A few months ago I decided to try and build some passive income.
I did some research on ways to earn passive income.
I started to read tons of articles on how to start an online business. And a lot of articles kept mentioning how the SaaS business model is the holy grail of online business models.
SaaS stands for software as a service and usually has a subscription model.
After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to try and start a SaaS business.
I’m a programmer so creating a technical application wasn’t a hurdle for me. The biggest problem for me was figuring out what I should create.
At the time I was working on a hobby programming project at the time that required me to take screenshots of websites. A lot of screenshots.
Something that would be nearly impossible to do by hand.
And as I was building a tool that automated screenshot taking, I thought: “more people are going to run into this problem”
And that is how I decided to build screenshotapi.net. A simple service that allows a computer to take screenshots of websites automatically.
The service is very simple, but it does one thing extremely well. And that is exactly what you need when you start a new business. Don’t try to do everything, one thing done perfectly is (almost) always better.
Once I had the idea down I started working on it. And after a few weeks, I had my first prototype up.
Build great things and they will come
I had built a great website, put 110% effort into it, and expected the world to find my project and see how great it was.
I was wrong.
After I launched the website nothing happened. I had 2 users, one of whom was me. The other was a friend who helped me test the website.
That’s when I decided that I should learn how to do marketing.
I threw some money into different advertising channels: Google, Facebook even Instagram.
The only thing that yielded any result was through Google advertising. Once I thought about it it made sense. I had created a highly technical service for developers. Those people would search for my service through Google, and probably not click on my random Facebook advertisement.
The first paying customer
After 2 weeks of advertising, I had the first paying customer. He had selected the smallest subscription of only $5 per month but I was still euphoric.
This meant that people were willing to pay for my product!
Now all I had to do was find the right channels, and drive more traffic to the website.
Next steps
My key takeaway is that marketing is crucial. You can have the greatest idea and the greatest execution. But, if you don’t have eyeballs looking at your product, you can never make a sell.
I’ve also found that outsourcing my company marketing is something that’s useful and can save a lot of internal resources. An SaaS link building agency is useful for helping to create and place links across the web in the hopes of driving more traffic to my site.
Using an agency that specializes in SaaS brands, in particular, is important because it’s more precise in how it targets and engages with the audience I require for my business. It’s an affordable solution that doesn’t require me to take on the financial burden of hiring more staff in-house.
Build great things and they will come; if you market it right.
Thanks for reading!
