I'm giving up on my SaaS sales journey

[chunhe889]

I resigned from my full-time job to commit my entire time to building envsecrets.com. It wasn't an instantaneous decisions. I'm very quick to reject 99% of the SaaS ideas. So, I thought this through.

1. I personally felt the requirement of a quick tool like this.
2. I knew almost all developers on the planet at least deal with this problem.
3. There are legitimate competitors. I knew I could single-handedly build a product at least as good as their even if not better. My primary competitor is YC backed and funded.
4. I know I could build this by myself. While maintaining it's security and keeping it open-source.

Here are my problems:

1. My entire time goes in development. Because I'm the only one building and maintaining quite literally the entire codebase. All services and infra included.
2. My sales suck. I don't have even a single paid customer by now.
3. This is my first time trying to sell something I've built. Earlier the companies I worked for, obviously took care of that.
4. Though, almost everyone I talk to instantly gets interested, but almost nobody even warmly completes the conversation. I don't even get close to offering a $5 subscription.
5. I tried onboarding a few interested fellows as potential co-founders to handle sales while I handle dev. I’ve tried part-time with a few folks like that and honestly I’m not that against it but 15-20 days into their commitment and eventually folks realise they are not really able to commit the required time and effort which in turn unfairly affects the project.
6. Much more lousier tools are able to score $5 subscribers on ProductHunt but I get zero visibility for a clearly more complex software.
7. I have no idea how to properly cold email without pissing people off.
8. I have tried discord/slack/reddit communities but every place has moderation rules which need me to put in months of work in building networks before I can properly leverage those groups.

I'm giving up on selling the tool, which I'm very confident is required by too many developers on the planet, and I'm not even able to hunt a potential co-founder willing to commit full-time to take the tool to $10k MRR with me.

I don't intend to build a complete 25 member company over this tool even though my primary competitor has done precisely that + raised $3 mil. But I only aim to take this software to $15K MRR which I'm very confident it deserves.

I'm trying to be very patient and rational about this but I'm getting tired and slowly giving up.

Edit: I really appreciate so many of you taking out the time to reply to this post. I'd be grateful if you all went ahead and starred the repository while you are at it: https://github.com/envsecrets/envsecrets

 

[kadmiel]

@chunhe889 Hey don't give up yet. Your tool has potential! If it's not blowing a hole in your finances I'd say keep at it for at least another year.

As others have said I think you'll find it hard marketing this to individual devs because the benefit is not immediately visible like say a copilot subscription. You want to target engineering managers, DevOps leads, CTOs of small firms, VPs and the likes. Basically decision makers for a dev team.

I think your free plan is also too generous.. consider skimming some features off ...

All the best!

 

[nichole08]

@kadmiel In my opinion with many dev tools (this included) you should market the benefit to individual devs (users) and sell it to their boss/ bosses boss (buyer).

The CTO typically doesn't care about the technicalities and the workflow. Devs do and they feel the pain. So you should build empathy/trust with that user.

Then, once you get adoption, sell (or do both at the same time).

There is also a concept called middle-out sales

• market to IC dev
• outreach/sell to team leader
• help team leader convince the boss

I put my thoughts on dev sales together in this article: https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/selling-to-developers

This is also a fantastic article describing the dev tool sales https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/the-developer-marketing-funnel

You have 3 stages in that funnel:

• Exploration. Help people see what your tool does, how it works with other tools, and what is special about it
• Demo. Show the result of how things will work when implemented
• Internal sale. Helps devs sell it to other people involved in buying dev tools

I hope this helps.

 

[kadmiel]

@nichole08 Yes this is a good breakdown

 

[chunhe889]

@kadmiel Hey, thanks!

Are you a developer as well?

 

[kadmiel]

@chunhe889 Yes I am ... I'd definitely consider your tool when the need arises.. but just a quick glance tells me the free plan is more than sufficient for me... So I'm guessing a lot of other devs will fall into this category

 

[chunhe889]

@kadmiel I've intentionally created a free-forever plan to allow devs to use it forever for their personal/side projects.

You only need to pay for more seats when you bring in more team members for collaboration.

 

[kadmiel]

@chunhe889 That's cool... Can also work well as a long term strategy. So if they get value from it, they can introduce it to their team

 

[mattithyah]

@chunhe889 I'm going to give it a try for my personal project! I'm a security engineer and will push it to my team if I like it and find that it fits our needs as we currently use HC Vault!

 

[chunhe889]

@mattithyah Hey, I'm glad to hear that.

1. Please give it a shot for your personal projects. Ping me if you get stuck anywhere and need help.
2. Yeah, Vault seems like an overkill if your use-case is only using it's KV engine for environment variables. Plus, it needs dedicated HR for maintenance and setting up ACLs.
3. If your only use-case is environment variables, I'm sure you'll find envsecrets.com much easier and fast.

 

[mattithyah]

@chunhe889 I've DMed you it's exactly what I was looking for last week! Don't give up on it. I say it has potential

 

[chunhe889]

@mattithyah Hey, thanks!

 

[yasmine]

@chunhe889 Check out this site. They talk about how to market saas tools for developers to developers. They also have a slack channel that is really good. https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-guide

 

[nichole08]

@yasmine Thanks for sharing it @yasmine!

I am the author if you'd like to follow up on something @chunhe889

 

[chunhe889]

@yasmine Thanks. I'll check it out.

 

[academicg]

@chunhe889 Please DM me.. I feel I have a lot of info that will help you. I just don't want to put my ideas on blast. I saw your website and it looks really nice.

 

[chunhe889]

@academicg Sure.

 

[jillybean736]

@chunhe889 Looks like you have a great solution pitched at the wrong audience. I think targeting developers is probably not the right approach. Yeah, sure it's a problem, do I care enough to solve it no. Do I care enough to also pay for it, definitely no. You need to be blogging hard about the problem and detailing past issues at companies with an ENV leak has caused loss or legal issues. Then, target CISOs and their subordinates with a company wide solution. $999 p/m for complete end-to-end environment management control with risk assessment for when employees leave. It's also look to see if I could get someone to underwrite it with an insurance policy. E.g. buy our solution and get $1m of cyber security coverage.

 

[chunhe889]

@jillybean736

1. Yes, targeting developers is turning out to be hard. They simply don't seem to be seriously concerned about security of secrets. The smaller the team, the more lackadaisical.
2. Problem with targeting CISOs and similar executives is that they are less of coders and more of "compliance guys." They repeatedly ask me about SOC-2, HIPAA and other compliance certificates. I'm too early to apply for them, and they are anyway fairly expensive ordeals. I open-sourced the repo in an attempt to build greater trust.
3. Not so sure how that insurance idea.

 

[jess75]

@chunhe889 I agree you need to be blogging about it.
Usually devops and sysadmins are responsible for such choices in big teams and companies.
Infra choices are always made by sysadmins, and devops not devs.
thats why you need to know where to find them, for example our devop in the company was the one who introduced Hashicorp, if he had ever heard of you or read an article about you, he would have chosen you.

• Also keep in mind in many countries having a secret management system, is a requirenment to get a security certificate, which is a must for many agencies who wanna market their security level, you see the image here? how deep this infra is? and thats why such decision would be not by the hands of devs?
• you need to blog about security, about Hashicorp, about different security styles and tools and protocls like zero trust, to gain organic seo