Confirmation bias is a killer. The lesson you learned is worth much more than you lost.
I can't stress this enough: don't use search ads for anything but laser targeted direct response marketing. It's somewhere between useless and actively harmful for anything else.
The only things I do anymore are 1. talk to actual sales prospects and 2. content marketing. Everything else is a handout to Google and Facebook shareholders.
Agreed on Google Search Ads. I've run a lot of pre-launch campaigns, mostly for e-comm and SaaS products. Meta ads is still the best way to go if you're going the ad route. YouTube is 2nd best option if you're good at making videos. For growth hacking, Producthunt and Facebook & LinkedIn groups can work. For SaaS, LinkedIn ads can work if you really know your audience and know how to run ads. Cold email also works well for SaaS if provide upfront value and not spam people.
But Google Search Ads is highly competitive and lots of bot traffic. IMO, it's best for retargeting during pre-launch.
PPC is the absolute fastest way to lose your shirt.
One thing that stands out is that OP wasn't bidding on "intent" keywords, sounded more like people were searching for info on Lightroom API than a product they would pay for. That's much harder traffic to convert.
Sounds like the fake emails were from "subscription bombs". Bad actors will bulk sign up targets to flood their inboxes and hide worrying notifications like security alerts.
You learned some great lessons there, but I would challenge one item early in the "script":
> 2. Verify if it’s a problem from search volume.
It contextually depends, but correlating a problem-to-be-solved with search analytics can be really tenuous. I'd suggest a different phrasing:
Verify it it's a problem by speaking with customers.
You can still use all the tools, but in the end you want to talk to those who you intend to serve. At that point, you'll have zeroed in on the actual problem they may have and are willing to pay you to solve.
> applying Adobe Lightroom presets (image filters) on many images quickly and cheaply
This sounds to me like a thing people might pay for.
But I would (strongly) guess most photographers don’t know what an “API” is or why they’d want to pay monthly for one, or how to wire up “curl” to it somehow. People who know that stuff will cobble this together in a script.
As a simple desktop app I could see a utility like this doing well in that audience though. $29-49 one time payment, apply all the presets you want, save lots of time.
But… this is a built in feature of Adobe Lightroom.[2] And it is not even some hard to find feature. I learned about it in the first tutorial of Adobe Lightroom i ever watched.
Hah, this is a perfect example of why it's important to build products for an audience you know and understand. (I've barely used Lightroom and clearly I'm not part of this audience)
On the other point though, there's a case to be made for building products to make things easier/better/more discoverable/etc even if when they already exist. One example: there are is ton of screen recorder software out there despite the fact that QuickTime on Mac can record the screen.
I’ve signed up for waitlists and bought things from some of them, and I’ve launched products to waitlists I built (and made some sales on launch day).
I think a few things helped with that, but one difference that stands out is where the subscribers came from. Mine were mainly from Twitter or people already reading my blog, so they already knew who I was to some degree and had some reason to believe I could help them. It’s a much harder job to sell to random people who came from an ad, who start off with a lot less trust. Any missteps in the copy/problem you solve/etc are magnified because random people are just looking for any reason to hit the back button.
I was on the Analogue Pocket waiting list and also the Framework computer waiting list. Still on both actually, though I've had the chance to purchase it (well at least the Pocket) and have not yet.
I’m really surprised by how negative many of the reactions here are. I found the overall concept and approach very interesting and entirely plausible, though obviously it didn’t work out at all in the end. If there was a better technique to validate the signups, that could have helped pivot to a different product with actual interest. And I loved the research to target a specific search keyword with traffic but few results.
My criticism (seems everyone has one!) is that building your own billing, and spending two weeks on the first version before you have any customers, is a massive overkill. Really all you need is to track usage. Don’t even bother trying to automate on your own at this stage…
A huge part of the failure here is misunderstanding the budget of the target audience. The author genuinely thought that photographers have hundreds of dollars of cash hanging around to spend on this SaaS tool, even after meeting a customer who explained that they weren't willing to pay for this.
How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.
The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.
I didn’t think that photographers had the cash, I thought that developers handling photos in some way had cash. Such as the various AI photo generator sites that might want to homogenize the style of images they create for ads, headshots, etc.
For actual photographers, they’re probably manipulating all of the photos on their own computers with Desktop software.
Photoshop’s pricing for this is 15 cents per image which is prohibitively expensive for nearly any image generation use case.
That’s actually the type of tool I was playing around with implementing when I came across this as an issue I wanted to solve for myself.
My impression is they were excited about the rate that people were joining the waitlist more than the number on the list. They were assuming that if n people were joining the waitlist every month they would get n * 10% new customers per month post launch.
As far as I know, typical conversion from a waitlist is below 2% and that's after you're fairly sure you're dealing with people and not bots.
Neither 100 nor 1000 emails is even remotely enough, both amount to nothing.
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed your write-up and certainly feel for you. It seems you did everything right.
Possibly the sign-ups were generic bots, trying unsophisticated contact-form spam. I can see how a wait-list and contact form look similar to a bot, especially one which is optimized to treat basically anything with an email address and a text field as a contact form.
Readit News
I can't stress this enough: don't use search ads for anything but laser targeted direct response marketing. It's somewhere between useless and actively harmful for anything else.
The only things I do anymore are 1. talk to actual sales prospects and 2. content marketing. Everything else is a handout to Google and Facebook shareholders.
But Google Search Ads is highly competitive and lots of bot traffic. IMO, it's best for retargeting during pre-launch.
One thing that stands out is that OP wasn't bidding on "intent" keywords, sounded more like people were searching for info on Lightroom API than a product they would pay for. That's much harder traffic to convert.
https://www.spamhero.com/support/125230/I_am_being_attacked_...
I use to work on a newsletter service and we had to combat this constantly.
> 2. Verify if it’s a problem from search volume.
It contextually depends, but correlating a problem-to-be-solved with search analytics can be really tenuous. I'd suggest a different phrasing:
You can still use all the tools, but in the end you want to talk to those who you intend to serve. At that point, you'll have zeroed in on the actual problem they may have and are willing to pay you to solve.Do it better the next time!
This sounds to me like a thing people might pay for.
But I would (strongly) guess most photographers don’t know what an “API” is or why they’d want to pay monthly for one, or how to wire up “curl” to it somehow. People who know that stuff will cobble this together in a script.
As a simple desktop app I could see a utility like this doing well in that audience though. $29-49 one time payment, apply all the presets you want, save lots of time.
1: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/batch-edi...
On the other point though, there's a case to be made for building products to make things easier/better/more discoverable/etc even if when they already exist. One example: there are is ton of screen recorder software out there despite the fact that QuickTime on Mac can record the screen.
I think a few things helped with that, but one difference that stands out is where the subscribers came from. Mine were mainly from Twitter or people already reading my blog, so they already knew who I was to some degree and had some reason to believe I could help them. It’s a much harder job to sell to random people who came from an ad, who start off with a lot less trust. Any missteps in the copy/problem you solve/etc are magnified because random people are just looking for any reason to hit the back button.
But if it's really promising and ready and I care enough then I'll notice anyway.
My criticism (seems everyone has one!) is that building your own billing, and spending two weeks on the first version before you have any customers, is a massive overkill. Really all you need is to track usage. Don’t even bother trying to automate on your own at this stage…
> When the waitlist reached 100 people
$500/month for every person on the waitlist?
How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.
The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.
For actual photographers, they’re probably manipulating all of the photos on their own computers with Desktop software.
Photoshop’s pricing for this is 15 cents per image which is prohibitively expensive for nearly any image generation use case.
That’s actually the type of tool I was playing around with implementing when I came across this as an issue I wanted to solve for myself.
$5000/mo for 10% of the list. Unless he factored in the list growing further.
The website has pricing and it does say $500/mo for the pro version. So maybe 100 was a typo and he had 1000 on the waitlist.
Possibly the sign-ups were generic bots, trying unsophisticated contact-form spam. I can see how a wait-list and contact form look similar to a bot, especially one which is optimized to treat basically anything with an email address and a text field as a contact form.