The offer that made me want to quit YouTube

Context

It's December 2024 and I'm spending Christmas in Japan. From a capsule hotel in Tokyo, I decide that this would be a good time to start a new project and make a new offer. Since I want to spend most of my day exploring, this time I decide to limit work to an hour a day.

By this point, I've already released three webapps on the internet. They haven't made the revenue I'd hoped, but they've taught me about building applications. Now I have my own process, which forms the seed of my next offer.

Want help planning your own SaaS offer? Let's talk.

Effort

The idea? Turn my approach to building software into a framework others can use. This isn't anything new—I've seen another developer do something similar (Marc Lou). His success gives me confidence. Developers would pay to access my starter project, which will include deployment, payments, and user login already setup. Basically, a SaaS-in-a-box. They just add their own app's custom features, then they're good to go.

So I do my hour a day, extracting my framework in a easy-to-understand way, before heading out to climb tall buildings. Soon, I'm back in the UK, where I crank up the hours. I create a landing page with the headline "The fastest way to build a working webapp", describing the benefits of my offer. Pricing is $49 for the starter tier or $59 for pro, which comes with lifetime updates.

Once everything's ready, I send three emails to my list over a one week period:

Coming soon
The offer
Reminder

I cross my fingers that some developers on my list will see value in this.

Outcome

I sell two memberships during a two-week launch period. During the following months, I sell three more. All are pro memberships, earning $295 revenue. It's my most successful SaaS launch to date.

Lesson

After seeing the other developer have success with his SaaS starter project, I was convinced I could do the same. The difference? He had a huge audience on X, full of developers who wanted to build SaaS just like him. I did not.

At the time, I was making videos about SaaS. But for the launch, I relied only on my existing email list of a few thousand developers. When I sent the launch email, I hadn't emailed them for months. They weren't expecting an email, so probably weren't ready for my offer. Also, many of them weren't interested in SaaS, having joined my list for unrelated reasons. I'd been trying to use a broken sales funnel.

Conclusion

I ignored the fundamentals, relying on a broken sales funnel.

Although I was getting views on videos about SaaS, I didn't have a way to contact those viewers directly. So I launched to the wrong audience. The better approach would have been to gather relevant leads in advance via a lead magnet, then launch.