<story><title>Ask HN: When did people start paying for your SaaS and why?</title><text>When did people start paying for your SaaS?&lt;p&gt;How many times did it take before you got it right? I don&amp;#x27;t suspect most people get it right on their first go, so what have you taken from your failures and what have been the biggest factors in your success in terms of gaining traction with your SaaS?&lt;p&gt;In particular, what marketing&amp;#x2F;promo tactics have served you best?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>I got the first paying customer for Appointment Reminder the first day it was open for business.  (DB id #22, after a bunch of test accounts and friends &amp;amp; family demos.)  ~2.5 years and ~$1,000 later he still happily pays $29 a month.  This was not unknowable prior to launching the site (though I was still on pins and needles): I had already walked the sales pitch for it to enough businesses in downtown Chicago that I was pretty sure some number would buy what I was selling if it were put in front of them.&lt;p&gt;I think people who are pre-business vastly overestimate the difficulty of getting the first sale and probably vastly underestimate the difficulty of reaching scale.  Gail Goodman has a presentation on the Long SaaS Ramp of Death.  When you say those words in a group of SaaS entrepreneurs you&amp;#x27;ll see pained recognition on everybody&amp;#x27;s faces, even those (of us?) whose businesses are fairly successful.  Dear God does figuring out the scalable marketing piece take time.  (I&amp;#x27;ve got it figured out for Bingo Card Creator, but have only isolated bits and pieces of the orchestra playing in disjointed fashion for Appointment Reminder.)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;businessofsoftware.org&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;gail-goodman-constant-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I kind of feel like I beat on these drums to death, but organic SEO, AdWords, lifecycle emails, and an optimized first-run experience are sort of my favorite arrows in the quiver for increasing sales.  That and a whole lot of just &lt;i&gt;grinding it out&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Also, tie a string around your finger for Rob Walling&amp;#x27;s presentation from Microconf 2013 where he takes HitTail, a SaaS he acquired, from ~X to ~30X in recurring revenue over the course of a year.  (There are numbers in the presentation but I remember him asking us to be circumspect about them.)  He goes into month by month detail of what he was doing, and you&amp;#x27;ll understand the level of sheer frustration involved until hard work and ingenuity starts to reveal &amp;quot;flywheels&amp;quot; (his word for scalable&amp;#x2F;repeatable acquisition channels).  As far as I know, this isn&amp;#x27;t on the Internet yet, but I expect it will be late this year.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: When did people start paying for your SaaS and why?</title><text>When did people start paying for your SaaS?&lt;p&gt;How many times did it take before you got it right? I don&amp;#x27;t suspect most people get it right on their first go, so what have you taken from your failures and what have been the biggest factors in your success in terms of gaining traction with your SaaS?&lt;p&gt;In particular, what marketing&amp;#x2F;promo tactics have served you best?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chaddeshon</author><text>I launched BromBone a few months ago. About 150 people signed up and tried it at least once. Most of them never came back after that. No one ever paid.&lt;p&gt;A few weeks ago, I refocused BromBone into a subset of what it was before. I&amp;#x27;ve already got a handful of paid accounts and I expect a few more soon. I&amp;#x27;m not rich yet, but some people paying is way better than no one paying. There is hope this time.&lt;p&gt;For BromBone, I think there are two main things that have made the difference:&lt;p&gt;1) The first version of the service would make developer&amp;#x27;s lives a little easier but still leaves a lot of development for them to do. The new version completely eliminates a pain for them with very little work on their part.&lt;p&gt;The first version could have been helpful to a lot of different people. I thought a bigger market would be better. Instead it meant:
* I couldn&amp;#x27;t focus on one community
* I had to try to market to communities I didn&amp;#x27;t really understand
* It fix half of a lot of people&amp;#x27;s problems, but didn&amp;#x27;t completely fix anyone&amp;#x27;s&lt;p&gt;2) The new version has a landing page that looks more like a traditional SaaS landing page. I tried to go my own way to much with the previous landing page. I&amp;#x27;m not a designer, and I didn&amp;#x27;t pull it off. I think the new landing page looks more legit to people and makes them more likely to recommend it to their boss.&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;BromBone v1 was a &amp;quot;Headless Browser as a Service&amp;quot;.  
BromBone v2 is &amp;quot;Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google&amp;quot;.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.BromBone.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.BromBone.com&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>