Where is your SaaS website failing? Four honest stages of growth
Building a product is often easier than getting customers to use and pay for it. This post identifies four common traps where solo founders get stuck: no traffic, no sign-ups, no payments, or high churn.
Many new business owners focus too much on the 'build' phase and ignore the distribution phase. The post breaks down the SaaS journey into four brutally honest scenarios: a ghost town with no visitors, a leaky bucket where visitors don't sign up, a free-user trap where nobody pays, and a churn problem where customers leave quickly. For solo operators, understanding which scenario they are in helps them focus on the right fix. Instead of adding more features, you might need to fix your marketing or find a better product-market fit.
Key points
- Identify if your business problem is traffic, conversion, or retention.
- If visitors don't sign up, your website's message is likely unclear.
- High churn means your product isn't providing enough long-term value.
- Managing the customer funnel is just as important as writing code.
- Fix one stage of the growth process before moving to the next.
Quick term guide
- build
- A chosen set of in-game abilities or items a player equips for their character.
- founder
- A person who starts a new company or project.
- churn
- The rate at which customers stop paying for or using a service.
- business
- An activity where you provide value to others in exchange for money.
- distribution
- All the work involved in getting your product or content in front of people — posting on social media, sending emails, sharing in communities, etc.
- product-market fit
- When a product actually solves a real problem for a specific group of people.
- conversion
- The rate at which visitors or users take a desired action, like signing up or paying
- funnel
- The path a customer takes from first hearing about a product to paying for it.