Growing gSweets 📈 – Oct. 11, 2020
A transparent look at what goes into growing a small indie SaaS company.
The top-level numbers:
Starting # of users: 40
Ending # of users: 45
Growth strategies used
As we’re still working through some bugs, we’re not pursuing mass-adoption just yet. Users need a private link to access the app, and we’re trying to onboard new users one at a time.
1. Promo video
I spent 2 hours last Sunday putting together this 30 second promo video for gSweets. It’s a great asset for our homepage, our launch materials and for sending to prospects. I only used Quicktime, iMovie and Youtube to throw this together. It was a pleasure creating it and a nice change of pace. Once published I posted it to LinkdeIn & Twitter. As of this writing it has 120 views.
2. Personal outreach
I continued to reach out to former colleagues & friends (mostly via LinkedIn) to get feedback. gSweets was well-received by one Head of Product and 2 content/product marketers, who agreed to share it with their teams.
3. Outbound email
In the 30+ user interviews I’ve conducted so far, I’ve identified two main personas with whom gSweets resonates strongly; marketers (content, social media, product marketing) and product managers. Using LinkedIn I’ve built email lists of ~200 content marketers and ~400 product managers respectively.
At first I started sending one-off emails via Gmail but I only got one response on ~20 emails. Unfortunately, you can’t track open and click-through rates using Gmail. This week I signed up for the free plan of PersistIQ to improve the speed and tracking of this outbound effort. I can send up to 20 emails a day and it usually takes me about 5 minutes to personalize and send them.
My messaging so far has been friendly and help-seeking; I’m just an indie maker who’s looking for feedback on the my new app. I link users to a Youtube promo of the app’s functionality and encourage them to reply if they are interested in testing it. So far the open rates have been excellent but the reply rates have been abismal.
My gut is telling me that receiving an email from a stranger with links in it doesn’t inspire confidence to open them.
Over the next couple weeks I intend to experiment with the personas I’m reaching out to (so far it’s mostly been product managers) and the copy in the email to try and build more trust and encourage a response. For now it’s hard to tell if this user list is a bad fit or it’s more a reflection of my outreach strategy.
Upcoming growth initiatives
Slack groups (content marketers, technical writers, PMs)
Public launch (Hacker news, Product Hunt)
Twitter outreach (Google docs users, Notion users, Grammarly users)
Other insights
Privacy is a primary concern. For some this is something we can overcome through communication of how the app works and what data we collect (or don’t). Some organizations strictly prohibit non-whitelisted Chrome extensions for their employees. Shopify and Detectify brought this up.
Our first review!
I’d love for this newsletter to help start a dialogue. If you have ideas or feedback, feel free to reply to this email, drop a comment or find me on twitter.
Cheers,
Jer (& Christoph)
PS: If you still haven’t given gSweets a try, you can install it here.