If You Build It, They Will (Not) Come

Part II: If You Build It, They Will (Not) Come

To start from the beginning, read Part I: Introducing, FormFlow

From Launch to Millionaire (Not Quite)

Welcome to part two of my indie hacker / solo founder / start-up journey, in which I launched my SaaS product, FormFlow, received an enormous pay-check, millions in funding, and am now writing this blog from my new Ferrari.

Ahem.

Let me pause there and come back down to earth for a second.

Obviously, none of that happened. In fact, what did happen was extremely underwhelming.

Well, that's not true. I actually received some perfectly good feedback. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

For those of you who have just joined the journey, let me start there. My name is James, and I'm building an AI powered SaaS survey creator called FormFlow. FormFlow is a simple survey and form builder that uses AI to automatically generate surveys for you in seconds. You don't even have to think of the survey questions anymore, allowing you to 👋 wave goodbye to those clunky manual survey building tools!

There's an (AI) app for that

Before we dive into the last two weeks of my marketing progress with FormFlow, I wanted to talk about what is happening right now in the AI space.

I was 22 when the iPhone "app craze" peaked. If you were a developer between the years 2008-2012 you'll remember that the iPhone AppStore sparked a new age in start-ups. Here was this amazing new device, ecosystem and absolutely wonderful developer experience that allowed anyone to pick up a Mac, fire up Xcode and build the next million-dollar app or game.

Fast-forward to March 2023 and the feeling is somewhat similar. Although there's no new device or developer experience, there is an API that's easy to consume that allows for some potentially incredible, dare I say magical experiences to be built.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of new apps built around the GPT-3.5 API that seem to be coming out every day. Some examples:

The list goes on and on. In fact, you can see a complete list of GPT powered start-ups here

Don't Build First, Ask Questions Later

Anyway, back to my journey.

If you read part one of my journey, you'll know that I spent the last three months building FormFlow (which was a mistake, by the way).

Big mistake.

HUGE mistake.

Bad James, very bad James.

If you're reading this and building a SaaS product and you're doing that. Don't. Stop it. Re-think your v1 and get an MVP out as soon as possible. Where? Continue reading and I'll tell you where I shared my product to get incredibly useful feedback.

What I should have done was build an incredibly small proof-of-concept of the tiniest part of FormFlow, get that online and immediately start showing it to people. Now, because I did not do that, I feel as though I'm behind. I'm behind because in order for a product like FormFlow to be successful, it needs users. It also needs features that users need, not features that I think they need.

I read somewhere that you should spend the same amount of time marketing your product as you spent building it

James
Founder, FormFlow

I made the fatal error of building first, because it's comfortable, and asking questions, or feedback, later.

I read somewhere that you should spend the same amount of time marketing your product as you spent building it. I don't have a reference for you, but it was likely read on somewhere like Hacker News.

That's really solid advice, and at the same time crazy to think that I should spend the next three months (so, up to the end of July) marketing FormFlow. It sounds right though, and to be honest, also hints at the importance of not being a solo-founder and hiring someone else to help with the other side of work that you're not doing. So, if you're an engineer, bring in a marketing co-founder, and if you're a marketer, bring in an engineer.

Share, Share, Share

When I finally stopped coding and was happy with v1 of FormFlow, I panicked. I panicked because of I was crippled with decision paralysis. There were a million things I could do when it came to telling people about FormFlow, but what should I do?

That's why I find engineering to be so much easier. If there's a show-stopping bug, fix it. A user asks for an important feature? Build it.

When it came to marketing I knew that I just had to get the word out. I needed to share FormFlow.

Share it? Share it where?!

I had a million thoughts all at once 🤯. Here's the order of thoughts I had in that moment of time:

I should create a Twitter account and start tweeting.
Nahhhh. I should create a Mastodon account and start there and get ahead of the game.
There's no one on Mastodon.
I need to find my audience and ask them first.
Where do I find my audience? LinkedIn?
So now I have to cold call / cold email people. I need a good template!
Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself and need to focus.
I could focus on organic SEO and get traffic that way!
That's way too slow. I need feedback, stat!
Wait, what about the technologies that I built FormFlow in? RedwoodJS and Ink.
What If I posted it to the RedwoodJS and Ink discord?
How am I going to track success here. I need Analytics on my site.
Holy crap, Reddit!
End thoughts.

Although I don't read Reddit, I do have a soft spot for it. Especially when it comes to the (few) interactions I've had with people on there. Therefore, I decided that I'd bite the bullet and find a sub-reddit that was appropriate for sharing my idea and a place I wouldn't get banned for self promotion.

Enter, r/SideProject.

I posted FormFlow on multiple sub-reddits that allowed self-promotion. Again, please don't break any rules on Reddit. It lowers your reputation and is really annoying for others. Your post will just get taken down immediately anyway.

The response was exactly what I needed. Feedback. Good, honest feedback from real people. If there is anyone reading this who's thinking of building a SaaS product, I urge you to not write a single line of code until you have reach out and found your audience. Once you've done that and you've found someone willing to work very closely with you, only then will you build a product that's a true market fit. Until then, you're guessing.

I've stopped working on FormFlow until I've found at least 10 monthly active users, or two users who are willing to work closely with me on the product. If you are that person by the way, feel free to reach out to me (hey at formflow.co).

What's Next?

It's funny how difficult marketing feels to me compared to coding something. Coding actually makes me feel...happy. Whenever I think about doing anything marketing related (apart from writing this blog), I feel completely stuck. Like I have decision paralysis. It's jarring.

Therefore, I'm going to play to my strengths and try something absolutely bonkers.

As you know, FormFlow is powered by GPT3.5. It uses GPT to generate surveys within seconds based on a single prompt from a user. Something simple like Create a 5 question survey to gather feedback from a user.. Therefore, my absolutely ridiculous, crazy, bonkers idea is that I'm going to use GPT3.5 to create hundreds of survey templates for me.

I figured that it still counts as marketing, because it would be creating organic content to promote FormFlow's use-cases. That makes sense, right? It's definitely not another coding challenge to distract me from marketing my product.

I promise.