We are developers ourself. 4 years ago we built a great tool (a remote logger for mobile apps)[1] internally for ourselves. We had such a huge benefit from it when developing mobile apps, we thought this tool must be very useful to other developers as well. It was a no brainer to turn it into a SaaS product. But we had no clue about how to market it to people.
So we started reading every book on marketing out there (e.g. "Traction") and listened to a tons of product marketing related podcasts (e.g. "Smart Passive Income", "The Art of Product"). We tried many things over a period of 2 years. Nothing worked. After investing 100k€ in development and marketing money plus a lot of our own hours we were almost about to kill it. When suddenly, after the summer break, sales slowly started to ramp up. Without doing anything, but gaining traction on some of our blog posts about technology and development.
Now almost 5 years since inception we have a nice and stable business with 20k€ MRR and constantly growing. We stopped doing any marketing as you'd learn it from the books and focused entirely on creating value for developers through generating content that is also interesting for ourselves. And to be honest, it also makes you feel a lot better, not having to trick people into buying something.
There's probably still a lot we can learn and do better in order to "sell more", but we're quite happy with the current situation (financially) and really appreciate the feedback and praise we get from the developer community valuing our product.
Without wanting to self-promote our product too much, if you're interested in getting more details about our "failed marketing story" we've just published a blog post[2] on Indie Hackers about exactly this.
Comments
This. A thousand times.
We are developers ourself. 4 years ago we built a great tool (a remote logger for mobile apps)[1] internally for ourselves. We had such a huge benefit from it when developing mobile apps, we thought this tool must be very useful to other developers as well. It was a no brainer to turn it into a SaaS product. But we had no clue about how to market it to people.
So we started reading every book on marketing out there (e.g. "Traction") and listened to a tons of product marketing related podcasts (e.g. "Smart Passive Income", "The Art of Product"). We tried many things over a period of 2 years. Nothing worked. After investing 100k€ in development and marketing money plus a lot of our own hours we were almost about to kill it. When suddenly, after the summer break, sales slowly started to ramp up. Without doing anything, but gaining traction on some of our blog posts about technology and development.
Now almost 5 years since inception we have a nice and stable business with 20k€ MRR and constantly growing. We stopped doing any marketing as you'd learn it from the books and focused entirely on creating value for developers through generating content that is also interesting for ourselves. And to be honest, it also makes you feel a lot better, not having to trick people into buying something.
There's probably still a lot we can learn and do better in order to "sell more", but we're quite happy with the current situation (financially) and really appreciate the feedback and praise we get from the developer community valuing our product.
Without wanting to self-promote our product too much, if you're interested in getting more details about our "failed marketing story" we've just published a blog post[2] on Indie Hackers about exactly this.
- 1: https://bugfender.com
- 2: https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-projec...
Did you put any ad spend behind those blog posts, or did traffic come organically?
We tried ads, but that didn't work. Whether developers just block or ignore them, or we didn't figure out the right message, I don't know.
So all of our traffic is now organic.