scollins

Hi HN,

I started a SaaS company 3 years ago with no prior knowledge in sales or marketing. Got first few customers from existing network and facebook. Since then my co-founder and I kept repeating same process for new customers, without focusing on 1 channel.

Now we are at steady $10K MRR with a product people love, healthy margins and low burn rate, but don't have a repeatable customer acquisition process yet. Finding new customers on facebook / cold email / adwords is painfully slow, because current customer base is diverse enough to detect any pattern or build a profile. (Ranging from $10 customers to $1500/mo customers)

Has anyone been in this situation before? How did you pick a segment and kickstart growth?

I have a few products listed on aws marketplace (Both AMI an SaaS). Does anyone have experience in optimizing product position in search results?

Marketplace listing management has a field for adding keywords, but they don't affect result position.

I am bootstrapping a SaaS product with a 7 day free trial (no credit card required).

Few weeks ago someone wrote a blog post about services that have free trials and mentioned my site. Since then, I have been getting very high number of signups using fake names. Most of these users try to host phishing pages, send bulk emails, try to upgrade using stolen cards and in some cases try penn testing the service.

So far I have been successful in blocking spam emails and penn testing attempts, and stripe has been blocking stolen cards, but it's taking up significant amount of time per day.

I am considering $1 trials, but don't want to discourage legit users from signing up.

Since signups are not from any specific country or email provider, Are there any services that can screen each signup? I'm currently testing Maxmind minfraud with poor results.

I started a service agency that makes e-commerce sites significantly faster on desktop and mobile (Sometimes as fast as native apps). I have around 25 customers.

But when I approach new prospects, none of them care about their store's performance. I keep amazon and google's studies handy, but often the conversation ends before I can bring them up.

Highlighting revenue benefits of a fast site hasn't helped much either.

What would be a good way to educate prospects about importance of a fast e-commerce website?

If someone can point me in right direction, I'll be happy to pay for your time.

Most startups I see are using wordpress for their blogs, even if their programming stack isn't based on PHP.

How do you manage wordpress security and updates if you host the blog in house? If not, what service do you use to maintain wordpress?

After spending last few years working with major cloud providers, I'm thinking of building a startup that will automate cloud deployment and operations with 1 click. Here's what I'm thinking:

1. Users will see a list of available tasks similar to this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials?primary_filter=trending

(Example: Deploy a self-healing ruby stack, Deploy memcached, Deploy sharded mongodb, Deploy postgresql cluster, Run a script on all servers daily)

2. User will be able to pick any of the tasks from list and select target servers (or create new servers). All required changes, updates will be done automatically, and follow best practices.

Tasks will cover deployment, orchestration, stack building, optimizations, security and monitoring. New tasks will be added often, so users can try new technologies with 1 click.

Users will be charged per month by number of servers they have in the account, but will be able to perform as many tasks on servers as they need.

This way, instead of spending time with trial-and-error, finding tutorials and mixed results, users will benefit from tested automation that is secure and follows best practice.

Would you be interested in (and pay for) such service?

Thanks!

I am visiting SF next week and will be there for a few days. During my stay, I would like to meet founders and developers and have interesting chat.

I have fairly good experience with cloud ops and scaling apps and stacks across datacenters. So I might be able to bring something to the table as well.

If any of you awesome people are available next week, coffee is on me :)

I recently got invited to final round of interview at an accelerator in SF. Interview will be with few partners.

What should I expect at the interview as a B2B SaaS founder with some revenue?

I have developed a SaaS product for devops after a user survey. I got 500-600 users to signup for invitation list. After sending them invitations, around 10% users signed up but didn't engage with the product, and didn't respond to feedback emails / widgets.

Now I am trying to find new users and have followed tips from various "How to get first X users" threads without much luck. I have a co-founder who has background in web marketing and sales, but he hasn't been much help with this.

Should I find a business co-founder who will be able to sell the product, or just tweak my signup process via iterations?