What to Do When No One Will Pay for Your SaaS Product

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Ryan Born is the co-founder, and CEO of Cloud Campaign, a SaaS platform that helps agencies to manage multiple brands on social media at scale.

Ryan was working as a software engineer in the San Francisco area. Like most developers, he loved building things. And he was always tinkering on side-projects.

His latest idea was a social media management tool. He created a few mockups for a product that didn't exist yet and published a landing page to see if anyone was interested.

The next day he turned up at work and heard a big announcement. The company he worked for had been acquired, his office was being closed and he was going to be laid off.

As he's sitting in this meeting, his phone's going crazy. It keeps buzzing every couple of minutes. Turns out he was getting notified every time someone signed up on his landing page.

He was blown away by how many people were interested in a product he hadn't even built yet.

Ryan started building the product and quickly launched the beta. He listed it on sites like Product Hunt and Beta List. And it wasn't long until he had 400 people signed up.

That got him even more excited about his product. So next, he added a paid plan and tried to get people to upgrade. But not even one person paid for the product.

He tried cold email outreach in the hope of finding customers. But that didn't work.

He tried running paid ads. But that didn't work either.

His savings were running out fast. And he had a very limited runway to make this business work. But where was he supposed to go from here? It seemed like nothing was working.

Fast forward to today, Ryan's business is generating around $25K in monthly recurring revenue. And he's found a scalable marketing channel that's working well for him.

In this interview, you'll learn what exactly Ryan did to turn things around. We talk about all the things he tried that didn't work and the important lessons he learned.

And we deep dive into exactly how he found customers and how he's grown revenue.

If you're bootstrapping or still trying to find product/market fit, I think you'll love this interview. It's jam-packed with some great strategies, lessons, and insights.

I hope you enjoy it.

This episode is part of our Bootstrapping series.

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What to Do When No One Will Pay for Your SaaS Product

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