Ask HN: No one is buying our SaaS. Are we doomed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: No one is buying our SaaS. Are we doomed?

2 pointsclassof855 comments

We got exactly 1 customer who paid us almost immediately. We have delivered for them quite consistently. We asked for feedback and they are silent. We just don't know why.

We have been trying to reach out to other people in our target market but seeing lackluster response. We either get we are not interested or silence treatment.

This is the second product. Our first attempt had early interest from people but we could not monetize for after 6 months.

We are having hard time even to get people to speak with us for feedback and problem validation for current and other ideas.

What is going in SaaS market? I understand economy is not best state what it could be and there are millions of SaaS, ChatGPT wrappers in last two years.

I know problem is us and our approach. But, I wonder how others in SaaS are doing?

For the context, our SaaS is in search engine marketing for people with a lot of data. Think Algolia but targeted towards data heavy industry.

I will appreciate if you can share insights. I am losing patience and money everyday.

Grizzled graybeard here. Warning: you don't want to read what my extensive experience suggests.

Your problem is more common than you might want to hear. Too many B2B SaaS vendors chasing the SME market beset by difficult economic times.

In my experience, the big ticket enterprise scale market comprises of BIG client companies who are so big and important that they will only deal with big, important vendors. Think Oracle, SalesForce, IBM, MS, and the Big 5 consulting / accounting firms.

Which leaves the SME sector, where the imperative is to manage costs, chase payments, please clients, quell staff issues and dream of work-life balance. In 99% of these cases, they don't have time to contemplate yet another data wrangling app with all its attendant issues.

If you are able demonstrate quick, quantifiable significant increase in revenue, then you might get retained on a contract basis to deliver on those promises. If the data volumes are truly large you may need to consider on-premises solutions.

Would you mind sharing a link to the service?

How are people getting their data into your system? "A lot" to me means petabyte-scale, and no way you're transferring that into an external service through the Internet, so I'm going to assume your software includes an installer, or somehow integrates into my environment?

With the lackluster response, it seems like the problem you're solving isn't really a problem others have at all.

Was your first customer a competitor?

I just found these HN threads:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166253

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166432

SaaS is dying, time to build consumer-facing experiences lol

What do you mean by SaaS is dying? Why do you think so?

There's so much saturation in the SaaS/"indie hacker" space, basically anything that could be done is already done. The nicher you get, the easier it is to either implement yourself or build an actual consumer app around.

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