In my previous post, I gamified my SaaS business journey and I defined level 5 like so:
Level 5: Getting To Minimum Wage (<=$1000/mo)
I’m quite stuck there. In fact, my MRR went from $200 to $60 due to a $99/mo cancelling and due to 3 debit cards having insufficient funds in their account.
So I’m faced with 2 problems:
- Not enough customers.
- Something wrong with my product.
I’m addressing both problems.
Something Wrong With My Product
None of my churns will give me a response on why they cancelled, so I signed up for a bunch of freelance writing platforms to stress-test my product (it writes SEO-optimized articles in 1 click with AI).
As a freelancer, a lot of clients have a set of specifications that you adhere to, only to change their mind after you give them a first draft.
Thus, I realized that it’s a lot less important for the AI to generate the perfect blog post / article on the first try, and it’s a lot more important that I have features that allow for the user to trivially edit / revamp large parts of the article to their liking. So similar to how Photoshop has a bunch of buttons on the side that’ll allow users to easily manipulate their image, I’m building a suite that’ll have a bunch of buttons on the side that’ll allow users to easily manipulate large parts of their entire article (powered by AI).
But as I mentioned before, my bigger problem is not having enough customers. So I’m only spending 0.5 to 1.5 days per week improving the product.
Frustrated AF Because I Don’t Have Enough Customers
I put in a shit ton of effort building this product and marketing it and yet, I’ve very few customers. Gamifying it, I think I’ll do the following to clear Level 5:
- 500 short form videos [Tiktok and YouTube shorts]
- 180 Quora questions, where some of which I’ll backlink to myself.
- 2000 direct sales emails.
- 180 comments on Indiehacker to drive traffic to myself.
If that doesn’t work, I’ll switch to more of a guest-posting / SEO strategy to drive passive traffic. I’m good at on-page SEO but suck at networking / building backlinks, so that’s why I’m avoiding doing that now.
Note it’s not X per week. It’s just doing all the volume and seeing what comes out of it.
So expect updates on the above 4 tactics and what I learn from them.
2nd-Order Consequences Of Freelancing
Freelancing allows me to make money, which is good because my SaaS isn’t making much. But the best thing about trying to do freelance writing is that I can document my journey and leverage it as short-form video marketing collateral.