What I did different on my 6th attempt and how it got me 100 paying customers. Hopefully this helps you too!

Hey everyone! I wanted to share my journey of getting my first 100 paying customers for my SaaS application. I posted something similar recently focusing on cold outreach, but I left out the initial strategy for coming up with a product in the first place, so here goes.

Background

To give you some context, my SaaS application Dawnvox (www.dawnvox.com) is a customer feedback tool that I built. It's my sixth attempt at trying to find success with a SaaS product. Also, I want to note that my background is in tech, which allowed me to build everything myself. We'll come back to this in a moment.

Previous Attempts

Previously, I'd try to build something that I thought was cool. Having a background in tech, my thought process went like this: "Oh, I can build some sort of CI/CD tool and make it really easy to use," or "Small businesses need a cheaper way to do X," and then off I'd go to build something for a few weeks, completely focused on the tech side. Then I'd realize there were a million tools all doing the same thing, and I'd quickly lose motivation…

Three Questions That Made a Difference This Time

Before diving into the specifics, I want to highlight three questions that I believe made the difference this time around:

1. Figuring Out What You Are Good At (Your Advantage): Leverage your unique skills and strengths. For me, it was my background in tech, which allowed me to build the product myself. I also have experience in SaaS, both B2B and B2C. I knew enough about how to market and talk to prospects.
2. What You Are Passionate About: Passion drives perseverance. I was passionate about creating a tool that could help businesses gather and analyze customer feedback effectively because I love knowing how customers feel and constantly improving.
3. What Customers Need: Understand the market demand and pain points. I identified a gap in affordable customer feedback tools for startups and small businesses. At work, I'd used a variety of different tools, and while they all worked well, they were all super expensive. This is what I decided to focus on.

At this point, I felt good because my product idea was at the intersection of:

• What I'm good at (Tech)
• What I'm passionate about (Customer satisfaction)
• What customers need (a more accessible tool, particularly aimed at small businesses)

Regarding point 3, I didn't have to spend too much time on customer market research. The market exists; I knew that. I just found a smaller slice of this market and focused on that.

GEMO (Good Enough, Move On)

I gave myself a hard deadline: three weeks. I would have everything live in three weeks' time. I didn't want this to suck up too much time, as I already have a full-time job. Plus, if it failed, I'd be happy it only took three weeks.

Launch

Three weeks later, I had a product. It was by no means perfect and still missing a bunch of features. No matter, I launched anyway.

By "launch," I mean doing cold outreach. You can read more about that here if you like. The article explains more about how I got the 100 customers. But in my opinion, that was possible because of the foundation I laid in finding the right product to build.

Summary

I think my success this time stemmed from finding a product at the intersection of the following 3 areas.

1. leveraging my tech background
2. focusing on my passion for customer satisfaction
3. addressing a clear market need for affordable feedback tools for small businesses.

Also I gave myself a strict deadline to launch no matter what in 3 weeks.

Anyways, this is just a brief overview of the initial template I followed for identifying a product. I hope it helps.

Feel free to reach out in the comments, and I'm happy to post about other parts of my business too.

I've really appreciated the support I've gotten on Reddit, so I hope I can give back in some small way.