Why Won’t You Talk To Me?! (Interlude 2)

(This is an interlude of The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch — By Yourself. You can read Part 1 of that here or you can read Interlude 1 here.)

You want to know what the hardest thing is about bootstrapping a SaaS business all by yourself?

No, it’s not the hours (you can learn to like how those suck).

No, it’s not trying to find product-market fit (although that sucks, too).

And no, it’s not the time it takes to build up meaningful revenue (yeah, that sucks, but you get used to being “poor” after a while).

It’s not any of those things. In fact, after you’ve been at it for a while, you don’t even notice those things anymore.

What sucks the most and is the hardest thing to adjust to is the indifference most people will have towards you and your SaaS app.

Indifference is probably worse than rejection.

With rejection, you can at least rationalize things to yourself. Maybe they’re having a bad day. Maybe I need to change my approach. Maybe they’re just a jerk. Because rejection is really only someone disagreeing with something you believe in, it’s easy to write off rejection as nothing more than someone else’s opinion.

But with indifference, you’re completely robbed of any feedback. You’ll probably tend to come to the conclusion that they just don’t care. And that can be incredibly demoralizing. Because you care. You care about them. You cared enough to write that blog post, pay for that ad, put out that podcast, or send them that email. You care about making sure your product can actually help them. You care about being fair about your pricing. Unless you’re a money-grubbing sociopath, you care about the people you’re trying to serve with your solution.

And even if you’re not a money-grubbing sociopath, you probably care that you make some money at some point with this thing.

As you set out to build awareness of your SaaS app, you’re going to be putting yourself out there — a lot.

You’re going to spend hours and hours crafting a blog post no one reads.

You’re going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on advertising that doesn’t get you a single sign up.

You’re going to send hundreds of emails (and even more follow up emails) that nobody replies to.

And you’re going to get people that sign up for your service and then never use it. And when you reach out to them about that, chances are they won’t give you the time of day.

So what do you do?

First of all, don’t give up.

Too many people throw the towel in after spending months building their SaaS app out only to find (rather quickly) that getting customers for it is a lot more dismal of a process than they expected. (That’s why I told you to stop writing code. Check out Part 1 if you need a refresher.)

Just remember: You always lose when you decide to quit.

Second, you need to realize that you’re just as guilty.

Of course you don’t realize that ignoring that blog post, ad, landing page, podcast, or email is actually causing someone else strife. You’re just going about your day doing you.

Chances are, you’re not being malicious when you skim over something, click on something you thought looked interesting but were never serious about signing up for, or added something to some online store’s shopping cart you never intended to actually purchase.

But I bet you someone out there is watching those metrics and getting upset about them.

Here’s a fun little story. I published an article about how I lost a ton of signups to an impossible to reproduce bug on Tamboo’s registration page. That same day, my signups went up by a factor of three. I was ecstatic, to say the least. And just like that, my hopes were dashed. None of those surplus signups actually installed the tracking code on their website, which means none of them actually used the app, let alone watched a single website visitor recording.

Turns out, they were just curious to see what the registration process looked like after having read the article.

Did anyone I ever emailed actually take the time to send me a response and tell me that?

No.

I had to spend a lot of time and frustration to figure that out on my own. And yeah — that kind of sucked.

But I promise you not one single person who did that had any intention of making me feel like crap. But it still did.

Finally, ask yourself if maybe you’re just hanging out with the wrong crowd.

Maybe the reason no one is excited by your offering is because you’re not really resonating with them.

It might be that your messaging is perfectly fine, but that you’re just putting it in front of the wrong people. If you’re trying to market to people who like .NET, you probably shouldn’t be trying to reach them through a Java forum.

Or maybe you need to change how you’re presenting yourself. People can smell unauthentic a mile away. The first thing you should ask yourself is “do I believe what I’m saying?” If not, scrap it and start over.

Lastly, you need to understand that people only care about themselves. If you’re not resonating with people, it’s probably because you’re trying to put the conversation on you instead of them.

The truth is: People don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product. They only care about themselves.

You stand a much better chance at resonating with people when you talk about their wants, their needs, and their interests instead of your own.

And when it still sucks?

Take a break. Hang out with some friends. Do something to get your mind off of it.

Because if there’s any truth to the fact that conversion rates are extremely low in even the best cases — it’s that indifference is the norm.

Average CTR (click through rate) for display advertising? About 2.5%. Meaning 97.5% of people don’t care. That’s pretty close to everyone.

Average landing page to signup rate? That can easily be <1%. Meaning >= 99% of people don’t care. That’s just about everyone.

No one cares, but no one means anything by it.

The trick to overcoming indifference? Not caring about it.

[Want more? Continue on to Interlude 3 — You Must Burn.]