I hate freeloaders. And I hate giving out free trials. My hypothesis is that SaaS’s giving free trial just have either: A weak offer Weak targeting and/or A weak landing page And instead of lowering your price, you should add more value so that you can charge more / reinvest the money to make it better, and so on. So why test out free trials? Many people ask for free trials....
I’ve seen ads for Masterworks for a few years now, which is a platform for you to buy fractionalized luxury art. I’ve seen how crazy NFTs are and how easily rich people part with their money when it comes to flexing + art, so I decided to play. A Bit Sus Masterworks was founded in 2017 and on my dashboard it says: They’ve purchased 203 pieces of artwork....
Stolen directly from this lecture series, I’ve updated my mental model on when to use ads. Instead of having you watch many 40+ minute lectures, I’ll distill it down into a few paragraphs below. Old Model Get customers. Get up to $1K/mo so I can afford ads. Pay for ads. This is an incomplete model because it disregards a few things: Customers churning. $1K/mo is good, except it’s $0/mo next month if my churn’s 100% and I don’t acquire new customers....
When do you hire and expand? When should you get funding? When should you consider having business partners? Here’s my thoughts. Phase 1: Your Business Catches Up To You A startup / business is an extension of you as a founder. The revenue generated is an extension of your skills to: Create / procure a great product Finding a suitable avatar for your product Marketing and selling your product to that avatar In this phase, branding doesn’t matter that much....
I don’t want to run ads for my SaaS until it reaches $1k/mo. I feel like if I can’t even get to a minimum wage point ($1K/mo), then there’s no PMF for my product and I shouldn’t sink a ton of money in ads. That is, I want to be cheap and use low-cost organic marketing as an MVP to see if there could even be traction if I run ads, and then run ads thereafter....
Techies say if your product is good enough, it’ll sell itself. Marketers will tell you a good product is worthless unless you have great marketing to sell it. Marketing Is Crucial…But Not What You Think If your product’s 10X better than a competitor, it only has some potential to go viral. Your competitor’s market matters a ton as well. If you’re dominating a tiny niche, there’s inherently no product-market fit and it doesn’t matter how good your product is....
This is a journal entry and provides no value, except that of entertainment. You can skip this post if you want to learn about SaaS. Chapter 1: Beginning Of Snipes I like money, and who doesn’t. And in the August of 2021 I got into NFTs. About a month later in September of 2021, I realized that people ‘finger-slipped’ on OpenSea and might list things for 0.1 ETH instead of 1ETH, or ....
This is just a copy paste of my post here on reddit. I’ve been very short on time but will provide more unique content soon (like, tomorrow). Intro I wanted to shill a SaaS with social media because I wanted to avoid paid ads. (I’ve done dropshipping where it’s ad-intensive and just prefer to do bootstrap organic until I get more viral). I picked Tik Tok to shill my SaaS despite the normal crowd because:...
The elephant in the room Using AI to generate content for blogs is a concern because Google (and others) have come out and said that: They’ll detect AI-generated content AI-generated content will have ‘signatures’ in the future to show that it is AI-generated AI-generated content could get de-ranked / lower rank in search engines. For the 3rd point, Google has also said that AI-generated content is okay, as long as there’s some good content in your blog post where it demonstrates EAT (expertise, authority, trust)....
This is just a quick update of the previous episode. Initially, I just wanted a video to break 1K views on Tik Tok. But this one that got 10K views now has 40K views. It seems like as long as you reach a certain threshold of views, Tik Tok will keep showing it for a while. Subscribe, or I’ll have ChatGPT fill in these subscribe CTAs. Subscribed Whereas before when all my videos didn’t break 1K views, the views will stop growing, period....
I mentioned in my recent content strategy post that one of the things I’ll be doing is doing Tik Tok videos, but also driving them to a lead magnet. My videos + free resources will build trust, and there will be a blurb in the free resources to get customers. Lesson 1: Get Advice. Trust me, I hate talking about this because everyone talks about this. And I am in no way saying “ChatGPT WILL MAKE YOU RICH HAHAHA" like many of the other posts out there....
Most SaaS (and businesses) is a price race to the bottom. This is bad because: Lower margins = must cut quality Cutting quality = must charge lower price Competitors all copy each other, so everyone is lowering price to be “competitive,” and the quality exponentially decays In the end, the customers suffer. Instead of cutting quality to lower price, one could increase efficiency. But to be “competitive,” you have to do something novel and increase it by 10X compared to your competitor....
Per my previous post about getting clarity on my content strategy, I need to be creating more products. So I’m going to do 12 SaaS projects in 2023. Projects So Far Rage Filter in the month of January Wraith Docs in February Plan To Do It There’s no fixed schedule and I plan to do a rough cadence of 1 project a month. But if I do 2 projects in a single month, or 3, then I can spend the extra time created doing more marketing....
I want to build software because it’s intellectually challenging. And I want to be able to market them and make money from them. Further, I want to do this without ads. That is, use low-cost marketing. Hence, I made Wraith Scribe — so it can assist me with low-cost, SEO marketing. The problem is, there’s many channels for low-cost, organic marketing: Tik Tok YouTube Facebook Groups Reddit Quora Google SEO …And about a million more....
Due Diligence Exercise. Below is how I think about whether or not I should do something in a business. Investing in marketing costs time and/or money. To maximize your leverage per unit of time, you should spend some time investigating to see if a marketing method could even work for you. If not, don’t put your head in the sand and try it out anyway for the sake of “grinding.”...
Doing the right thing and living a good life is difficult, because it’s not straightforward. There’s 3 types of lives to live: a short-term oriented life, a long-term oriented life, and an examined life. Short-Term Oriented Life These are the ‘losers.’ They focus on short-term pleasures only and are driven by hedonistic desires. They are heavy in debt, each junk food, and use drugs to get through life. They live a very happy short-term existence by deferring all their problems, but in the long-term:...
I talked about my experiment a bit in this popular Reddit thread here. These are genuine stats, too. I considered buying upvotes to “seed” the post with social proof (much like how Hallal Guys put 10 $1 bills in their tip jar when they open for social proof to encourage tipping), but I was too cheap to pay the $25 to do it. A more updated / detailed version below:...
As a startup, I should be focusing 80-90% of my efforts in marketing, and only 10-20% in development. That would be the right thing to do. I went ahead and did the wrong thing. I made Wraith Scribe, which is a platform that lets you use AI to write and edit blog posts. Updates I Am Making I’m improving this old editor which leverages ToastUI: To a custom-built editor:...
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....
My Product And Its Main Purpose I made a tool that’ll let you write complete, SEO-optimized articles in 2 clicks. It’s usefulness lies in: Saving time for business owners that want to generate organic traffic, because then instead of spending hours writing blogs, they can just spend 10 minutes. This frees up time for biz owners to focus on higher ROI activities. I think of it like this: biz owners have some X hours per day to do work....