd pay money to get it resolved. Read Star Problems. This framework doesn't really work for consumers but that's fine for now. Selling to consumers is much more of a black box than to business. The reason being "expensive problems / star problems." If they have a $10,000 problem that you can solve for $2,000 that's a no-brainer. With consumers, it's more about feelings.
To study them, big companies use sophisticated techniques to figure out the segments, like K-means clustering for example, and other quantitative marketing techniques.
You can forget about all that. Just focus on ethnography. Digital ethnography specifically. This means identifying the places where your audience (or target segment) hangs out online so you can study them.
Why online? It's easy to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time. You don't have to worry about social desirability bias. This is a cognitive bias that causes people to "lie". Either to themselves or to the researcher because they want to come across differently. Suppose you ask people "Are you a generous person?" Almost no one will say no because they don't want to view themselves as selfish or might be ashamed you (the researcher) will judge them.
## ii. Formulate a strategy
There are books and books, and blog and blogs full of confusing, overly complicated "advice" on what strategy is.
It's simple. Someone is at A and they wish to go to B. A strategy is the path you pick out of the collection of paths to go from A to B.
The strategy I recommend is to "demonstrate you can help your audience by actually helping them". (Again, this doesn't let itself well to consumers but it's great for B2B).
You already know A and B because of your qualitative market research, so now you simply help close the delta ever so slightly. This builds trust and helps establish you as an authority. (This is going from an audience to a tribe)
You can then get a subset of those people onto a list.
This is special because it means that you have a person that's raised their hand to say: I have this expensive problem + I trust you to help me solve it.
(Keep in mind that getting a person to sign up is already a sale with the price being $0.)
### iii. Execute the tactics
The very last step is the place that everyone starts at. The tactics. But how can you execute tactics if you don't have a strategy? And how can you have a strategy if you don't know who you're serving and what you're helping them with? Your guess is as good as mine. If this seems ridiculous, it's because it is.
So this final step is really just the implementation of the strategy. What exact tactics will you use to accomplish your strategy? This is also where your iteration should be. Not in the strategy but in the execution of it.
## Risk Reduction
But to answer your question directly, you should absolutely continue at the macro level.
You should, however, have zero loyalty to ideas. In order to reduce the systemic risk, you need volume. This is where @dvassallo 's Small Bets ideas comes into play. You try a bunch of things and then see what the market connects with.
Andrew Mason (Groupon founder) once said: It doesn't matter how smart you think you are, you'll never be smarter than the collective market. So ship a bunch of things and iterate.
Right now you can do one of two things: scrap the idea and go to the next one or start at step 1, the diagnosis of a market segment.
Your main job until you're successful will be to learn to grow through this cycle as many times as possible. The job of a comedian is not to write and deliver a successful set, it's to get comfortable writing jokes, going on stage, and iterating/killing the jokes. Then the good jokes will take care of themselves. The same holds true for you. Just continue to show up and do the work.
Good luck.
P.S. I see you're doing AI. Be careful hopping on trends. They're dangerous for three reasons: i. Lots of competition; ii. You're unlikely to be passionate about it which means you'll quit when it gets rough; iii. Easy come, easy go. If the money comes easily it tends to go easily as well when the fad is over. During facebook, everyone built a social media thingy. During Fourquare, everyone had a location app. During IG, everyone built a photo app. During Groupon, everyone did coupons. During Airbnb, everyone did sharing economy. During Uber... you get the gist.
Edit: I got a newsletter where I talk about stuff like this: https://www.YounglingResearch.com/subscribe
Truly an excellent post. I agree with all of this. I'm new to indie hacking, but I've worked in product for a decade, launching many successful B2B solutions.
I have also fallen into the trap of building a solution before researching the market, it's so easy to do.
I generally start with user research (mainly interviews) to help me iterate and get some validation on each of the following dimensions:
To me, these are all equal and can all be adjusted (pivoted) as you progress.
You won't perfectly validate all of these upfront, but you should have an assumption for each and be aware of the riskiest ones. Doing this upfront is hard work, but late-stage pivots are way more expensive.
Me too. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't make this mistake. Perhaps an evolutionary psychologists or a sociologists can shed light on why this particular trap is so attractive.
It also never goes away. You get better at dealing with it but there's a non-zero possibility that one makes that mistake again for the next business idea. It's just so counterintuitive. (And the smarter you are, the better you are at justifying why this one exception this one time is okay.)
Starting with user interviews (or customer development) is also a popular technique! Unfortunately, there's very little research with respect to the order of operations.
Empirically, I tend to recommend cust dev once the business has customers. From experience, I've seen people get nowhere despite a bunch of cust dev so the patterns are more difficult to discern than if you start with research.
But if it works, keep doing it. Always happy to see people applying solid marketing fundamentals.
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I hope you don’t give up. Making a living by selling products to people who care is hard but doable!
Instead of firing this career path, fire your approach.
I don’t know you but if I had to guess I’d say you picked ideas based on your gut.
That’s like trying to write a successful Netflix comedy special without ever performing in front of crowds… technically possible but the probability rounded to an integer is zero.
So then how do you do it?
Write a little bit, then go on stage in front of an audience and perform.
Do they laugh? That’s the litmus test.
No? Kill the joke or tweak it and try again tomorrow.
After MANY iterations you have a collection of jokes which become… your Netflix special.
But you didn’t dream it up in isolation. You got honest to god feedback from the real world.
Entrepreneurship is NO different.
There’s a word for doing what you want regardless of what anyone else thinks: hobby.
The second you want to get paid (= other people giving you THEIR money) you’re accepting that you are now in service to them.
This means, you start with researching your audience so you understand (and have cold hard proof) what their star problems are. (Google star problems Youngling Research). Problems that are serious enough a group of people is willing to pay $X to solve it.
So if you feel like your ideas are bad, they aren’t. Your research is most likely the culprit.
I got an eBook and a video that covers my Research-First methodology for finding problems that are painful enough so that you know your product will sell before you make it. You can have a look here.
But the TLDR is this: embed yourself in the culture of your audience until the problem becomes painfully obvious. This is not a spectrum, it’s binary. Keep doing research until it’s clear as day. Pay attention to what people complain about and what they’re currently buying. Ask yourself why they’re buying that. What job are they hiring that product for? And then once the problem is clear, you can start working on the solution using the comedian special approach I laid out above.
(Good luck and if you’ve got questions hmu RJY@YounglingResearch.com)
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Of course :)
Your personality is absolutely not an issue. Especially if you use the digital ethnography I recommend. You can just sit behind your computer and research your target segment.
As for the whole "people don't really know what they're willing to pay for until you shove it on their face," you absolutely need to get rid of that mindset.
You have chosen this career path which means you've given up the right to say "I'm making this because I think it's cool and you need it."
This is very "Jehovah's witness". You have to be cautious believing you know better what's right for other people than they do. Even if you're right (which you don't know for sure), it still comes across as condescending.
So your main job is to study them, figure out what sucks according to them, and then solve that problem in a way they not you, find valuable.
You'll notice how much more enjoyable it is to run a business this way. It literally is the difference between being Sisyphus and running after a boulder that's rolling downhill.
“The job of a comedian is not to write and deliver a successful set, it's to get comfortable writing jokes, going on stage, and iterating/killing the jokes.”
Great advice, thank you.
Thanks Chief! This is one of my favorite interviews. It's a roundtable of comics discussing comedy and at one point Louis CK asks Jerry Seinfeld how quickly he became successful. He shares this mindset there. I wrote about it here: https://www.younglingresearch.com/essays/oneofthoseguys
Wow, this comment is worth a standalone post.
Oh, I can see you already made it a standalone post on your website. 😄
Hahah yeah, fleshed it out a little and it makes it easier to refer people to it in the future. Whenever I see a good question, I assume OP is not the only person to have it.
This is excellent advice!
Appreciate it G
Thanks this really helps.
Glad to hear it
Your idea definitely looks worth pursuing. Communication could be better
Eg: on the playstore it says "Madhur AI: text to speech tts"
Not immediately clear what it does and what the benefit is.
Something like
"MadhurAI: Get your documents read to you while on the move"
may convey it better. All the best
Thanks I really needed this. I am very confused right now.
Don't ask if you are working on the right idea first.
Ask 'what am I doing to grow this'? If you are marketing like crazy (and being effective) and you have no growth, question the idea.
But if you build the best burger restaurant in the world and tell no one about it, is the idea wrong? Or do you just need to share it?
You are right I have not done marketing like crazy. This is my first saas so I was really confused but after this post it's clear that I am lacking on the marketing side of things. Thanks!
No problem. I am releasing a 'how to market a Saas guide' pretty soon. You can get on the list to get it here if you want - http://eepurl.com/bCWb6X
10k+ installs actually is not so bad at all! Here it might be rather a Model/Market Fit thing. You might want to dig into https://brianbalfour.com/essays/hubspot-growth-framework-100m from Brian Balfour.
Hope it helps!
n0nikk
Thanks
Honestly it's a way better idea than I see typically getting tossed around here. Also, don't worry so much about marketing. If you improve the product and add in some inbuilt marketing, you can use that as your marketing. For example, what if you told users to unlock features, they needed to refer a friend? There you go, more installs..
Thanks! this gives me hope. I 'll try adding referals.
You're welcome! Fingers crossed. Also if you do need some Venture Capital to pursue bigger things you're welcome to use my site to help with your pitch/find investors :) VCbackME.com
Thanks
Do not look at growth, look at retention rates and product usage. If the latter is good, you have a good product and you should continue building it.
I have 4+ years of experience in data science. I can help for free if needed.
Thanks! My retention is around 15~20% I don't know if it's good or bad.
In what timeframe? You need to dig deeper.
When are customers most likely to churn?
Are new customers churning in a later stadium?
Are customers using your product more often over time?
What type of customer uses your product excessively?
How do these numbers compare to other similar businesses?
These are all interesting questions to answer to analyze if you are heading in the right direction.
I have not analyzed all these things. I will look into these Thanks!
I think the idea is sound but the competition will be hard. The idea seems obviously valuable so there will be many well-funded competitors sooner or later. I would build something that's less obvious and can be somewhat profitable asap by catering it to a niche user group.
Don' be sad. The growth is of course very important, but the product experience is much more important.
Thanks I'll keep that in mind.
good
Idea seems nice man, but I think your messaging and CTA can be bit better. I'm a bit sceptical on the pricing plan, like is it free, or paid or freemium. Also, the paragraph font on the landing page can be better.
Thanks I'll imporve these.
A lot of factors play into the growth of your SaaS product. If you've got like 10k+ installs in the last 6 months (read this in the comments), then you're on decent track I believe.
You just need to market more effectively. Try revamping the website design. Make it more premium and it should feel more than just MVP type product. Also, see if you can add new content sections to explain your product, talk about visitor's issues and how Madhur AI solves.
Another idea would be to record YouTube videos and embed them on the website. Videos drive lot of engagement + conversions. I did that for my landing page and we've been getting lot of views on our demo.
I'd say just talk to your current users and see how much value you're delivering to them and then take a suitable call. Hope that helps bud!
Thanks I'll work more on marketing side of things. Your suggestions are really helpful.
It's very cool and great idea. How's the competition landscape though? What do you think is your value add compared to existing solutions out there? :)
Thanks! There are only 3-4 compititors not much. My app has few advance features like ocr and neural voices.
Keep it running, grow it slowly, but try launching other products too. Your first product is seldom your best or most profitable product.
I have a few ideas but I think I will face simillar problem with them. But thanks for the advice.
Looks pretty good. Improving the story step by step and push different use cases. The main question is: What do you want to achieve with your own product personally?
Thanks! that's a really good question. I just started this saas because I had a lot of ebooks whose audio books where not readily available. But for the past few weeks I am conflicted where to take it next.
+10k installs in under 6 months doesn't seem to me that you are on the bad path, just see where are the weak parts and try to fix them.
Good luck!
Thanks I'll try to improve my marketing I think that's the weakest part.
Looks good man, going solo takes time. Talk with other devs here:
https://vibehut.io/rooms/6303cec659d18f0016a69f3c
Thanks
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