Here's a quick story about my biggest SAAS success to date.
I was working as a software engineer at Expedia. On the side, I was running cold email outreach for a few saas companies.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of doing cold email was writing the email sequences. Especially to do proper A/B testing with 2-4 variations of each email. I ended up shortcutting this with chatgpt. However, vanilla gpt sucks at writing emails, so I slowly put together a prompt I'd use. Along with the prompt, I'd input the company's product, the pain point of the buyer, and any metrics or case studies I had.
The result was pretty good. It got me about 75% of the way there. It saved a ton of time.
I have built a few gpt wrappers before, and it's honestly a lot harder than it sounds. Getting quality results that are accurate can be difficult. But, I was already using gpt to write these emails, so I thought I might as well at least build the tool for myself.
My initial repository commit was on April 20th.
I used it myself, and it was awesome.
I hosted it completely for free for anyone to use. I tracked IP addresses of users to see how many people tried it.
Stats:
I finished up adding sign ups and payments on May 4th.
I launched on product hunt... and TADA! Crickets. A few more sign ups but no paid users.
Once I implemented sign ups, I allowed everyone to start with 5 generations for free. People loved it, but I noticed multiple people would abuse the system, creating multiple accounts for themself to get more free credits and avoid paying.
So I made the scary decision to completely remove the free plan 2 days ago.
And in the last 24 hours?
I got my first 4 subscribers.
I'm not rich by any means, but man it feels good when things finally start to work out.
I know it's kind of lame giving advice to others when I'm sitting here at $36 MRR, but at one point I would look up to me now, so here's my advice.
I was working as a software engineer at Expedia. On the side, I was running cold email outreach for a few saas companies.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of doing cold email was writing the email sequences. Especially to do proper A/B testing with 2-4 variations of each email. I ended up shortcutting this with chatgpt. However, vanilla gpt sucks at writing emails, so I slowly put together a prompt I'd use. Along with the prompt, I'd input the company's product, the pain point of the buyer, and any metrics or case studies I had.
The result was pretty good. It got me about 75% of the way there. It saved a ton of time.
I have built a few gpt wrappers before, and it's honestly a lot harder than it sounds. Getting quality results that are accurate can be difficult. But, I was already using gpt to write these emails, so I thought I might as well at least build the tool for myself.
My initial repository commit was on April 20th.
I used it myself, and it was awesome.
I hosted it completely for free for anyone to use. I tracked IP addresses of users to see how many people tried it.
Stats:
- Over 300 people tried it by marketing on X and reddit
- 21 people generated 6 or more emails
- 16 people came back on a later date to use the product again
I finished up adding sign ups and payments on May 4th.
I launched on product hunt... and TADA! Crickets. A few more sign ups but no paid users.
Once I implemented sign ups, I allowed everyone to start with 5 generations for free. People loved it, but I noticed multiple people would abuse the system, creating multiple accounts for themself to get more free credits and avoid paying.
So I made the scary decision to completely remove the free plan 2 days ago.
And in the last 24 hours?
I got my first 4 subscribers.
I'm not rich by any means, but man it feels good when things finally start to work out.
I know it's kind of lame giving advice to others when I'm sitting here at $36 MRR, but at one point I would look up to me now, so here's my advice.
- Learn from every failure, take a break to gather yourself, and try again with your new knowledge. This is my 5th saas product I've built, and I'm excited about $36 MRR... it's not an easy road. But every failure contains learnings.
- Start with the distribution. If you have a killer idea, first think about who will purchase it and how you will reach those people. Please have a plan before writing any code. For me, it was cold email. I can easily target thousands of business development reps who send cold emails every day and could benefit from my tool.
- Be patient. It sucks but you simply have to be patient. Even if you are doing everything right, it will take time for you to build a trustworthy landing page. Don't try a marketing channel for a day and give up. I'd give each one at least a week, maybe a month before assuming it doesn't work.
