What would you choose: to create a product that will undoubtedly improve the lives of millions of people, but with no guarantee of commercial success, or to create a product that is obviously super commercially successful, but has no real utility?
For the past year, we ve been building a specialized SaaS tool. Our entire value proposition was a specific automated workflow that saved our users about 10 hours a week. We charged $49/month for it, and we had a solid base of 80 paying customers.
Then, on Tuesday, a massive, billion-dollar incumbent in our space announced their quarterly update. Buried in the release notes was the exact feature we built our entire company around. And they are offering it for free to anyone on their $10/mo enterprise plan.
Not a pity post I've recovered and I'm launching again in six weeks. But I want to write down the post-mortem while it's still fresh, because I made three mistakes that I now see everywhere in other people's launches.
Mistake one: I treated the launch as the marketing, not a moment in an existing marketing motion. I had no list, no audience, no warm network on PH. 63 upvotes was basically my friends plus luck.
Mistake two: my tagline described the category ("AI-powered project management") instead of a result. Nobody clicks a category.
Mistake three: I launched on a Tuesday because "Tuesday sounds good." I had no idea what else was launching that day. Two well-known companies launched the same day and I was invisible.
I work with startup teams and use AI tools almost every day for writing, research, support, and more. It saves a lot of time, no doubt. But there are still things AI just can t do well.
For example, when reading customer feedback, AI often misses the real meaning behind the words, like when someone sounds polite but is actually unhappy. Or when making product decisions, AI can list pros and cons, but it doesn t really understand the bigger picture or timing like a human would.
All of us want customers on our platforms. However, a sign-up is very different from an engaged user who keeps returning and finding value over time.
Creating the right user experience, without being too intrusive, spammy, or in your face , can significantly improve engagement, increase conversions, and reduce churn. In my experience, a platform s success is defined far more by its active users than by the total number of people who have ever signed up.
Below are a few approaches I ve seen work well, along with some that haven t been as effective.
Yesterday, @zaczuo shared an idea about delivering packages from space. To me, that seems quite sci-fi and financially demanding to actually pull off. Today, I m reading that Bezos predicts millions of people could be living in space by 2050.
How realistic is this scenario, given that the last time we set foot on the Moon was more than 50 years ago? (And above all, I feel like we still can t solve basic problems on Earth, let alone expand into space.)
Kind of struggling to figure out how to pitch my site wacht.tv, usually I just say its Reddit meets MTV. Maybe I'm overthinking it but I rarely see X meets Y as a tagline.
We built a pricing page with 5 tiers a $9 starter, $29 basic, $49 pro, $99 business, and a custom enterprise plan. Conversion rates dropped by 14%.
Instead of making it easier for buyers to enter, we created a decision matrix. Visitors spent 20 minutes comparing feature cells rather than evaluating if the product solved their problem.
When we collapsed everything into two clean options (a core utility tier and a power-user tier), trial to paid conversion jumped almost overnight.
For those who have radically simplified their pricing: did you see an immediate lift in activation, or did you panic about losing top-of-funnel signups?
Lovable hit $400M ARR with 146 employees. That's $2.7M revenue per employee. Midjourney goes even further. $500M revenue. ~110 employees. $0 raised from investors. That's over $4.5M per employee. Bootstrapped. For context: most SaaS companies celebrate $200k-$300k per employee as a strong benchmark.
If 146 people can generate $400M, what does the math look like at 10?
The world has changed rapidly over the past two decades with the internet, new technologies and the accelerated transfer of information.
Anyone not actively working online or in IT may have trouble keeping up with these "tech trends." This is especially true for older generations who did not have the opportunity to grow up with computers as it is today.
