Starting a micro-SaaS - day 4

Following some of your advice from yesterday - big thanks to ToPe! (by the way, love the advice - keep it coming!) I started my work today by reworking the landing page for the site. I added screenshots of the app itself, and added a mention of the price of the product.

Additionally, I've slashed the price more than in half, to 3 USD. I don't think it was realistic or fair to be expecting people to be paying US$6.50 for what is a fairly basic react application. My target market is also families, who often lack in funds for discretionary purchases, and my product is very much a nice to have rather than a need to have, outside of some niche family environments.

Editing the landing page was a chore for sure. I've improved considerably in coding since I made it, and looking back at that old code makes me shudder - I'm half tempted to upload the code to it so you can all shame me for my liberal use of inline styling.

I'm better now - Promise! The only inline styles present in the actual application is in Material UI's sx prop.

I do have half a mind to rework the whole landing page, but ultimately it is converting so I'm going to focus my efforts on continuing to drive traffic.

I feel like this would be a good opportunity to go into more detail on my "funnel", so to speak.

The plan is visitors to the site click on a blog post.

Then, they click on a call to action from a blog post and reach the landing page.

Next, they fill out a registration form and log in to their account.

Finally, they confirm card details and begin their free trial, not churning out before the free trial ends (hopefully)

On to the meat of the day. Social traffic is down, most likely due to changes in my content marketing strategy (more on that later), but organic traffic is starting to happen which is really exciting! There's very much a limit to how much traffic I can drum up by writing 2 blog posts a day and sharing them on reddit (approximately 50 new sessions), but organic traffic can very much snowball.

Search console has a lag time of a few days, so I don't know exact numbers, but I can see at least one organic click from it, and according to google analytics I had 9 sessions from organic on day 4. I'm hoping this trend of organic traffic growth continues.

In the interest of keeping to my restriction of keeping myself to a maximum of two hours spent on this business per day, I decided to start using AI to write my blog posts for me. They're not terrible, but they're definitely not the best.

They do get clicks, those clicks have converted to 4 new sign ups (abandoned before card confirmation), but admittedly all of these were with the old price. I'm hoping to get a few genuine trials in the coming weeks, and with the increase in organic traffic this is very much a possibility.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm very much focused on throughput at the moment. Once i'm finished with exams for my course in a few weeks and can afford to spend more than two hours a day on the business, I'll go back and rewrite my best performing blogs into proper pillar content.

I'm not going to do the full P/L calculation today as it remains unchanged. Currently the business is losing USD$16 per month.

Summary: Focus is starting to shift from direct social traffic to building organic clicks, Landing page has been reworked to be more transparent, price has been reduced and I'm using AI to get more content out in a given time.

Thanks for reading!