Launching a SaaS? Watch This Before You Start!

Key Takeaways

If you're building a SAS or thinking about building a SAS, in this video, I'm going to show you the mistakes that I made when launching my SAS a few weeks ago so you don't make those same mistakes. Before we start, if you could hit the subscribe button, give us a like, it just shows me that I'm not wasting my time making this content and that you're actually going to get some value from it. Okay, so a few weeks ago, I launched my first SAS called Influ. It's a content creation tool for influencers for X. The idea is that they can create their own threads, uh, news-based tweets, basically making their life a bit easier, okay? Saving them time, research, and all that. Okay, I'm not going to lie, I thought the whole process would be a lot easier than it was. Okay, I knew it was going to be difficult, but I didn't realize it was going to be quite this difficult. So, what I thought I'd do was make a quick video explaining and sharing what I would do differently if I was to start the whole process again with Influ. Basically, so you guys don't waste your time, money, and brain cells like I have over the past four or 5 months. Firstly, I should have spent more time on the problem and not the product itself. When I first got the idea for Influ, I jumped straight into building it. I thought, "Hang on, people have a problem with finding content to post on on X. I'll just build a tool to to solve that problem." But here's the thing. I didn't validate the problem enough. I didn't talk to potential users. I didn't research much into other companies who are doing something similar. Um, and I didn't ask really would anyone pay for this. So I think the first bit of advice I can give you is that you need to spend spend more time understanding the actual problem than diving straight into building it. And okay, it's a it's a very common thing. You know, you want to get you want to get started. You you you've got this idea, you're very keen, you're very eager to get going. But if people just actually spend more time sort of understanding the the issue that you're trying to solve, then you're going to waste far less time by actually building something that you're not sure that anyone actually is going to want to use. So talking to real people is going to help. Uh post on X, Discord, you know, Facebook, Instagram, just try and get as much information as you can to start with because you'll end up you'll build a lot smarter. Okay, so number two, I overbuilt way too early. Okay, this is another common problem. People think, oh, you know, it has to be absolutely perfect. Um, so they you spend weeks adding more features, then you then you think of something else and you think, oh god, I just if I just add that, if I just add this, you know, you you start obsessing over the UI, you you're obsessing over the buttons. Um, you know, but at which time you've got zero users. So, what should I have done? Well, I should have launched a much simpler version. Okay, something very basic, something that only generated say one tweet at a time. Then I should have put it out there to the public. Um, and then I could have improved after I got some basic feedback. You need to ship fast. Feedback is your best feature. Okay? Nobody cares about what color button you've got or how the UI looks temporarily. It does it doesn't matter. What you need to know is you need to validate your idea. You need to make sure that people are going to use it and more importantly people are going to actually pay to use it. At the end of the day I I spent months building something that I I still don't really know if anyone wants. You know I I I was obsessing over the UI um obsessing over features and I can't stress this enough. It's so important that you validate your idea first and don't waste time like I did. I wasted months obsessing obsessing over all this and and you know it look influent might may take off. I don't know. But there's still a chance that I've wasted all those months when all I could what I should have done was validate the idea first and save my time. If it was if I knew it was going to fail, if I knew it was going to be a lot harder than it was, then I could have said, do you know what? Let's come up with something else or let's let's let's create a a um a basic version. Push that for a bit. If that doesn't work, then I can move on to something else. Okay, so number three, I should have marketed way sooner than than I did. Okay, I waited till pretty much um the app or the SAS was finished uh until I was happy with it. I didn't really promote it on X beforehand. I just thought to myself, no, I'm going to knuckle down. I'm going to build this to perfection, then I'll launch it, okay? And then I'll start marketing it. But that is completely the wrong way of doing it. Like like I discussed previously, you have to validate your idea first. You need to you need to to drop feeders. You need to if you know if you get your validation, say you got your validation, people are interested in this, you need to start building in public. You need to start driving demand for for your product. Okay? You want to get people curious. You want to get people interested. Um you can share everything. Share everything in the build. Share, you know, the all the successes. Share the the bugs, you know, share all the frustrations. Just get it out there. Get as much content out there as possible. Don't just bury your head, you know, in in on your uh computer and just code or, you know, or use no code, lovable, whatever you're using. You know, get the product out there, get the ideas, get, you know, put it in people, put it in people's heads. The more content you post about your SAS, the more eyes it draws, okay? The the more people become curious, more people come become interested in it. People don't necessarily buy products, okay? they're buying into the story of the product. Okay. Um don't I I waited too late to tell my story. Um and that's something that I will I won't make that mistake again. Okay. With my next SAS, I'm already planning that. I'm planning how I'm going to market it, how I'm going to post it about it on X. So don't make that same mistake that I did. So if you want to take any anything away from this this bit of advice, start marketing before your product is actually ready, okay? because that way you'll build an audience and you might even actually get some some pre-sales before it's before it's ready to launch. Okay, so number four, I try to do absolutely everything alone. All right, that's from building the SAS, from the marketing, the the business plan, the the content writing, the social media side. Okay, and it was really stressing me out. You know, it was I was I'd have late nights. Um my you know, my brain was fried whilst I was working full-time. I thought actually maybe asking for help would make me look a bit weak and pathetic. But, you know, I I've been completely wrong on this because there are whole communities, you know, based on X, you've got indie hackers, loads of forums that you can just, you know, everyone's willing to help each other. Okay, that's what we're we're all here to make money. There's plenty of money to be made. Um, just my advice is just ask for ask for help. Okay, if you're you're completely new to this like like I am really um then you're going to need some assistance, you know, whether it's using chat GPT or you know or some AI based platform or actually using real humans, you know, who have got experience or can suggest ideas, then then please do it because otherwise you're going to really you're going to find it so stressful and you're going to struggle. So, make sure that you take this this bit of advice. Okay, so number five, I didn't think about the monetization aspect early enough. I was so focused on building the product, getting it out there, and not actually really considering what I'm going to charge for this. I had no idea where to start. Okay, so I looked at some of my competitors and they were charging, so 30, 40 bucks a month. And I was thinking to myself, would I pay 30 or 40 bucks a month for this? And I wasn't sure. But then I thought if other people are paying on their platform then maybe they pay that sort of money for Influ. But so this led me to obsessing about the features thinking well okay I've got to make sure that my app's got more features than than they have so I can justify that price. And also at the time I wasn't aware of the prices of the APIs for for X for for instance. Okay, I started building this thing without looking into the prices for the APIs because I assumed they would be similar to other social media platforms. Little did I know that they were absolutely nowhere near same prices as as like Facebook or um you Tik Tok or YouTube. The X APIs are absolutely astronomical. Okay, it's ridiculous. But so so I then had to try and price accordingly to to use the X APIs. Then I realized that I there was absolutely no way I could scale my business um with the price hikes of the the the the later tiers um of the X subscriptions. So I had to basically revamp my entire structure of of Inflow Amp making it um a standalone platform. So you essentially can't connect to X and post to X directly through my site. I think I have found a solution to that. Okay. So I've been working on that um uh using caching data and stuff. So I'm going to I am going to play around with that a bit more cuz I still think I think I can solve that that issue. So I will be continuing to to go down that road. So that's the five things that I've learned so far with building my first SAS. Um, so hopefully you got some, you know, you got some value from this this video. Um, I re, like I say, I I don't want you to waste the time and the u and have the same stress that I've gone through whilst whilst building this. Okay, no code certainly makes it faster, but it doesn't make it easier. Okay, building a SAS is not easy, but with the proper with a proper plan in place and determination, okay, you can do it. Anyone can do it. you've you know you've seen the testimonials on your on YouTube you know people making 10 20k a month from their own SAS companies it is doable but you've got to like I said you've got to have a proper plan don't waste time and you know and and keep believing because even if it's even if it's not your first SAS that that succeeds keep going like I'm going to keep going you know influ may succeed in the future but I don't know I'm going to keep working on it Um, but I've got other ideas that I want to start building as well. So, keep going. You're doing great. And please subscribe to the channel. Give us a like. and I'll catch you in the next