How to promote my SAAS product

Hacker News is a large community of mostly developers and people really interested in tech.

The business related posts that do well on HN are either:

1. Related to developers building startups (i.e. developers talking about how they built their product, with a focus on tech used)
2. Related to big tech companies (FAANG, Elon, etc) - a lot of people on HN work at big tech companies.

If you wanted to post on HN about your product and have it do well, you would have to write about how you built the tech behind it. That probably wouldn't really help you get customers, might lead to competition.

To me, seems like your target customers are either content marketers or founder wearing many hats. From glancing at your blog, I can tell you are hoping to focus on solo founders/indie hackers and making content marketing easier for them.

Your best bet would be to go where the highest density of founder are. Posts like this on IH are a fine start. You could also try joining smaller communities of founders (local meetups are good options too, if available).

I think your product might be a good fit to promote on tech twitter as well. Although, that is a long term strategy that takes a lot of time and effort to pay off.

You can try creating some free side projects using your core tool and use that as marketing. @yongfook did an amazing job of this with "Tweetagram" for Banner Bear (link)

Here’s my recommendation . . .

Take a step back and define WHO is struggling most to solve the problem you want to address with your business idea. Be as absurdly specific as possible. What demographics, geographics, psychographics, or behaviors do they all have in common?

• Demographics: age, gender, education, income, marital status, etc.
• Geographics: country, city, region, or radius around an area.
• Psychographics: activities, hobbies, interests, and opinions.
• Behaviors: what they do (e.g. ‘regularly publishes content on Medium’)

Then create a list of the watering holes where your dream customers hang out.

1. What are the top websites they already go to?
2. What forums or message boards do they participate in?
3. What are the Facebook groups they engage in?
4. Who are the influencers they follow on social media?
5. What podcasts do they listen to?
6. What are the email newsletters they are subscribed to?
7. What blogs do they read?
8. What channels are they subscribed to on YouTube?
9. What conferences or events do they regularly attend?
10. What keywords are they searching for in Google to find answers?

Armed with this information, the most promising channel strategy for YOUR business will reveal itself as the easy and obvious choice, and you can begin running tests.

Some landing page (also blog) suggestions. I focus on the written content here. It’s not strictly about to find users, but the landing page is kinda crucial in that search.

1. The English needs a polish. Even knowing that the product itself is AI, it’s hard to market writing without good writing. Plenty of cheap editors and copywriters around on freelance platforms.

2. Headline: I presume faster content is the main USP. The headline seems fine. Needs to be followed up with a subheader that expands on it, instead of just stating the same thing with different words. E.g. Writable AI is faster, smarter and writes better English than most copywriters.
   Give us the rest of the USPs.

(But if you wanted to follow a feature > benefit model, I might suggest stating what the product is, followed by text that pushes the main benefit in a single sentence. E.g. AI content writer > Polished content in the time it takes you to say ‘bunch of munchy crunchy carrots’).

3. Automate content writing for you. Can I suggest either: Automated content writing for you OR Automate your content writing.
   Or get to the point quicker ... e.g. Header: No time to write endless pages of content?
   Text: Tell Writable AI what you want and let it generate high-quality articles to attract your audience and improve your SEO. It’s cost-effective, automated content writing.

4. Growth hackers – this is the first time you’ve mentioned high-quality. Perhaps that should be mentioned higher up.
   Writers – perhaps efficiency could be seen as a benefit and mentioned higher up too.

5. Blogs – summary text should expand a little on the title (not repeat it) and give readers a reason to open the link. Tempt them in.

H2 tags should be used in blogs, it’s good SEO and also useful to readers who want to scan the page before settling down to read.

Blog is suffering from a lack of audience clarity. If you’re selling to an audience who already writes, they won’t be interested in how to write (they know already). If you’re selling to creators who need content, they won’t be interested in reasons to have content (they know already). Once you’re sure of your audience, consider what they’re thinking about. Someone mentioned trending topics in this thread. Blogs aren’t just about SEO. Computers aren’t buying your product. You need users to believe in your product, so your product examples have to wow them.

I would strongly suggest you try BetaList if not already. For my app @reviewReels, I got the first 45 users I got from the Beta list.

Here is a fool proof method, albeit with an upper limit:

• compile a list of all your competitors. You probably think you have 5, but in reality you have 30 or more.
• monitor for mentions of their domain names. Use a tool like Syften [1]
• when someone mentions one of them, have a look at the conversation. Usually you'll find it's a great opportunity to get a customer or more.
• for a step-by-step case study, see: https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/

[1] https://syften.com

First, get a better landing page. And then narrow down your niche.
I've seen a lot of products like yours, so you need to only focus on a specific audience. For example, Creators, E-Commerce Sellers etc... It's easier to market to a small audience and expand from there.

I would say find some content marketers and contact them. But use your product to craft some posts, can be based on stuff they have already written so you can give an example on how much faster it actually is to generate content for them.

Can your tool craft posts in there style? I would imagine a writers style is important to maintain if they have work out there already.

I wrote this article recently, hope this helps you market your SaaS.
https://byvi.co/2022/05/22/marketing-for-b2b-how-to-execute-on-a-0-budget/
Feel free to reach out to brainstorm some ideas.

Late to the party, if anyone wants to promote their product on Reddit, segue can help.

1. Join relevant subreddits:
   https://segue.co/subreddit/topic/ai-assisted-copy-writing/

2. There are 2 ways to promote on Reddit

2.1. Organically mention your product by responding to others (recommended).
e.g., if someone asks What are the pros n cons of using AI to automate my copywriting?, you can chime in, share your expertise, and mention your product link at the end.

You can use segue and subscribe to a topic to receive leads automatically, so you don't have to waste too much time in there.

2.2 For self-promoting, this might be a little trickier since most subreddits forbid self-promoting, so make sure you spend some time with the community first, register an account, upvote others and earn some karma before starting a new post to promote your product. Otherwise your account may get banned, your post might be deleted automatically.

I am trying to marketing my plugin - not sure what is the right way but seems like LinkedIn outreach is the only and best way to do that

I think the solution is to keep on posting and iterate your title to be better. See what the hottest threads are naming and find an angle the most attractive to the developers and start-up people.

I am working with an investor to build a SaaS directory to help SaaS get traffic and investor feedback - https://www.saasbudha.com/

The investor will launch the platform on his Twitter account (50K+ followers) in the coming weeks. You should be able to get some traffic by listing on the directory.

Have you tried writing to blogs that you like (or are just popular or whatever) and asked for feedback on your tool? You can use whoworksthere.com to help find author email addresses.

If you know/believe your ideal customer profile are bloggers, start hanging out where they are, get involved in their community and start working on getting feedback on your tool. Not paying users, just feedback. What's keeping them from using it? What do they use now that could be similar? What problem can you really solve for them?

I totally get the desire to run Google Ads, but this early on, it's a waste of money.

Ask people for help, beg for feedback.

To promote your product, you must first understand who your potential customers are. Even if you have a general idea, I recommend that you write it down about different customer profiles who can benefit from your SaaS so that you are more clear about it. After you have a firm grasp on the customer profiles, you must devise marketing strategies to raise product awareness. There are generally two approaches to take:

1. Push Strategy: If you don't have enough traction yet, this is the recommended strategy, and many big giants use it. In this strategy, you find potential decision makers in the target organizations and spread the word about your product/service to them. You can try cold emailing or cold calling. This strategy has a low conversion rate and is quite exhaustive, but it works 100% of the time if done correctly.

2. Pull Strategy: This is the most effective strategy, and it should be used in combination with your outreach campaigns. In this strategy, you are not approaching anyone about your product/service, but rather making information and benefits more accessible so that potential buyers are pulled towards it. This can be accomplished through SEO (I see your Domain rating is low as well as there isn't enough content to be indexed on search engines, you can improve by writing quality blogs, getting good backlinks, I would recommend you to launch it on Product Hunt to get some traction and quality backlinks), you can write SEO-friendly blogs (you can find trending topics and generate content using your own product, which will get you inbound traffic as well as serve as an example of what they can do with this tool), you can create product videos and post them on YouTube, Instagram, and a variety of other video sharing platforms. You can also list your product in a variety of communities and listings. This approach requires a lot of work, but the leads you get have a high buying intent, so that conversion rate is quite high.

These are the two general strategies to promote your SaaS product. Good luck with it!

Try twitter! Twitter can be a great way to promote your SAAS product! Join conversations with existing influencers in your sector and try to get involved with those who have a large following.

Additionally, try to tweet about relevant topics in your industry, and be sure to include a link to your product in your tweets!

How much did you spend on the ads?

Good question!
What we considered in the end:

• Create content with opt-in or links to your product (educative article, eBook, video for TikTok, etc depends on your resources)
• Promote it to communities, where your target audience

For starting it can be great option, don't thing about scalable options like paid ads. Your target - get first 100 customers and validate idea

I recently watched LemList founder talking about how to acquire the first 10 customers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jmi_-3aDss

And in conclusion, he's saying the best way is to do cold outreach. (Getting appointments by sending cold emails. ) Also, instead of trying to sell from the start, try understanding the customers.

So, I was trying Twitter or blog as other people succeeded in building in a public way, but now preparing for cold emails. (Some recommend Apollo.io).

How about creating cold outreach email by your own service and sending it to your potential users? My service is also related to sales(https://www.shareloapp.com), so I plan to do it by using it.

I'm a bit nervous about it though, so maybe we can give feedback to each other if you decide to try cold emailing. Ping me on indie hackers or drop a DM on Twitter(@TeshimaAtsuhiro) if you are interested:)