How does one go to market?
So, like you do, I've been building a SaaS platform as a solo founder for the past 4 months. Fun times had by all. But, I need money at some point in time (preferably sooner than later), and the product is hopefully...good enough. So I'm going to market starting this week.
Spent last week building a nice flyer and talking with the printer. Check it out. Pretty slick, I hope.
Right, so I should probably talk a bit about, what the devil I built.
ScheduleLord is an employee scheduling web app.
It's a Progressive Web App (PWA), but explaining that is a nightmare. So it's easier just to say it's a website that has app features.
My target demographic is small mom and pop restaurants. Obviously foolish of me, as you can't squeeze blood from a rock, but I have a suspicion that there is money being left on the table by the current incumbents.
"Your margin is my opportunity." As a moderately evil man once said.
So my theory is, I can produce just as good value (if not better) as larger teams, with less overhead and feature bloat, and focus on reducing friction. Famous last words, I'm sure.
So, who am I?
I'm William Johnson. Going by the handle dethstrobe on the interwebs. You might have heard of it. You're on it now. I've worked as a software engineer for 14 years, mostly engineering softness for large faceless mega corps. So after leaving from the GOOGs last year, I figured I should try my hand at making my own company. My first gut instinct was making developer tools, but turns out people think AI will just magically make good non-hallucinated documentation.
So I did like you do, and I pivoted. I've been doing product engineering for my entire career, so let's just do that. I had a few ideas, feel free to steal them, an RSS reader that also aggregates open feeds like BlueSky and Mastodon to make a one stop shop to get all your feeds (minus the wall gardens). Yet another fitness tracking and calorie counting app (this is mostly because MyFitnessPal is so crappy and crashy). A tai chi app using computer vision to help instruct you on how to move. Anyway, fell back on employee shift scheduling, and so ScheduleLord was born!
So here we are now in the distant future of 4 months from when I started. The app, in my humble and biased opinion, is pretty good. Not as feature rich as my competitors, but I'm working on closing that gap, and I feel like I have some easy low hanging fruit that many of them don't touch, like passwordless, sync to personal calendar app, no need for downloading yet another app while also getting push notifications (that PWA magic man).
Now brings us to the go to market. What the hell does that even mean? I mean seriously. I've been reading up on popular guides and the advice is pretty generic and not actionable, riddled with abbreviations and acronyms.
So, let's go over my strategy.
Pound the Pavement
That fun flyer I showed you up there. Well, I'm going to go door to door and talk with restaurant staff and hand them a flyer and ask them what they're currently using and if there are any pain points.
By the way, this is quite literally the most terrifying thing in my entire life! I literally have no idea how door to door salesman do this. This sucks.
But ain't no better way to get feedback from users directly than literally to have a face to face conversation with them. I just wish it didn't make me want to commit seppuku to restore my honor.
Online Ads
Well, turns out reddit has a deal to give me $1500 if I give them $1500. So that'll cut my costs in half at least. No idea if this is going to work...also slightly worried that this post on reddit will count as metrics towards reddit's conversions. But whatever... If reddit wants to take my work as their own then so be it.
Social Stuff...I guess...
That's this post! Also, I made a post on linkedin that has laughably low engagement. Also, talked about it a bit on my personal Facebook feed, which isn't exactly my target demographic, but you never know, network effects and all that.
Is it working? No idea... I literally just started today.
Any advice on how to help optimize my current strategies, or if there are other strategies I should look into, and/or how to hold off the sweet embrace of death while talking to people in person, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
Also, feedback on the app would be cool too.
- ← Previous
If I were President: Part 1