The article doesn't mention this but if there is a freemium component to the product, a 2% conversion rate is actually not bad. Not great, but not bad either. From what I've seen, a 3-7% conversion rate would be quite good for such a product.

> Really? 2% seems awful. If a company signs up for your trial, they must have a problem they're trying to solve. If you don't solve 98% of peoples' problems, it seems like you have a problem getting people engaged with your product.

Also think about how many of those signups are for "products" that never get delivered. Some side project that is thinking about charging and the dev never bothers implementing, some startup is thinking of switching from per-client contracts to a self-service model and either doesn't make the switch or dies/gets acquired before they manage it. None of those situations are Stripe not meeting someone's needs, and a single developer can create an arbitrary number of those trials throughout a year.

The article isn't talking about super-early-stage SaaS, it's about SaaS in general. While 2% might be good for a just-implemented product, it comes off as poor for a mature one.

There's a big gap between someone at a company signing up for a trial and them getting enough convincing leverage to get the company to consider that seriously.

All too often someone at the company is getting their problem solved (possibly by the free/trial plan), but they aren't at a position where they are able to drive any purchases whatsoever for that company.

Well, I've had my little SaaS up and running for about 6 weeks.

- The landing page gets about 30-70 hits per day (excepting the occasional spike) -- how many of those are bots and crawlers, I wonder?

- I've had a grand total of FIVE (5) trial sign ups.

- No buyers yet

- My linode bill is currently about ~$120/month.

- Still within the free tier on S3 and Mailgun.

- You know, when I'm the only one using the app, I don't place much stress on the infrastructure.

Now, I can't really say one way or another if I'm getting to that 2% because I'm just not getting enough trial sign-ups :)

EDIT: Oh, yea, link for the curious: https://www.contabulo.com

Bah, I've posted it here before.

I can help you increase your visit-to-signup conversion rate for free, if you're interested. Just soft launched my own service (www.leadnexus.co), where I will split test your signup forms to find more effective options. Your volume might make it a little tougher to optimize, but I bet I can improve on that ~0.3% conversion rate for you.

(That goes for anyone reading this -- happy to see if I can help, to test out my own idea. Not ready for a bigger announcement, but ping me via the site or travis@leadnexus.co if you want to give it a shot.)

Link - https://www.leadnexus.co

Nice site :)

Might want to fix this passage:

> We use an emphasis on optionality, machine learning, and a dedicate to results to get you more users and leads. We don't want you to pay us for unless we improve your results.

Good catch, thank you! I've got to update the copy tomorrow, will make a pass through this as well.

Why is your linode bill so high with so few users? I see a 32GB plan is $120/month. Do you really need that?

1. App Server (all my Clojure services... and the one transient service written in golang)

2. Postgres (Master)

3. Postgres (Standby)

4. Elasticsearch server (yea, only one right now, you know, few users)

5. One linode running RabbitMQ

6. The linode running NGINX that sits in front of the app server and does all of the reverse proxying

Also,

7. The linode running the marketing site (wordpress).

I know, I know, I'm a nerd and just couldn't help myself with the architecture. Hey, at least it should be fairly scalable.

Don't need the standby server, just use automated backups.

You also don't need the linode running nginx, with so few users put it on one server.

Finally wordpress should be $5/month or less.

Right there you could drop at least $15 / month.

$15 / month.

Kind of not even worth thinking about when you're a developer and should be internally billing yourself for $100/hour+.

Fair, what I decribed should reduce overhead as well (less nodes = less complexity typically).

Also when you're starting something you can't bill yourself anything mentally. Else you'd go out and be billing someone else, you'd likely make more money. In part cutting costs is important because it's actual savings, i.e. imagning billing yourself doesn't produce real money.

Hey, my day job doesn't pay nearly that much :)

Consolidate that all down to a single server and save your configurations in case you ever do get customers. There’s no need to be wasting $120/month when you literally have no customers at this point.

I'd disagree. Optimizing infrastructure costs is the last thing you should be worried about at the start. Your time is far, far more valuable. If it works, leave it alone and spend your time on product/sales/marketing.

- Infrastructure size correlates with labor required to keep everything running. It's not a perfect correlation, but keeping things small at the beginning usually saves a lot of time.

- Maintenance costs will be a limitation on how many different experiments you can keep running at the same time. If you consolidate everything on the same machine, and still has 98% of the machine for the next experiment, you will keep your first one running even if it has low profitability. If you need $120/month just to keep it running, you will be tempted to close it down after any new idea appear.

- You are assuming that the OP lives in a developed country and has a well paying job there. You are also assuming he has no risk of being unemployed for a couple of months.

- All that is probably dwarfed by taking a couple of hours a day for reading HN. So I should go back to my project and stop thinking about unasked advice :)

I use this app myself. Worst case, if it fails as a business I open source it and continue to use it myself (after consolidating onto a single host just for myself).

And I'm in the US and not going to run out of money assuming I can keep my day job :)

He has 5 trial signups after 6 weeks. Let’s be realistic here. His time is literally valueless because he hasn’t made a single sale.

Better to save money and expand if and when a paying customer shows up.

$120/month is a drop in the bucket. You need to look at the opportunity cost. His time is worth over $100/hour and better spent on other things (features, marketing, whatever..)

If he gets a ton of customers, he'll need to expand anyway and will waste even more time setting things back up.

Well, you know, I'd like to think my problem is sales/marketing and not product.

Maybe you know it, but reading your comments it looks like you are treating sales/marketing as an afterthought.

For running a successful business, I think you should try to always have the others in mind when you work on one, because that’s how you can find product/market fit (otherwise it’s mostly luck, and/or you had perfect hindsight of your market).

The value of his time is that he can use it to figure out what customers will actually pay for.

You could containerize all of these services and run them on the same machine.

I'd advise against single machine container deployment. You'll hit big problems the day you need to horizontally scale.

If you're going to dockerize, at least spread things over a two node swarm so you find these issues early.

A quick glance at your site, and I left with the impression that you're a more corporate version of Trello. Right now Trello serves our needs perfectly for free, so what's the value add in signing up?

Gah, I get that. It serves a different purpose and I wouldn't think it's really in competition with Trello.

Perhaps a screencast/animation showing the product in action could demonstrate its not-a-Trello-clone-ness better than still screenshots.

Are you more in-line with Confluence, as a place to build a database of knowledge in the organization?

This is purely my opinion, so please take it with a large grain of salt. I'm not a fan of videos and won't last long enough on a site to sit through them unless I've arrived there from a referral (there is too much software out there that does the same thing, so time is at a premium). I'm more of a fan of descriptive workflow/image showing what the software does and keeps the value prop simple.

As an example, this marketing site impressed me greatly and I actually took the time to read through the different features as it was easy to follow and I didn't feel flustered by each of the feature explanations: https://www.contactually.com/how-it-works

My only gripe, there is no cohesive single blurb explaining how all these features fit together in a complete package. Their tagline at the top is weak, but visually they've nailed it.

Also, having to sign up for a demo kind of sucks and slows down the process of me getting to try out your product to evaluate if it meets my needs. I'd love for our industry to move towards a "here is a sandbox, have fun for a few minutes" model which would be completely painless for folks evaluating the tool. After a couple of minutes it could nudge you to sign up for a full trial account.

I'm not in your market, but your product looks pretty interesting.

The free trial is fairly prominent on your home page. On your pricing page, all of the free trial links are below the fold for me: https://imgur.com/a/4qsaf

You might want to move the free trial buttons higher, maybe right below "How much does Contabulo cost?"

Also, you can put cost in lowercase.

Gotcha, thanks.

I find your pricing page a bit confusing (could well be me though) - I'm used to SaaS pricing being per-user while you are advertising 'packages' that actually look quite high but aren't really when you calculate the per-user price.

e.g. Maybe replace $29.99 for 10 users with $2.99 per user (with a minimum sign up of 10 users)?

Hmm... you might be right there. I thought packages would be simpler (and I know basecamp charges a flat $99 - I'd be afraid of large enterprises coming along and placing more than $99 worth of infrastructure costs on me).

I know Jira, for example, has a low rate package for the first 10 users (basically like a paid trial), and then the pricing switches to per-user and it ramps up quickly.

Maybe A/B test it or something - I guess I take a very simplistic approach where I see the numbers on the page, assume they are per user and the run away before reading the small print.

Good luck with the service!

> assume they are per user and the run away before reading the small print.

LOL, that could be a problem. I could at least draw attention to the fact that these are packages and NOT per user pricing in a more obvious way.

My two cents: make it easier for people to see know what it is.

I'm not entirely sure from a brief scan - is it team wiki software? Is it sorta like trello cards but for archival/searchable org information?

As someone who is actually looking at team wiki software for a couple startups and nonprofits I'm helping I can tell you that my threshhold for signing up for a trial (even no CC required) is pretty high so don't let that discourage you.

> is it team wiki software? Is it sorta like trello cards but for archival/searchable org information?

That's basically it. The idea came to me after I had become frustrated with enterprise wiki/KM software. At the time I was being forced to use Liferay, though I've also had to use Confluence, MediaWiki, and Sharepoint (the worst thing in the universe) in a corporate setting, none of which I particularly liked.

I’m currently looking for a team wiki solution (team of 3), but I wasn’t sold by your landing page.

Here are some things that went through my head:

- I don’t like the graphic design

- evaluating if this is good will take us more than a month

- I’m worried about lock-in. If, after a few months I discover this isn’t for us, do I need to keep paying not to lose my data?

> - I don’t like the graphic design

Of the landing page or the product itself? The landing page is an easier fix :)

> - evaluating if this is good will take us more than a month

That's quite possibly true. Wikis take time to populate and only become useful if people commit to doing so. The problem is how to balance:

- Giving users time to evaluate the product

- Revenue

> - I’m worried about lock-in. If, after a few months I discover this isn’t for us, do I need to keep paying not to lose my data?

Valid point. I do plan to add a data export feature at some point. I'm wondering what the most useful format for such a thing might be. CSV? XML? JSON? SQL?

Conversely, I still haven't thought of a sane way to allow for a mass data import... but I'd like to.

I was talking about the graphic design of the product screenshots.

I'm personally not a fan of time limited trials -- I think feature or usage limits are better, especially when you don't have any users yet, and you need people to use the app and give feedback...

Currently the trial is limited to 5 users and something like 100MB of file storage. I was actually more worried offering a free-tier would result in people abusing the service (i.e., using it to store/share illegal stuff).

However, just between you, me, and the internet, I actually haven't enabled the logic to lock trial accounts out at 30 days. Because I'm still unsure about it.

"Stop losing your mind" is clever but hard to grok.

Maybe "Stop employee brain drain"? That would at least be relatable to people who have heard the phrase brain drain before.

This product has a subset of features from Drop-box, Trello and Instagram?

I don't know about Instagram (haven't used that much), but I'm shooting for (long-term) a card-based, simplified replacement for tools like Confluence, which I find overwrought and difficult to use.

It uses cards, so I suppose it superficially resembles Trello and similar agile board-esque tools, but it definitely has a different feel to it.

I actually got the idea for the basic layout from Pintrest (I originally had a masonry-like layout to the cards, but switched to CSS grid -- makes sorting/searching/scanning for something specific easier, IMO).

How are you marketing the product?

So far:

- Get listed in any/every saas (esp b2b) directory I can find (haven't done producthunt yet, though).

- Send out cold emails (not a lot so far). I'd start making cold phone calls if I wasn't sitting at a day job during business hours every weekday. I could try postcards..?

- Post to online formus - kind of like I'm doing here :)

I'm really trying to avoid resorting to PPC ads, but it might be time to do that.

I'm also thinking of making it free for academic use, just to get some folks using the product and talking about it.

Also, the thought to find a partner who knows bizdev/marketing/sales has occurred to me.

Thanks! I think 30-70 visits per day without paying for them is quite a lot after six weeks. I'm in a similar situation, working a day job while trying to get something off the ground. Right now I'm just experimenting with ideas and trying to learn as much as possible.

I think paid ads is a pretty good approach to validate the product and copy, even if it's not a viable strategy in the long run.

Making it free for academic use makes sense in more than that sense. If you're lucky you might get a .edu backlink from it, which is valuable for seo.

Site is down btw

I think y'all managed to crash my wordpress site. Rebooted :)

Yeah, that's the one part of the article that seemed off to me. For my low-touch, no-credit-card-up-front SaaS product we get about 25% trial-to-paid conversion rate. I think it's possible we're above average, but we're not doing 10x better than "extremely good" peers.

Maybe there's just so much variance that it's impossible to give a good benchmark, but even still, 2% seems low.

I also suspect that marketing has a lot to do with it. A company that's much better at marketing than product will be better at getting someone to sign up for a trial and worse at converting them, so maybe their numbers would be down in the 2% range. I feel like I'm the opposite (bad at marketing, but pretty good at product)

Your numbers are great, and congratulations. That said, I will guess that you are leaving money on the table by not having a wider target audience for your marketing.

Also, the idea that a company is “better at marketing than at converting” isn’t really the correct way to look at it. Basically the math says that you want to keep increasing the width of the net you cast as long as it is profitable. In some cases, you will find a profitable group to market to, but the reasonable conversion rate for that market (i.e., people who end up loving or product) is just naturally lower than your high-conversion group.

As a simple example, someone may have a very technical finance newsletter that they sell to finance professionals, and they covert that group at a high rate (and a high price). This newsletter can probably also target HNW individual investors profitably, but they will not likely have the same conversion rate.

I think the 2% metric refers to all users from top of the funnel to paying customer. I've always found the metrics in this deck helpful: https://www.slideshare.net/totango/2012-saa-s-conversions-be....

That would make more sense. But then it's weird that for credit-card-required the conversion rate is 40-60%. That's definitely trial -> paid, not visitor -> paid.

> Conversion rates of low-touch SaaS trials with credit card not required:

> 2%+: extremely good

I think that is the percentage of website visitors who eventually become paying subscribers. Eg. 10% of visitors sign up for a trial and 20% of those trial users pay for a subscription at the end of their trial period.

Patrick - can you confirm this?

Then how come for credit-card-required he says 40-60%? That must be trial to paid.

I do not have lot of experience in SaaS. I do have experience dealing with conversion rate in ecommerce. I believe you usually cannot compare conversion rate across different businesses in different markets. Comparing SaaS businesses in different markets is like comparing apple and oranges.

Not 98% of people... 98% of people who had a problem that they felt signing up for your trial would solve. It's not like trial signups are coming from random people across the globe.