Posted by drvroom 7/2/2025
Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?
I posted to all channels (except HN) yet I don't see much demand. We clearly see how businesses, small and large, could benefit from our SaaS saving their staff at least 10 hours for real. Our initial testing shows it works great.
Is there slump in SaaS selling or are we doing something wrong. I am pretty sure it is the later.
Why businesses, especially marketing/sales leaders or product managers, won't show interest in our SaaS. My competition research shows they are growing fast.
Yet, I can't get anyone to use it for free when we clearly add more value for 1:1 feature comparision.
Am I missing something? Has all marketing changed to paid campaigns on Google or Influencer marketing on X, TikTok? We don't have a big (or even medium size) budget.
How do I sell my SaaS to SMBs and large corporations when they don't even reply.
With me preaching textbook digital marketing to my team, I feel dirty and like a fraud.
Paid marketing doesn't work in my experience. Social media is cheap. I've had an app get thousands of views based on a reddit post, and not one person (literally 0) bothered to click outside of the page (i.e. were curious what app this is). Social media is a false sense of validation, even if you get a hit.
Direct sales is the only thing that I found that works consistently. Get in front of anyone in this organization.
My guess is you're trying to do too direct so you send a spammy email telling them how great your product is. Don't do that. Don't try to sell them anything. Don't even tell them you have a product. Just get them on a zoom call and ask them what they do now and why it sucks. People are much more receptive to take a call and tell you about what they do or their problems than they are to hear a sales pitch.
I also do the same with anyone that cold emails or calls me - 99% look to be a waste of time. When we still worked in an office you'd hear the telephones ring across the office one by one, as the robocaller worked through the extensions. Many ended up turning the ringer off, because otherwise it is an onslaught that is far more disruptive than whatever pain point they might actually be able to solve. So "Get in front" of someone sounds good, but I would guess it is hard.
But almost all the cold emails I get are trying to sell me something like an award or a list of potential clients which is something I'm not interested in so i react the same
Top down means you’re trying to sell managers and above who don’t directly use the tool. Usually they care about seeing case studies, logos of other companies, testimonials from their peers, etc. They want to look good and the way you help them with that is making one of their metrics look good, or giving them more budget to work with. Safe decisions are easier for them to make because they don’t want to get fired by making a risky bet, even if the risky bet offers more for less (“nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”). Usually the way in with them is through partnerships, relationships, and education. Start with friends who work in that industry to get you a case study and logo or you could try to make friends at a conference if you don’t have any already. Or create some educational material around the problem and sell them consulting, using your tool as a solution. Almost always this starts off as more consultative as a relationship.
If it’s bottom up, you’re selling to the individual contributors who don’t get a say about paying for the tool. That means you have to start with a generous free tier and try to get as many seats filled or usage as possible. It should bring enough value to the ICs and the organization that by the time they hit their usage caps in the free tier, the ICs are begging their managers to put a credit card in or asking to set up a sales call. If you’re not getting any usage at the free tier, then it comes back to finding where the ICs hang out and trying to integrate your tool as part of a workflow to common problems they solve. This is again about educating and making/leaning on friends to help spread the word and convince others to use your tool.
In both cases, relationships matter a lot to get initial traction (existing customers, friends in the industry, partners). They will help you figure out what’s needed to sell into the market you want to sell into, what’s holding you back, and getting you early validation. I didn’t see you mention existing relationships you have, so maybe that’s a good place to start.
People only care about "more value" when it solves more problems. So if your competition is killing it, and you are not getting bites on your added value, you need to talk to people to find out what pains they still have even when using your competitor's solution, and then make sure your added value resolves those pains.
Otherwise, you've got the same solution, just a shinier version, and that is all your 1:1 feature comparison will show.
There is a big caveat on this that we have no idea what product or feature set you are talking about, so this is pure speculation. You'd have to share a lot more about your product and marketing to get more substantive answers.
And if you don’t believe in it how on earth are you meant to sell it?
This is a bit late to solve that problem. You ideally figure these things out before you build an entire product.