The reality behind bootstrapping a SaaS • Part 1
What you are about to read is the opposite of a “flex” article.
I will not tell you how I bootstrapped a $83 333 MRR SaaS in 3 months.
Nor will I give any advice on how to build a SaaS.
I will just share my experience, struggling on a SaaS since one and a half years. The real long path of bootstrapping a SaaS. I hope it will help you and allow me to connect with fellow SaaS developers, share experiences, and help each other out.
I started developing this SaaS since September 2021.
Here are the results so far:
229 registered users, 375 Amazon stores, 1 400+ store’s countries, millions of orders synchronized…
0 profit.
Even worst.
Today, July 14th 2023, the company is burning €1200+ per month.
How it started.
In 2019, a friend (Stephen 👋) told me about selling on Amazon. He paid for courses, started selling on the marketplace and went pretty good.
He shared with me everything he knows about it, gave me golden advices and shared his courses so I can learn and start an Amazon business.
Few months later I was able to start selling yoga mats on Amazon, thanks to him !
Getting the first sales is an amazing feeling ! 🤑
You feel like you finally succeeded in turning an idea to an actual product that people pay for.
Then I got my first real good reviews ! A few months earlier I didn’t knew anything about selling on Amazon, even less about yoga, and here I was, selling dozens of premium yoga mats to happy customers.
I felt like the yogi version of Steve Jobs 😅
I was feeding my ego with a well-growing revenue. I used to talk to my friends about how many mats I sold each day and how great of an opportunity Amazon is. I felt like a visionary entrepreneur who knows things…
Stephen advised me to use ShopKeeper, a SaaS tool that tracks all Amazon costs so you can know your real profit.
And it was at this moment that I knew… 💥
10k€ loss
Selling on Amazon is all about ranking your product for keywords.
Those keywords must be relevant enough for people to buy your product and, of course, have enough search volume.
The yoga mats I was selling were built for experienced yogis. I noticed in competitors’ product reviews that a lot of yogis complained about slippage. Yoga postures require a mat with good grip, so I opted for premium natural rubber mat material with an ultra-grippy layer on top.
The main keywords I was targeting (in FR) were:
- Yoga mat
- Natural rubber yoga mat
- Anti-slip yoga mat
- Ultra-grip yoga mat
Well, to rank for those keywords, you mainly have one choice: Amazon Ads.
Amazon Ads’s concept is quite simple:
- You target a keyword and set a bid, let say €1.50.
- Each time a visitor clicks on your “sponsored product” you get charged €1.50.
- Your organic ranking on that keyword improves each time a visitor buys your product after clicking on your ad.
- You are supposed to lower your bids once your organic rank is good.
- You get more and more organic sales, more and more profit and eventually become a fackin-multi-millionaire 🤑
Quite simple in theory.
In practice it is way more complicated.
You quickly spend a lot on ads to figure out which keywords are relevant. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, and you dont know why.
You end up paying for Ads courses and learn about strategies appear efficient but are too complicated to apply on a daily basis…
Fast forward, I made a lot of mistakes, lost a lot on ads and failed.
⚰️ 2019–2021. 1400 mats sold. €85k+ revenue. €10k loss !
I stopped selling on Amazon and, as I am a developer, started a SaaS to help Amazon sellers with issues I faced.
🚀 September 2021, let’s go Harissa Man !
Developing an ads automation tool is quite long and complicated.
So to start quickly and “lean”, I focused on another small issue/niche related to Amazon sellers.
While I was selling on Amazon, one technique to boost your product ranking was using “Supreme URL”.
Basically, a service called pixelfy.me let you generate small URLs that manipulated Amazon’s URL parameters to make them believe that the visitor had typed a certain keyword. If the visitor purchased your product, it was supposed to improve your ranking.
Kinda borderline, but you gotta do what you gotta do right ? 🏴☠️
The problem with Pixelfy was that it wasn’t possible to track your keyword rank and actually see if the Supreme URL was effective.
💡 I had my MVP idea !
- I would develop a Pixelfy.me copycat, with a smoother UX, including a Supreme URL + keyword rank tracker. I estimate it would take around 3 weeks of development.
- Then, I would talk about it on the 500+ Amazon sellers Discord group I was a part of, sending messages to sellers one by one with a ready-to-use product.
- I would also mention it to the course trainer (who runs the YouTube channel “Money TV”), let’s call him French-Money-Fox.
- Eventually French-Money-Fox would find the service very helpful and share it with the community in exchange for affiliation.
- The community would be excited to try it for free, love it and pay for it. I would get dozens, then hundreds of customers and then develop the ads automation feature, and eventually become fackin-multi-millionaire. 🤗
It is more fun to work with people, so I talked about it with my friend HM, Harissa Man. I decided to take this opportunity to try a new framework, Laravel, which is loved by HM.
HM was ok 🤝
We started building the MVP.
He developed all the clean foundations and assisted me make the transition from Symfony to Laravel.
A month later, the MVP was ready and so were we.
I shared it with the Discord community, sending personalized messages to sellers one by one.
I also sent a (way too long) message to French-Money-Fox.
Nothing happened.
No trust. No answer. No user. Even for free.
I changed my approach and start engaging more with sellers before introducing them to the tool.
✅ We got our first beta testers.
❌ We got that answer from French-Money-Fox: “Looks cool, but I don’t have time”
💥 Harissa-Man grew tired of working on a tool that didn’t provide fast enough returns and decided to quit.
He left solid technical foundations and continued to offer advice and provide code reviews for months. 🙏
🦸 He wished me luck and ran fast across the street with a harissa sandwich.
The Mom feedbacks period
Reality is often far away from theory and logic.
In theory, sellers who are already using Pixelfy.me would be willing to try a better solution for free.
In reality, they tend to only try solutions they trust, and won’t trust a came-out-of-nowhere ex-seller/developer proposing a free solution.
Moreover, selling on Amazon is all about finding good niches, and the level of trust and value must be strong enough for sellers to disclose their niches to a potential competitor. 🥷
Being too excited with the genuinely better solution we built, I underestimated how important trust would be.
I also underestimated how challenging it would be to convince “trust-owners,” such as Amazon trainers, to try and promote the tool in exchange for affiliation.
Here began the “travail de fourmis” (ant work) phase.
I spent days across Discord servers and Facebook groups, sending hundreds of personalized messages.
Most sellers never responded, and only a few registered but never really used the tool.
I realized that I was clearly doing something wrong in my approach, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I continued reaching out to more Amazon trainers and YouTubers. One well-known figure (Dan Rodgers) was kind enough to register but never used the tool. I believe the tool’s functionality was simply not strong enough, and the main feature of tricking the Amazon algorithm was seen as too risky or questionable.
I finally got in touch with a french trainer who has a community of over 200 students!
Let’s call him Jean-Sauveur.
Jean-Sauveur is not on Youtube.
He doesn’t over promise about succeeding on Amazon. He makes all his acquisition from Google SEO & Google Ads. He seems well-organized, and his courses appear to be serious and reputable. One of my friends actually paid for his Amazon FBA training and was satisfied with the experience.
- “His course is very clear, and he takes the time to have a call with each of his students before they start the training.”, she told me.
I had a call with Jean-Sauveur.
He didn’t show much enthusiasm about “Supreme URL” tricky url feature.
So I told him about the next feature I planed to add:
✨ A dashboard to have a clear and simple overview of key metrics. ✨
He became excited about it !
- “Do you think it would help your students?”, I asked
- “Yes, for sure”, he said
- “If I develop it, will you promote the tool to them with affiliate links?”
- “Of course, once the dashboard is ready!”
I was so excited ! The first Amazon trainer to validate the tool I was building ! A first door opened to, hopefully, tens of sellers. 🤩
I stopped sending messages to individual sellers and dived into the Amazon “Selling-Partner API” to connect with Amazon sellers’ data and build the first dashboard.
At this moment, I discovered what a mess this API was.
Getting access to it took me an entire week!
Synchronizing the seller’s products took me 3 weeks!
It was so unreal for such a big company like Amazon that I wrote an article to document it. The article quickly ranked well on google, got hundreds then thousands of views and some connection with fellow developers struggling like me. It later led me to try focussing on this audience, but I will talk about that in another article.
Time to launch !
It took me a month to build the dashboard. I ended up having the exact dashboard that I wished I had when I was selling on Amazon. 🤩
I immediately reached out to Jean-Sauveur !
“Hey Jean-Sauveur !
Hope you are well. The dashboard is now ready ! Sellers can see all of their key metrics in a single view ! All countries and all ads combined ! They can even see their organic sales, which is important yet not available on the official Amazon seller dashboard (Amazon Seller Central).”, I sent.
He never answered.
LinkedIn, email, phone, I tried them all.
Jean-Sauveur disappeared.
He was not the savior I expected.
Started one of those painful periods in entrepreneurship: doubts.
What went wrong ? What mistake did I make ? Am I in the right way ? Am I even solving a real issue ? Why some sellers tell it’s a good idea but few registered ? Am I that bad at “selling” ? Maybe Harissa-Man left because he knew we wont make it. Why Jean-Sauveur disappeared ? Did he lied ? Why ? Is it because I am black ? Am I black ? 😅
I obviously had to change something. I had to learn how to talk to sellers and trainer to know their real issues.
I searched for books about that on Youtube and discovered a gold nugget…
The Mom Test
Do you know this moment when you are stuck for so long in a video game and you get tips that unlocks everything?
That is exactly how I felt with this book!
The Mom Test teaches you “How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.” (especially Jean-Sauveur) !
I learned that I asked questions in the worst possible way, which left sellers and trainers with almost no choice but to answer “yes, that is a good idea.” I learned that there is a world between saying “yes, I will use it” and actually using it. I learned how to conduct user interviews, discover real issues, and identify when I was “demonstrating” or approaching things incorrectly.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone willing to launch a product. It was the best book I have read in 2023 so far (and actually the only one 😅).
I also discovered one of the best talks I have seen about getting your first customers.
No theory, a highly practical talk that shares insightful experiences. I recommend watching it.
Pivot ?
Finding and convincing sellers to have a call was too difficult.
I failed to have calls with trainers to listen to their student issues.
I even started doubting the Amazon ads automation struggle. Yes I struggled with it as a seller, but I never paid for an automation software myself.
Among the people I met, there was a freelancer who worked with big companies selling on Amazon. Thanks to the mom test method, I discovered that his main issue was extracting data from Amazon to create his weekly report.
I contacted most of the French Amazon freelancers, added hundreds of Amazon experts on LinkedIn with an automation tool and sent them personalized message to have a talk.
I eventually managed to talk to over 100 experts. They almost all have two main issues:
- Struggle to find new customers (sellers)
- Long time spend on extracting data for weekly / month reports
I though: What if I focus on Amazon experts instead of sellers ?
- They are way more easier to target (LinkedIn).
- I identified a first issue that can be easily solved (online reports)
- They might have a larger budget than most sellers.
It was time to pivot !
Let me know if it’s worth writing what happened next.
