How I successfully launched the new version of my SaaS

Build up audience before launching, ask for testimonials, make a powerful website, and be personal and honest to the Hacker News community

Takuya Matsuyama

25 Jun 2019 — 8 min read

Grow an Audience

Hi, it’s Takuya. This blog is a place to share my experiences on my solo devs. I’ve recently released the new version of my solo project called Inkdrop — the Markdown note-taking app.

Thanks to all your support, a lot of people came read the article and signed up my app. I’m so happy that this launch has been succeeded and my 7-month journey has finally ended with great result. Before going on to the next chapter, I would like to share how I did for this launch. What I did and why to make this happen.

An announcement generated 1,000 sign-ups

Monthly sign-ups since its first release (Jun 24)

Around 300 people have registered each month before the launch, but it got more than 1,000 people have signed up this month. Wow, I realized that the total number of registrations have already reached 10K just now! Amazing. The announcement blogpost got read by 12.8K people. Here is the stats report of Medium:

97% of views are from external referrals

Most people came from this post on Product Hunt and this post on Hacker News. Here is the real-time report of the website on Google Analytics:

Many people from US and Europe were visiting my website at that moment

Now, how did I make this happen?

Build up audience before launching

You could launch your product without the audience, but having it will increase the likelihood of your success. Gabriel Weinberg emphasizes the importance of building an audience in his book:

Traction and product development are of equal importance and should each get about half of your attention. This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50 percent on traction.

— Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

I think you want to spend all of your attention on product until its launch but do not do that. When you decided to build something, talk about it with your friends, write blogposts, and keep sharing your thoughts while developing it. When your product is time to be launched, your audience will be happy to help it spread to the world. I kept writing blogposts and made some YouTube videos during the 7-month journey. It’s totally fine that the audience may not use your app. They also have their audience that may use your app.

Contribute to other communities

Be a giver. I’ve written some blogging tips but there is one more thing you can do from the beginning: Contribute to other communities. Why OSS projects can get a lot of praises is because they contribute to the open source community. Basecamp open-sourced their framework called Ruby on Rails. I also have some open source projects on GitHub. Not only the OSS community, there are also many communities and clusters that may fit your target. I posted some articles on HackerNoon and freeCodeCamp as my app’s target is programmers. More you contribute to others, more you attract people. So find your community to reside. For example, if your target is travelers, do contribute to travel communities and accumulate reputations.

The right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. — Paul Graham, Do things that don’t scale

Don’t be a taker. I see some people buy followers and automate their accounts to gain tractions. That’s totally a short-term tactic and will not work well because it only satisfies your desire for recognition. Zombie accounts are not your audience and will not actually help your product spread like Pieter Levels said:

(…) The same applies to buying fake virality. It won’t work. It looks good on paper but it’s not actual humans. And people are less and less impressed with seeing big numbers on somebody’s social media account. (..snipped..) Because we’re sick and tired of fake stuff. — Pieter Levels, MAKE: Bootstrapper’s Handbook

Make it a part of your life

Building audience takes long time. There’s no shortcuts. You have to foster it little by little. Months and years. So it would be difficult to accomplish if you are not really interested in the domain you are working on. That’s one of reasons why you have to do what you love.

As I write articles on my solo devs, more personal developers come see me. I’m so happy that my articles are helpful for their solo projects. And that helps me write more articles like this one. Then, it will attract more people and help my app thrive — That is a good cycle. My audience is now like a solo developer community.

You don’t have to build up a large number of followers. As you can see, I usually get only a few hundreds of reads on blogposts:

Seems like my audience is small — but strong. Because they have actually supported my release. Thanks a lot!

Ask for testimonials

If it is not the first time to launch for your product like my case, it would be great to ask existing users for their reviews about your product. It would build a great trust for your product.

I asked my paid users to drop a line via email. Here is an actual email I’ve sent:Title: Can you help me out?Hi {%firstname%},I have a quick favor to ask.I'm currently building the new website for releasing the new version. Could you write a brief testimonial that I can add to my list of satisfied clients on it?I’m not looking for a novel or anything. Just a few sentences describing your experience with Inkdrop. Prospective users don’t care so much about what I say about my product, but they do care what my customers have to say.For an idea of what other customers have written, please click hereAll you have to do is simply fill this Google Form with your testimonial. Also, if you are able to do this in the next day or two, that would be awesome.Thanks so much, {%firstname%}.— Takuya Matsuyama

As I basically don’t like receiving or sending bulk mails, I didn’t know how to ask customers for a favor. So I learned copywriting in order to compose an effective message. In this mail, I used Robert Collier’s method. He found that starting a letter with “will you do me a favor?” is the most effective. So I just simply started with “I have a quick favor to ask.”, and describe what I’m working on and what I wanted them to do. Everyone is busy and does not have much time to read a boring long text, so I explained it very briefly and frankly.

On top of that, I added a link to the page which lists example testimonial quotes in the mail so that they can get an idea to write theirs more easily. As a result, 14 people have responded. Thanks for writing!

I rebuilt the website for Inkdrop completely. My design was strongly inspired by Sketch’s website as I love their beautiful and attractive design:

The page structure is as following:

🎤 Catchphrase (What problem does this solve? What is the benefit of this product?)
📷 Screenshots for each supported platform (What does this look like? Is this able to run on my computer/device?)
🚀 Features, UI and security (What can this do? How does this work?)
💬 Testimonials (What do people actually think?)
📣 Call-to-action (How can I start using this? How much?)
🙋‍♂️ About me (Who made this?)
✍️ Blog articles (How active is this?)

As you can see, each section tries to answer visitors’ questions so that they can consider if it fits their need. It would be useful as a checklist for your website.

I built it with Gatsby.js which lets you build a static website using ReactJS. The source code is here:

Be personal and honest to the Hacker News community

HN is an extremely competitive place since anyone can post. People on HN are geeky and radically honest (and painful). Why I successfully got on its leaderboard is probably because I was also geeky and honest. They hate spams, ads, fakes, and marketings. I have got many upvotes for 4 times on it, which posts were:

1) I’ve been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years
533 points | Jun 5, 2019 | 269 comments
2) How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS
925 points | Oct 15, 2018 | 135 comments
3) Inkdrop — Notebook app for Hackers
51 points | June 6, 2016 | 57 comments
4) The Four Painters: A Video Work Created with Deep Learning
59 points | Dec 23, 2015 | 18 comments

Basically these are my blog articles except for #3 which was the landing page for announcing the private beta of Inkdrop. The #2 made the biggest traffic to my blogpost, which was not posted by me (Thanks spiffytech). #4 is my video work using deep learning technology I made four years ago. On top of those my experiences, I can see what kind of posts people on HN like would be about new technology, personal story, and authentic thing. Make it less marketing-y and HN people will like it better.

Comments are basically critical but you can reply them just honestly as you thought so that more people would join the discussion. Because they want to know more about you. Be friendly.

I’ll continue working on this project.

After the launch, thankfully I’ve got a lot of inquiries. One of them was from a person who is interested in buying it. He said he loves to grow products. That was surprised me. But I declined the deal as this project is already a part of my life. I see some of paid users are paying for not merely a product but also my journey to live off of the solo devs. I’ve got many things to share through the project, which would be helpful for other solo developers. I’m spending the very exciting time right now. So I can’t sell it. I also would like to see how far Inkdrop can go and would like to show you guys. Let’s evolve it together!