Should we pivot?
Hello everyone!
For the last month, me and my co-founder have been working on Featurebase, it allows you to create custom feedback boards, publish roadmaps and changelogs.
We started looking for our first users a few weeks ago and have so far gotten around 500 visitors and 20 free-trial sign-ups. We regularly follow-up with all of the new users, but 90% of them don't seem to take any action. Only 1-2 of the initial users have gotten any real value out of the software yet.
The market for a tool like this should be pretty big, for example, we are an alternative to Canny.io and offer pretty much all the same features (their ARR is over 1M+). We first tried to differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering much cheaper pricing, but quickly felt like that isn't enough to convince the customer to use our product. Some unicorn features are needed that would make the choice between our and the competitor's product more clearer. However, we already find it hard to offer the same amount of features as our competitors, let alone creating new ones. Most of our main competitors have over 10 employees that work full time, because of that we find it really difficult to offer a better product than them with just two people.
We find that the current way of finding users through Reddit posting, cold-emailing, etc isn't sustainable and we are slowly losing motivation in the project. It is exhausting to continue putting in the 8h+ every day, without seeing any results and while still studying in school.
Maybe we are just targeting the wrong people and giving up too early.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Here is a link to our website: https://featurebase.app/
Stop development, move to 100% customer interactions, find what your ideal customer is. Your lacking customer development not features. Who are they? How do you reach them? What do they Really want?
Hey, thanks a lot for the advice! I agree that we are currently spending too much time on development compared to customer interactions. We first thought about niching down on who our ideal customer should be ourselves as well but found that almost every SaaS owner could benefit from our service. As we can see, that does not work very well. We need to be more specific because going after the whole market with no clear target does not work.
Start working with people one on one
Whats the LTV of a customer? I would expect it to be around $100+ if you use standard 5-10$ per seat pricing for business saas. We used productboard once and paid $50+ dollars per month. This unlocks paid ads as a primary acquisition channel where the CAC can be pretty high.
Heads up the pictures on your homepage aren't crisp (too low res) on my retina 15 inch macbook.
Good luck :) Also I agree with the comments here not to price too low
Hey, thanks a lot! We haven't had any paying customers yet, so it is hard to confirm the real LTV of a customer, it should be around $150+ for sure. Charging more will definitely allow us to move to better acquisition channels. Thanks for pointing out, will fix the images on smaller viewports.
Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your candid.
When you clone a product and attracted by your competitor's face value, it shows that you don't have much understanding of the market landscape and what exactly your prospecting customers want.
Sometimes people pay for a product not only it's cheaper or not. But also the user experience, service level, testimonial, customer relationship, future roadmap etc.
Keep it up!