Last year I watched a video from Simon Hoiberg where he revealed a super simple strategy to validate new SaaS ideas - run meta ads to a landing page where you described the problem you want to solve, then have an email sign up form to request access.
The rule of thumb is then if ~3-5% of site visitors (amount of people who clicked through from the ad) enter their email, there’s a fair indication there’s interest in the software.
It’s of course not guaranteeing success but I thought it was a genius way to validate new ideas with a small budget.
The worst thing you can do as an indie hacker is waste months (or years in some cases) building something nobody wants, and this lowers the chance that occurs.
Last week I got an idea for a SaaS that would let you store eBooks (the main marketing focus), PDFs, and other documents in one place and chat across them within a simple interface.
I didn’t think the idea was great but I’ve been wanting to take action on this strategy since the day I watched Simon’s video, and I thought it could be interesting.
Last weekend I spent a couple hours Saturday evening creating a landing page for the tool, then a few more on Sunday morning creating the ads I’d run to the page.
All in I ended up spending $58.54:
$10.37 on a domain from Porkbun (useowly.com)[https://useowly.com]
$10 for website hosting (Framer’s mini plan that gives you one page and a custom domain)
$38.17 on Meta ads (various placements across Instagram & Facebook)
The ads got turned on late Sunday night and would now send visitors to the landing page where they could enter their name within a tally.so form.
Within the form were three questions:
What is your email
What feature are you most excited to use
How did you find out about Owly (this SaaS idea)
This ended up giving me an interesting response.
I created 3 ads for Facebook, Instagram, and Instagram stories:
Each read “Transform how you learn with Owly. Import your digital downloads, ask questions, and let us help you understand your content faster.” with a headline of “Read and Learn Faster With Owly”.
There was then a “Learn more” button that went straight to the landing page.
Here’s what the Facebook ad looked like:
The results from the ads were:
- 3,536 impressions
- 2,610 reach
- 76 link clicks ($0.50 per click)
- ~2% click through rate (2-5 is apparently “good”)
I could have ran them longer to get more data but I felt I had learned what I wanted to.
My tally form received 6 submissions, but the responses to the third shocked me
1 visitor of the 76 from meta had signed up, which is roughly 1%. Of course this is not much data to work with but the remaining 5 were interesting.
I had left a link to the landing page in my YouTube video where I mentioned Humata, a similar tool to this would-be SaaS.
It makes sense given the topic of the video, but all remaining 5 had came from that video.
The website in total received 154 page views from Sunday-Thursday until I turned off the ads, which would be just about a 3% sign up rate in total.
If I wanted to properly validate/invalidate the idea i would have waited to get 300-500 page views, and then run a second set of ads to a waitlist asking how much potential users would be willing to pay.
I didn’t think it was worth building but what I got out of it was a $60 crash course in how to copy-write and run ads.
I already have a few new ideas that I think are much more viable business-wise that I plan to run these same tests for.
The Single Ultrawide Desk Setup for 2024
I finally got rid of my top monitor and my setup has never looked better.
Things I’ve found interesting
links to valuable stuff I thought was worth sharing. amazon links are affiliated.
Wooden pen holder - I’m a sucker for desk items like these. The wood looks great in my setup.
MacBook Stand - I bought another one of these stands for my home setup. Now that I’m only using a single monitor it’s nice to still have my mac’s display if I need it
Dell XPS 14 - I was sent this laptop to include in a video later this year but I’m insanely impressed. This thing has an OLED screen, 32GB of memory, and THE best trackpad on a windows laptop. It’s nearly identical to the macs, haptic feedback and all. It can even sort of run Cyberpunk.
Elgato Stream Deck - You’d think the stream deck would only be made for streamers, but it works great on mac and lets you map physical buttons and knobs to tons of actions or apps. It’s pretty expensive but I can see this being useful for editing.
Have a great week.
Cole
P.S. If you found this letter helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend :)
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