milanspeaks

I’m sharing my experience building a developer-focused SaaS so that anyone still in the early stages understands that every SaaS product has its own journey before you see meaningful traction.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) dictates how long that journey will be.

A SaaS like Lovable can achieve rapid adoption because the learning curve is minimal and the primary use case of creating a website is immediately understandable.

On the other hand, anything involving technical API integrations will take its own sweet time.

If you’re building a SaaS for marketers or support teams, your conversion funnel is relatively straightforward and usually looks like this:

1. Traffic

2. Signup

3. Trial

4. Paid conversion

Right now I am building a developer focused SaaS ( sendzen.io ) and I am finding it freakin' hard. I have managed to acquire 100s of signups but the journey from signup to a paid user is really long.

Most developers expect our product to have:

1. Great polish.

2. Magical Onboarding

3. Docs must be perfect.

4. Support has to be instant.

5. Pricing must look fair.

6. The product has to be rock-solid technically.

7. And a generous free-tier

After providing all this, still the journey is a funnel with 8 conversion points:

Traffic -> Signup -> Sandbox -> First message sent -> Prod activation -> Code integration -> First real use-case -> Paid conversion (if only they have business demand) -> Retention

Developers will compare us with Meta, Twilio, Resend, and they are right to do so but our team is like 2 backend and a single front-end developer.

Another thing founders (including myself) underestimate is the massive burden of education in developer-first SaaS.

So my advice to you if you are starting a new SaaS is set your expectations and funding runway based on your target-audience.

If you’re building a developer-focused SaaS, expect slower conversions, longer activation cycles, more support load, and a much heavier requirement for documentation, examples, tutorials, and handholding.

I’m still deep in the journey, but if there’s one takeaway so far, it’s this:

Developer-first SaaS takes its own time to compound.

If you’re also builing something for developers, feel free to correct me or guide me.

So if you have some kind of experience integrating with WhatsApp Business API as a developer, you would already know how tough it gets. I am planning to build a tool that is specifically intended to solve the developers problem regarding the following specific things:

1. Easy Onboarding with embedded setup with bank grade security (data encryption and security first approach)

2. Secure and scalable Send Message API supporting all message formats.

3. Secure and scalable Webhooks for incoming messages, delivery reports etc

4. Embedded Components for resellers like Meta Onboarding, Template Management etc.

5. Attractive Pricing

Yes, on the face of it, it would look like a WhatsApp API Wrapper, but behind the scene, we would be doing a lot of security, scalability, use-cases related solutions.

This is somewhat similar to what Twilio offers or several other enterprise provider offers but at a very high cost and with a lengthy sales cycle. I am going to provide the same thing but with excellent experience and attractive pricing.

I am not going to build Chatbot, Abandonded Cart or things directly for end-customer but my product is targeted to developers specifically who are sending more than 50k messages per month.

I want to know from you regarding your experience using WhatsApp Business API. Where did you hit friction - onboarding, approvals, webhooks, SDKs, scale, costs?

Would you mind sharing few of your experience?

I am building something similar to Twilio but only for WhatsApp. For my Product, my target audience is software developer. Now as a developer, I personally hate any kind of marketing targeted to me.

So for my Product, I am thinking of acquiring few open source project in some kind of messaging space and improve it by adding resources to it.

I am not quite sure how acquisition happens for open source software.

I am building an API based infrastructure tool for developers. I have been thinking for over a week to find a name but am just not able to find one. I have my UI design done, DB design done, APIs specifications ready but I couldn't come up with a name. I have thought of 1000+ names and cannot find it. I think I am now the worst person to name due to so much of overthinking.

Since my Product is about developer experience a nice name matters to me. I would wish to wear a hoodie with name daily so need something nice.

The emotions I want developer to experience is that this is something that would speed up their Dev cycle.

How do I solve this naming dillemma?

Theoretically, yes it should be possible. But practically it seems impossible to me as I see the CPC in US market goes almost as high as $80 per click and so if conversion rate is 2% the amount that needs to be spent for just a single order is $ 4000.

So if the lifetime value is less than $ 4000, it seems impossible to get the ROAS.

What have been your experience?

Hey everyone!

I'm Milan, founder of Robofy, an AI chatbot tool I've poured countless hours into. Robofy is live for around 3 months now. Our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) has been stagnant at around $500 for the last 3 months, which has been a tad frustrating. I rebranded in June to Robofy but still am stuck at $500 and I am looking for fresh ideas.

One thing I've noticed is an extremely large number of similar products popping up in the market. It's both exciting and scary because it confirms a demand, but also adds that much more competition. I think most of the competitors are coming up because of the cookbook published by OpenAI and the progress made by Langchain.

Nevertheless, here's where I need your help:

Marketing: I've tried the basic marketing channel's (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) but the ROI hasn't been great. In fact, I would say that I recovered only 20% of my investment of $2500 in ads. Hence am in need of fresh, out-of-the-box strategies that can help stand out in this saturated space.

Distribution: While product is great, I believe our main challenge lies in getting it in front of the right eyes. Any ideas or channels we might not have tapped into yet? I tried Twitter but again I faced the most common problem - not getting enough eyeballs.

I tried creating a reseller plan so as to change target audience from direct customers to smaller IT companies. I got 2 orders for it now and that creates a bulk of my revenue.

A few additional points:

The primary audience is small to medium businesses looking to streamline their customer support.

We have a free tier, as well as paid packages with more features and benefits.

I genuinely believe in Robofy, and I've had really positive feedback from our few users. It's just the scaling and distribution part where we're having a hiccup.

Thanks.

I see a lot of chatbot related products and social media content creation related products. In fact even I made one chatbot product.

These products have become quite generic in just 2 quarters.

Have you encountered any product that is doing things remarkably different and re-defining any existing large use-case. Would love to explore more.

I started a small productized SaaS business called growby.net. I am manually reaching out to potential companies to bring customers for growby and wanted to start SEO to boost some traffic. This is the process I follow. I am just sharing here to discuss the pros and cons of this approach.

Day 1:

1: Competitor Analysis: The first thing I did was to identify a competitor which is already ranking for the keywords I want to rank. I identified one website that was getting monthly traffic of 50k using search. I wanted to rank better for most of the keywords they are ranking.

2: Ahrefs Crawling of competitor's website: I did a scan of the competitor's website using Ahref's tool. Ahref gave me a list of around 45 blog post URL that was ranking nicely for them. Ahref also gave me a list of a total of 12000 keywords for all URLs combined. I exported all the data from Ahref in an Excel File. I aimed to finish 12 articles from this list of 45 in the next 2 days.

The above activity was to be done once only. now we will work on activities that have to be repetitive.

3: Keyword Clustering - GPT3 Entry :-) : I applied a filter on the URL and started working on the first blog post. The first article was about "Performance Appraisal in HR" and the competitor was ranking for almost 2500 keywords for it. I asked ChatGPT to do a clustering for all these 2500 keywords and I found a list of 10-12 important keywords. These are the keywords I want to target for creating the blog post.

4: Preparing Outline of the blog post - SEO META in 1 CLICK tool:

I opened the competitor's blog with the "Performance Appraisal in HR" related article and exported all the h1, and h2 tags using the "SEO META in 1 CLICK" plugin. I now got the article outline and the keywords for this page.

5: Actual Blog-Post creation using GPT3:

I just prompted the outline, and keywords in GPT3 to make a decent introduction, blogpost, conclusion, and key takeaways. It's important to ensure that the prompts are much more detailed to not get a generic reply.

6: Publish the blog post:

I published the blog post on my WordPress blog website. My blog post with almost 1500 words was ready with full research in just one day. A lot of time was spent in researching and identifying tools and preparing proper prompts for GPT3. I knew that the second day was going to be simple.

Day 2:

7: Publish the remaining 11 blog posts:

I just repeated steps number 3 to 6 for the next article and I was ready with it in the next 30 mins. I kept on creating till all 12 blog posts are created. I published them and did all the necessary design and usability changes. Each blog post is above 1000 words.

8: Update Sitemap and Search Console submission:

I used a free online crawling SEO tool to generate a sitemap and updated it on the website and the Google Search console. I did internal backlinking of all these blog-post to make them look proper.

9: Google Crawl and Indexing: Google has now started crawling and indexing these pages. I now need to create a list of backlinks and work on the technical SEO part.

10: Conclusion:

Each of the 12 blog posts I created is above 1000 words and I would have taken at least a week to write each blog post because of the research part and drifting away to Twitter, IH, etc. The 12 blog post would have taken me at least 12 weeks for sure.

I am yet to see any traffic/impression increase because of this work and so I have not resumed work for the remaining articles. I will have to work a lot on the suggestions provided by Ahref to increase the domain authority. I feel that if I stay consistent with this process, there is a probability to generate good traffic via SEO.

Here's my attempt at the elevator pitch:

Growby is a complete startup product suite aimed to help businesses launch quickly.

For a quick launch, it provides a single platform to create brand identity, website, hosting, and email setup.

The platform requires human-touch and conversation and so it can provide personalized attention and high quality.

In addition to providing branding & technology, Growby also plans to provide a comprehensive set of documents for various business use-cases.

Here is the link - http://www.growby.net

Here is the rationale on why we wanted to have a human touch: https://www.growby.net/blog/how-growby-got-its-logo-in-60-hoursthe-secret-is-out/

Here's my attempt at the elevator pitch:

Growby is a complete startup product suite aimed at simplifying business launch needs specifically for non-tech startups.

For a quick launch, it provides a single platform to create brand identity, website, hosting, and email setup.

The platform requires human-touch and conversation and so it can provide personalized attention and high quality.

In addition to providing technology platform, Growby also plans to provide a comprehensive set of documents for various business use-cases.

Here is the link - http://www.growby.net

Here is the rationale on why we wanted to have a human touch: https://www.growby.net/blog/how-growby-got-its-logo-in-60-hoursthe-secret-is-out/

I am just about to launch a productized service business. My target audience is very early-stage startups who wish to build their website, email setup, and brand-identity in a very cost-effective manner.

Most of the tech-startup folks can do these things themselves. So I am interested in reaching out to a few non-tech startups.

I tried reaching out to a few of them offline (mostly friends) and got some good early-stage orders. Now to scale it more, I want to reach out to them online.

What are my options to reach out to them? Are there any Reddit communities or Facebook groups that I should join?

Alpha Stage Link: https://www.growby.net (Just developed in 3 days)