I can't figure out secret sauce or what ever to SaaS.
Ghost Kitty
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What do all these product launches like Ruttl, Before Sunset, etc go soooooo well yet mine don't? Why is https://obeatow.com or https://twayobiz.com not sustainable? Is there something I'm missing as it sure seems like it?
nearly five years trying and then finishing and to build stuff knowone uses.
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vados@vados
You might consider tweaking your validation process -- try only building when you have a customer committed.
Other than that, try building a copycat competitor (there's no shame in it) -- no need to find a new market. Remember, most large companies are clones, not original ideas.
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@sewell_stephens
Not every single product is a copy cat -- ideas can be distinct and novel. It's not true that everything has competitors either -- green field ideas still exists. They're hard though (which is why I'm cautioning against them, because you have to convince people of the problem, lots of stuff.
I mean more concretely -- find a market with a product that has lots of traction, and angle to build something that solves the exact same problem, possibly in the same exact market or an adjacent one.
> And also, dont you have to have a product to even have a customer to begin with?
Nope, the really good entrepreneurs have customers *before* they build. This is quite common advice -- you'll see it parroted lots of places because it's true.
It can be hard to wrap the mind around because you may be a natural born builder, so you can start with the step of just "building" landing pages. Get a low cost landing page builder site, and build landing pages and see if you can get people to commit to your idea and using your product *before* you build it.
emails are good, actual money commitments are better. If you put out a landing page for something someone is SO excited about that they put down money *before the thing exists, just to increase the chance of you building it*, you have a possible winner.
IMO you've learned a valuable lesson in 5 years -- being a builder just isn't the way to get projects off the ground. It rarely works like you'd expect it to. You have to sell/market more than you build in the early days.
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@sewell_stephens IMO trying to out-do Google Analytics is really hard. You gotta niche down. There are projects that have done well in that space (Fathom, Plausible, smaller ones), but know that the space is crowded.
If you're trying to make another splitbee, then maybe that could work well for people, but I'd recommend selling *first* before you build. Find people who used to use splitbee and get them to make some sort of commitment (give you an email, give you money, etc).
> So im essentially instead of immediately building this on top of Obeatow, I will first send an email to everyone regarding this new addition. then I will make a short landing page where users can enter their email to be notified of release like you mentioned and see how it goes.
Sounds way reasonable, but one mistake I make often is that after you get their email, you should *reach out and talk to them*. Read the Mom Test (summary here: https://www.shortform.com/pdf/th...) to figure out what they actually will pay for and where their pain is, then solve that.
You may find that their issue *isn't* that they need Splitbee per-say, or rather that they just need some particular piece of value that Splitbee offered, or splitbee-like functionality *on top* of Google Analytics. A lot of people *hate* how hard GA is to use, maybe the value is there, not necessarily building a competitor.