Pt 3: Bootstrapping a SaaS Tool with No Budget, Beginner Coding Skills & Less Than 15 Hours a Week.

I had another market research call today and felt encouraged I was going in the right direction so I thought I’d share.

Before now there didn’t seem to be any significant link between the individual conversations I was having with my target market and I wondered if my ideal customer profile was too generic.

Today I had call number 4. Once again, “finding & onboarding new staff” came up as a primary pain point. This meant 75% (3/4) stated this is a high pain of theirs.

(The one who didn’t was an external CMO working for several startups — so it wasn’t his area anyway!)

I found all this pretty exciting! The purpose of these calls is to identify the biggest pains of my chosen industry and today I got an early indication that patterns are emerging.

Obviously, the numbers are far too low to draw any conclusions at this point. Besides, even if after 30 calls it’s clear I’m onto something, it won’t necessarily mean I could build an elegant SaaS solution around it. I’ve not popped open the champagne just yet. 🍾

Another cool thing I noticed today — my first post got shared on Twitter by @learncodewithme which resulted in about 14 people reading the article!

This is especially cool because Nathan Barry, bootstrap founder of ConvertKit said in his MicroConf keynote that documenting a process like this attracts support from others who root for normal people trying to build something cool.

After hearing this, I took his word for it and started documenting my own process — but I didn’t expect to see support so early on! So thanks to everyone who took the time to read this and previous posts. As always, I’d love to connect and talk about all things bootstrapping — drop me a message at me@maxeccles.co.uk.