Why having no new customers is the best news for me

I've been building my new SaaS in public for 6 weeks.

I got my first customer after 4 weeks.

I took a week off.

Over the past week I signed up 0 new customers.

This is the best news ever.

No I'm not insane, let me explain

In case you haven't seen any of my posts before, here's some context:

• I went from 0 to my first paying customer for my new SaaS in 28 days.

• I posted about my entire journey on Reddit and LinkedIn.

• I'm now sharing weekly updates about how I'm growing this business

• You can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

I didn't take the pedal off the gas, I spoke with 8 potential customers and I had 2 different type of feedback:

• my product is not there yet for their use case.

• my value proposition wasn't clear to them.

This is fantastic news.

I had 8 people engaging in a conversation with me. My effort in cold outreach and content creation are paying off.

I reached out to 13 people and 7 of them replied and engaged in a conversation. more than 50% conversion rate. Sweet!

I got 1 person reaching out to me because they saw one of my post on LinkedIn.

Obviously the most ROI came from the manual cold outreach. But there are positive sign from the content creation side of things.

Now back onto the feedback I received:

Product not ready for their use case

This is obviously expected. The first commit went in 3 weeks ago. I'd be very surprised if a potential customer would find everything they need and make sense out how to use it.

I made a conscious decision to remove some parts of the product that aren't solving the user a user problem.

For example:

• a user can't create an account. I'm creating them manually

• a user can't create a custom domain. I have to create it manually.

• a user can't upload pictures, I have to upload them on the CDN manually.

I'd rather be in a position where a prospect tells me that the product is not quite there. I'll take that instead of over-building and over-engineering any day.

This piece of feedback lead me to my biggest breakthrough.

I could've used the list of lacking feature / components as a todo list, spend a couple of weeks building. After that I could've gone back to those potential customers or finding new one.

But there is a better way.

The platform is not ready for prime time. Users can't sign up and start creating their landing pages.

Can I use this to my advantage?

I think so, I'm going to try a done-for-you approach until I have enough info / time to build all the pieces needed.

The done-for-you approach also opens a potential new stream of revenue, as I can charge a one time fee per page on top of a subscription

Unclear value prop

This is mainly down to a skill issue. I lost focus on the most important thing: Focusing on the how I can solve a problem for my customer.

In one of my calls I started rambling on about performance. How important this is and how most of the site builder have abysmal performance scores.

Instead of focusing on how I could help them I spent 6/7 minutes shitting on other platforms.

That didn't do me any favour and I did not close the sale.

Lesson learned, never take eyes off the prize.

Resist the urge of going down a tangent that I'm passionate about.

Always solve a problem, always help the customer.

So yes, I have had 0 new customers this week but I:

• had 8 new leads

• had feedback on my product

• came up with a potential new business model

This is insane progress and I'm super stoked about it

What do you think? am I approaching this correctly? do you agree with my learnings?

And now my favourite part, sharing numbers

Numbers

• 8 new leads

• 6 new landing pages created this past week. The product WORKS!

• I currently have 1 customer. MRR of £10.

• The newsletter has 52 subscribers. I promised to do a video of 50 push ups, so here it is

• The LinkedIn newsletter has 191 subscribers. WOW!

• Big party on X. 211 followers now!

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

If you need a high-converting landing page, reply to this email!