The hard truth: How to fail to build a SaaS application…

Introduction

Welcome back to my journey of building a SaaS product from ground up. In my last post (link) I talked about the doubts I had and how I kept myself motivated. This time around I am going to talk about the hard truth I had to learn the hard way. Nobody wants my product.

But first, let us see what I wanted to do this week, and what I actually did.

Retrospective

• ☑ Finding a name
• ☐ Creating a logo (?)
• ☑ Landing page
• ☑ Find and contact 20 people
• ☐ Code cleanups / Refactorings
• ☐ Bugfixing

As you can see, I focused on finding people to call, as well as creating a landing page. To my surprise it was harder than I thought. But more on that later.

Product name

Finding a good name is always a hard task. But I managed to come up with a couple of ideas:

• PairProgrammingParadise
• SharePair
• PairShare

To be honest, I did not spend much time in finding a good name either. I had more important tasks so I decided to postpone this one.

Landing page

I spend some time creating mockups for a landing page using Adobe XD. I did not want to spent hours coding a running website and probably waste time again. So I decided to go the easy route this time and only spend a few hours designing the page. In case I needed to share it with people, actually coding the page would not have been a huge problem.

Calling people

Finding people to call was much harder than anticipated. In my head it sounded as easy as dialing a number and asking “Hey, do even pair bro?”. As a matter of fact, this was in no way whatsoever a reasonable assumption. Quite the opposite was true. It was very hard to find people to call. Since I was only able to call during my lunch break, as well as after I got home, it soon became clear that calling people is not the best way to engage them. Additionally, the phone numbers of people who might use this product, hence developers or team leaders, are not listed on the homepages of their companies. So I first tried to call the main phone line and ask for someone who I can talk to. This, in almost all cases, did not go well. The next thing I tried was calling the persons responsible for open job positions. This had a much higher success rate since they were, most of the time, able to answer the question if their company was doing Pair-Programming. On top of that they were able to give me a contact number that I was able to call afterwards to talk to the people I was actually trying to talk to. The developers.

In addition of calling new people I too reached out to contacts of mine. I wrote some Freelancers I know and asked them if they know people who are pairing, and see the need in tracking their sessions. I contacted old colleagues, asked them if they could reach out to people they know and ask them. Not all of them answered (yet), but most of them were very kind to help me out and ask their peers.

All in all I was able to call 4 developers I do not know, 2 Freelancers replied to my message, 4 friends of mine answered. Most of them had experience in pairing, but not a single one saw the need of tracking their pairing sessions. They even said that the overhead of tracking would be more of a burden than a help. This is an incredibly devastating verdict for my product.

Next steps (03.02.20 – 09.02.20)

So what does that mean for me? Do I give up now? Not quite yet. I still have some open conversations and a few numbers to call. For the next week, I am going to try to reach out to more people and see if am able to find at least one person who sees the need of tracking pairing sessions.

As usual, if you are interested in more of these articles, follow me on twitter @thomaslanghorst