How hard is marketing a SAAS product?

Building a SAAS product has never been this easier with plenty of open-source software, community, and software libraries. Every year it gets better for individual developers to create new products, thanks to web frameworks and tools. The issue with most SAAS products is marketing them. Think of an individual developer creating software from scratch and trying to sell it. As the whole market is flooded with SAAS products with cheaper plans, it’s hard to sell unless there is something unique about the product. But, there are also copy-cat products that are being sold with huge marketing and improvisation. Over some time, people forget the original one as the new ones are better and more user-friendly. To achieve this state, companies and businesses put a tremendous amount of their initial investments and energy into marketing and customer support.

Can you survive the global competition?

Selling a product with large banners and TV adverts is old and expensive. An indie developer cannot afford or imagine such a thing without financial backing. Given the rise of digital advertising through different social media platforms and content marketing, it feels feasible to push your product. As the global market is expanding on the software front, the rise of new competitors with investors’ backing would smash adverts in any form. Though it’s not impossible, it is a hard task. The secret to beating them is with the right tools and strategies. Plan a significant amount of time for building your network and marketing strategies. Remember, the good thing with indie developers is flexibility and time. All you need to do is to utilize and prioritize your time when building a product.

Have you thought of customer support?

Every indie developer should acknowledge the fact that their project/product is not only used by the software developer but also by common people who have no idea about how most of the software work. People who are not tech-savvies are going to be your large user base, and they need proper documentation, videos and above all email support. A key to a loyal base is the ability to reply to them in a swift and quicker way. It is an essential thing to handle all customer enquiries (including the ones you feel silly about) with an appropriate response. It might seem overwhelming initially, but with the correct tools, you could automate the replies and answers.

Rise of social-media marketing

Whether you are socially active in real life, social networks could help boost your productivity. It also helps you understand the users’ views and add followers to your product page which internally helps your reputation. I really don’t want to have a blog with SEO-based topics. ‘HelloKea’ is designed for handling all social media interactions to some extent. Features that could assist in handling all your communication and management related to the projects. As there are heaps of social networks, I am thinking of integrating them one by one in Hellokea. The first and foremost is Twitter integration. Facebook pages, Google pages and Instagram are a few networks planned for the future.

Content Marketing

Content marketing has a huge role to play in your product reach. They do let people understand the ongoing development and the prices at some point. Moreover, content marketing is widely used to reach through search engines.

Writing is one of the best ways to explain your product to a wide audience. Customers do follow regular updates through your blog. And, it does help your build your skills in writing. Clear writing could provide a way for you to analyse the product defects.

Product releases

Have you ever logged your product progress? Usually, versions are used to track and add changes to the product. This is common among software developers when building a product. But, there should also be a way to track the changes and notify your customers about the progress you have made. In Hellokea, I am thinking of an option to handle the version and release progress. These releases should be shown in some form to your users to know about the updates.

As of now, these are the items that are planned for the release of version 1.0 in Hellokea:

• Option to create multiple products
• Twitter integration
• Email support and inbox for handling customer email enquiries
• Editor for composing tweets and threads
• User roles and permissions for managing teams

When these features are provided for each and every product/project, it would be a lot easier to manage. Team management would be an apt feature when the project matures.