Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

If that's your target, then you might possibly be operating under at least a few wrong assumptions.

As they say, you always want to sell to stakeholders. In large orgs, most people you can talk to just earn a salary. If you're selling time, money, or savings for the org, they're rarely interested. What usually holds their attention are magicians that offer to make their problems disappear.

You're trying to sell a DIY kit to companies where, past a certain size, the type of competency required becomes a rare commodity in-house (regardless of how ridiculously simple the solution). So they typically avoid upgrading themselves into new problems. Integrating a SaaS is always a new problem.

In addition to selling the tools to solve their problems, can you also offer to sell the service that makes them go away? Can you be the magician that makes entire problems disappear? What if you told them you'll take them away for a fee, could that get their attention? Try it and see if it at least gets the conversation going. If it does, you can lay out a price table where you charge a premium to hire a few people to work on it with your own tools.

You can monitor socials for individuals complaining about the pain point or about a competitor and reach out when you got a proper "signal".

I also avoid saying things like "free trial". Instead, I offer to give them access to the paid product to try it out.

It sounds less car salesman-y and as a receiver it feels nicer to get access to a paid product rather than a free trial everyone can have. Semantics most of the time, but it helps.

You can write organic content about how to solve those pains (and hope people searching for solutions find it).

When you do get customers you should always include a form that asks _why_ they are unsubscribing. I have learned a lot from it and it also offers a chance to turn customers back around. If someone complains about the price, I can give them a discounted rate. If someone complains about a specific quality issue I can give them free credits to make up for used ones, etc.

Always respond quickly. I have landed many customers simply because I respond quickly to emails. I've had customers tell me they chose my service over "big competitor Y" because I respond to their emails (even though my service is more expensive).

If you have an entire vertical, don't undervalue the small fish. I target ~3 different types of customers and the bulk of my revenue comes from one specific type of customer. I almost got rid of the other two customers, but realized my largest customer ($1XX,XXX/year) started off as a small fish for a year before becoming a big fish.

That may go against some of the traditional advice, as the small fish tend to account for most of the support... but in my case it works out.

A lot of the small customers end up being a channel on their own. A person leaves company A and goes to company B. They introduce your product at company B because they used it at company A.

When I speak with people I always ask how they found out about my product. Nine times out of ten it's a "coworker used your product at a different company".

In my case, I built an app called foundersmail.xyz, which gives users access to founders' official emails and other details. I got the idea after seeing someone else build a similar tool for investors — it worked well for him, but he already had an audience and reputation.

For me, I promoted it across various subreddits and platforms and got around 100 users. I noticed that only 20–30% actually used up their free credits. While debugging this, I discovered most of my users were students cold-emailing founders for summer internships. I thought at least one of them might convert — but unfortunately, none did (still trying to figure that part out).

My two biggest mistakes:

No traffic — not enough eyeballs.

Target audience mismatch — students using it instead of founders or professionals.

Interestingly, there are competitors making money with similar products, so I know there’s potential. I’m still figuring out what’s missing in my approach.

That said, I’m okay with the outcome so far. I haven’t spent a single rupee — free domain, free hosting, and I built it in my spare time and vibe coded. It was an experiment rather than an actual business.

Marketing became much more important than it used to be. I used to be able to rely on organic growth from people finding my SaaS using search engines. But this ended several years ago. Marketing also became much more difficult than it used to be. Generic ads on Google or LinkedIn no longer work, unless you can spend huge amounts of money on testing. I found all paid ads to be a waste of money.

If you have a B2B SaaS, you run into the additional problem of people being busy and not hanging out in forums. With consumers, things are more straightforward. You can generally blast an ad on Reddit, Instagram, and some other sites, and people will see it. Not so with B2B. Many of your customers will be busy working, and they will not pay any attention to work-related ads outside of work.

Content marketing also became more difficult. With search engines, especially Google, going down the drain and the deluge of crappy SEO-gaming and AI-generated content, it's difficult to rise above the noise.

I haven't found the right solution yet.

e.g. if your potential customers are perfectly happy to use spreadsheets to manage their workflows at your price point, it's not going to work out.

Trying not to be an ass, but "Build it and they will come" is not a good strategy (that unfortunately I've done/experienced multiple times).

I understand (and in certain context appreciate) hesitancy to blatant self-promotion but this is not the time.

Not seeing your website, websites of who you think your competitors are, links to your promotional efforts etc. makes it impossible to give good advice. The best you can hope for is generic, vague advice.

The devil is in details.

Maybe your website is bad. Maybe your product isn't as great as you think. Maybe your pitch is not good.

Generically I would say most people don't do enough promotion and could improve their "first time use" (onboarding) experience.

For example I make a note-taking application for developers and power users: https://edna.arslexis.io/

Almost all of my users came from Show HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846242

So it's a sobering realization that I got lucky enough that the post was interesting and generated discussion and made people try the app.

At the same time, I know I could be doing more marketing.

I know I could improve onboarding, I could record videos showing how to use more advanced features etc.

Chances are you could do more marketing and you could improve onboarding in your app but to give you specific, actionable advice we would have to know much more about your app, your competitors, your marketing efforts.

Not your description of those things, the actual website, the actual marketing post etc.

People only care about "more value" when it solves more problems. So if your competition is killing it, and you are not getting bites on your added value, you need to talk to people to find out what pains they still have even when using your competitor's solution, and then make sure your added value resolves those pains.

Otherwise, you've got the same solution, just a shinier version, and that is all your 1:1 feature comparison will show.

There is a big caveat on this that we have no idea what product or feature set you are talking about, so this is pure speculation. You'd have to share a lot more about your product and marketing to get more substantive answers.

Top down means you’re trying to sell managers and above who don’t directly use the tool. Usually they care about seeing case studies, logos of other companies, testimonials from their peers, etc. They want to look good and the way you help them with that is making one of their metrics look good, or giving them more budget to work with. Safe decisions are easier for them to make because they don’t want to get fired by making a risky bet, even if the risky bet offers more for less (“nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”). Usually the way in with them is through partnerships, relationships, and education. Start with friends who work in that industry to get you a case study and logo or you could try to make friends at a conference if you don’t have any already. Or create some educational material around the problem and sell them consulting, using your tool as a solution. Almost always this starts off as more consultative as a relationship.

If it’s bottom up, you’re selling to the individual contributors who don’t get a say about paying for the tool. That means you have to start with a generous free tier and try to get as many seats filled or usage as possible. It should bring enough value to the ICs and the organization that by the time they hit their usage caps in the free tier, the ICs are begging their managers to put a credit card in or asking to set up a sales call. If you’re not getting any usage at the free tier, then it comes back to finding where the ICs hang out and trying to integrate your tool as part of a workflow to common problems they solve. This is again about educating and making/leaning on friends to help spread the word and convince others to use your tool.

In both cases, relationships matter a lot to get initial traction (existing customers, friends in the industry, partners). They will help you figure out what’s needed to sell into the market you want to sell into, what’s holding you back, and getting you early validation. I didn’t see you mention existing relationships you have, so maybe that’s a good place to start.

With me preaching textbook digital marketing to my team, I feel dirty and like a fraud.

Also get out in the real world, go to meetups, or wherever you might meet potential clients and show them your app up close. They will probably be cordial and kindly dismissive, but you might get some real feedback. It's harder to ignore someone when they are standing in front of you.

Paid marketing doesn't work in my experience. Social media is cheap. I've had an app get thousands of views based on a reddit post, and not one person (literally 0) bothered to click outside of the page (i.e. were curious what app this is). Social media is a false sense of validation, even if you get a hit.

Direct sales is the only thing that I found that works consistently. Get in front of anyone in this organization.

My guess is you're trying to do too direct so you send a spammy email telling them how great your product is. Don't do that. Don't try to sell them anything. Don't even tell them you have a product. Just get them on a zoom call and ask them what they do now and why it sucks. People are much more receptive to take a call and tell you about what they do or their problems than they are to hear a sales pitch.

And if you don’t believe in it how on earth are you meant to sell it?

This is a bit late to solve that problem. You ideally figure these things out before you build an entire product.

It's random. See it as something like gambling. It's a healthy way to approach it. And ideally, do it with someone else's money.

your users are most likely going to stick with: products they already know, or something that's already popular. To entice users away from the competition, they need to see a clear value proposition that addresses their pain points, and preferably not just in marketing copy.

A few jobs ago, I worked for a struggling startup that was trying to pivot and we had one large customer that kept the lights on. I was over the project that kept the lights on and survived every round of layoffs.

The customer was hesitant about giving a small struggling startup money and made us put our code in escrow that they would have access to under certain conditions. The startup failed, they got the code and the company that acquired us for scraps added an addendum to my severance agreement that released me from my non compete and allowed me to have access to my work laptops and work for the client.

A few years later I was the dev lead at another company and I found the perfect SaaS product for our needs. But the CTO wasn’t comfortable basing our entire project around a one man startup. I suggested an escrow agreement, the lawyers got involved and we signed the contract and we were now 80% of his business.

I’m not suggesting you so an escrow. I am saying that many businesses aren’t going to trust a no name one person startup until you have some referenceable clients, provide an easy migration path if you go tits up and they know you aren’t a fly by night company.

Personally, I’m in the camp of “no one ever got fired for buying $WellKnownIndustryStandardProduct”

But I don’t have too much actionable advice when it comes to top of the funnel sales. I’m a “post sales architect” as part of my job. The next step below sales.

Your product is almost irrelevant, as long as it is at least mediocre at what it does.

What matters is your marketing and your positioning. From how you describe it, it sounds like you’re selling steak, not the sizzle - you say what it is capable of but not what it does for you. You mention that it could save “ten hours for real”, and this is the point you need to drive home - this will save you money, make you money, make you more attractive to investors, give you time and peace of mind.

As to channels - social media rules the roost. Pay YouTube and TikTok influencers to shill for you. If you don’t believe enough in your product to pay for marketing, why should they believe in it?

Push out hype-laden press releases. Thump your chest. Drop emails to journalists in the space, with pre-written soundbites and a link to the release. Make it easy content for them to sling up on their platform. The bar is low.

Pick a vertical. Work it, target it, saturate it with your product. If you can find a vertical that’s underserved, then start there.

Finally, make sure your landing page speaks to the above, and hammers the point home right out of the gate. “Vidlify will help you get that Ferrari you always wanted. Here’s how:”

Save jargon for the “I’m excited, tell me more”.

Then, either it will fly, and you can progress to a broader market, or it won’t, and you either accept your loss and move on, or tweak and try again - but don’t get caught in the sunk costs fallacy - just because you’ve already spent X time and Y money, it doesn’t mean you have to commit more.

Good luck.