Obviously I failed. I did this...

In my previous SaaS, I struggled to find early adopters.

And because of that, I made the stupidest mistake of my journey.

This is how it played out:

But before we get to that, let me tell you what I'm doing.

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day. I'm also adding lessons from my mistakes and learning from current events. If you're interested, you can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

2 years ago I decided to build a SaaS in the weight loss space. I chose that very overcrowded space for a very personal reason. I struggled with weight all my life. At 26 I was 180kg/400lbs. I lost half of my body weight over the years and keeping it off is still hard now.

It was a noble mission, my passion, and, as you can imagine, it was a failure.

It didn't take off for one simple reason: I didn't make it take off.

You don't have to trust me, Paul Graham agrees. I'm going to butcher the quote but it is something like: "Startups don't succeed, the founder(s) make them succeed".

You probably heard the "do things that don't scale".

When I heard that my immediate reaction was:

How dare you tell me to do things that don't scale? I am a staff-level software engineer, I can build a complex microservice architecture that can scale to the entire planet if it needs to. Of course, I only work on things that scale.

I'm sure you know what happened next and the stupid mistake I made.

Why would I want to find early adopters manually? Why would I go through the painstaking process of finding them, reaching out to them, and getting rejected by most of them? I can do more scalable things.

I can build stuff, launch an ad campaign, get traffic to a page, and convert a proportion of that traffic. Problem solved and no user interaction needed. Good, I don't like talking to people anyway.

I know what you're thinking right now: "LOL! This guy!"

Remember I didn't know any better back then and I didn't see the value in doing things the non-scalable way. I've been an engineer all my life. First, we add an abstraction layer and then we figure out what to do.

So why was this a failure?

Comes down to 1 simple fact. When you're using ads to drive traffic, you are getting cold traffic to your product or service.

Cold traffic is people that don't know you. People that don't know your services and they might not want to buy anything. It is BY FAR the hardest traffic to convert.

I tried to solve a simple problem by making it impossible to solve.

Early adopters are the life and blood of your early efforts.

Find 10 or so people that are willing to try out your product.

They will provide good feedback. Even simple stuff like "I could not figure out how to do X" is INVALUABLE in the beginning.

When building something we know it inside out, the obvious stuff is the harder to get right. We get tunnel vision

I was very afraid of reaching out to people and asking them to try out my stuff. The worst part for me right now is knowing that if you ask nicely, 90% of the people will try to help you out.

I could've reached out to a bunch of people and asked nicely and things would've been different.

All is different now. Today I reached out to 5 people asking them if I could use their product as a use case for my landing page.

Every single one of them replied to me, starting a conversation.

They were nice and supportive. None of them was a monster ready to tell me how bad my stuff

To all of you: Thank you!

So how do you find early adopters?

The usual LinkedIn, Reddit, and X route is still valid.

There are enough people in there that you can find 10 or so people to try out your stuff.

Follow 2 rules:

- Be human. These people might be the people that will save you from yourself. Be nice, and take an interest in their problems.

- Provide something valuable to them. You're not trying to get money out of these people. They are doing you a favor.

Don't go for volume. Don't try to get a "number" of DM per day. Scroll your feed, and look for people that you might genuinely help. Reach out to them and follow the rules above.

You'll be surprised by how many people are willing to talk to you if you treat them with respect and show genuine interest in them.

Hope that sharing this will help you not make the same mistakes I did.

Progress update

- My MVP is in a demoable (if this word exists) state. I have recorded a loom for my heroes and I'll share it with all of you once I have basic stuff like auth done.

- I'm back on X, I've dusted off my old account and started posting there too. I use X to talk about personal stuff too. Come hang out!

- Now that I have a slice of the MVP working, I need to add more stuff to it. the aim is to have a page fully built with my product, production-ready, by the end of the week.

## Celebrations

IT'S ALIVE

- 2 new legends joined the [newsletter](https://welldoitlive.beehiiv.com/). Honestly seeing the counter not moving for 2 days was heartbreaking. I know the numbers aren't important but this early on, every win is a HUGE win

- The LinkedIn newsletter is thriving too. The are 130 subscribers now!

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support, you're all legends!