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Comment by craze3 | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was a pretty good article that didn't over-sensationalize SaaS products, while still explaining how they can lead to success.

It sucks that the OP's website didn't "blow up", but then again, most micro-SaaS's are not meant to go viral like that.

One point I would add is that there should be more promotion other than just posting on HN + PH. If that's where your launch stops, you may not be realizing your full potential.

Another little nitpick; The domain they used (EarlyBrd.io) was kinda weird due to the unconventional spelling. Yes, you don't need a dot com, but it should still be something you can mention in conversation and have the other party instantly understand & be able to spell, without you spelling it out for them.

Lastly, why does everyone here seem to care more about post titles than actual posts nowadays?

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I've come to the conclusion that if you want to be a successful indie SaaS developer nowadays, it's better to start off as a marketing/sales person than as a developer. So many small SaaS products suffer from the same problem: no traffic, no customers, no market mindshare. The dev is definitely not the problem. The marketing is.

Thanks for your comments. I am OP :-)

My site went down for a bit while this is front-paged, but is back up now. Definitely I think it could be more of a success if I put more effort in (duh?).

Definitely there is a need to promote across multiple channels and ideally own your audience/create your own content because then you have traffic generation on demand.

The name is weird, I shipped anyways. earlybird.com and earlybrd.com were not free. I have spelled it out many times. It's annoying and sucks.

Hire people on upwork to promote it for you and when you've connected with them sell them the same tool for their own needs.

Inception! Love it.

Love the commitment to shipment, an inspiration to us all. I also liked the post title and thought it was fun but also made it clear what to expect.

Have you thought about whether you could expand the service to provide more value (and get paid more) by freelancers or considered other avenues where you could turn "RSS + notifications" into another business with a minimum of effort (other job sites, auction listings, it seems like there could be a lot)?

Thank you! Inspired that I inspired you because I used to read this type of thing and thought I'd never do anything like it. I've thought about expanding to additional freelancing sites but have not thought about the RSS+notifications thing. I still have something eating away at me that it's just an "RSS feed reader" but maybe I'm wrong about that entirely.

Just do this but for other job sites and aggregate. You seem to know Pieter Levels from your Make book reference, and I'm not sure if Remote Ok has an RSS feed or Slack notifications but this could be a pretty useful feature for that.

Also add categories and keywords to filter by for Upwork jobs if you haven't already. Contact Upwork users directly and message them about your product. Do things that don't scale as they say. I'd say contact maybe 500 people and see the response and subsequent sales. You could also contact marketers so they can post their jobs on your platform perhaps. There are many ways for future development it seems to me.

You can email me if you want more advice, I run a SaaS as well (https://getartemis.app) and I do some of these marketing tips I talk about.

I actually thought it was sort of a pun playing with the fact it could be understood as Early Bird or Early Board. And that sounds pretty neat to my non native English :D

> Lastly, why does everyone here seem to care more about post titles than actual posts nowadays?

The point of a title is to provide some kind of summary or teasing of what the posts talks about. If you try to guess the content of the article from the title you will fail here.

I don't want to criticize the content of this post, but we have this kind of content very often on the homepage, so it is not like we would have missed a super interesting thing

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