Roast my First SaaS: Review Butler
After working as the CTO of a web agency for the last decade, I left and decided to try my hand at building my own SaaS product. I was freelancing on the side and needed to scratch my own itch by collecting some testimonials. From my experience, I knew the best way to do this was to pre-write something myself for my client and send it to them once the work was done. I realized with the advent of AI and LLMs that this was a perfect task for them and the rest of the process could be optimized and automated: collecting information, sending emails/sms, tracking approval, using a well optimized approval page, redirecting to Google after to increase reviews, etc.
And so my first product became Review Butler! During my market research I realized the review collection space was obviously very saturated. Luckily it seemed like no one was going after the service professional niche specifically and doing anything special to optimize the actual collection process. All I saw was aggregation services, fancy forms for customers to fill in, intaking audio and video testimonial, etc. But nothing to actually make the process on the reviewer completely frictionless to maximize the chances of a good review. This gave me some more confidence as I think this can genuinely increase the rate of testimonials for businesses by reducing the friction involved in the customer writing something.
Building it was pretty smooth, but now I'm at the hard part (for me at least) in going to market with it. I'm much less confident at this end of the stick as I am in just building the thing. I went with a freemium model and put all my focus on increasing free signups first. I'm still developing the premium features anyway. My marketing strategy is to onboard free tier users and make my profit from the power users that would be sending requests in volume or using/reselling on the behalf of other businesses. The idea is that the free tier is often requesting a B2B testimonial and I can get exposure to the other businesses that are receiving the testimonial requests who may also like what we're offering. Maybe this is naive and won't generate much, but I'm hoping it helps. I think my insecurity in marketing my product is and will show up in the form of me offering as much value for free as possible.
So far my marketing has been to throw together a blog made by AI. I plan on revisiting it with better content later on but don't have the time at the moment. I'm doing a bit of Google PPC but haven't seen much out of that. I just started posting to some AI/SaaS tool directories that Anita put together (thanks, Anita!).
I think my biggest mistake here is not having much of a marketing plan in place. I figured I would build it and adjust my strategies after I go to market. I'm not sure if this was the right strategy but what's done is done.
What I think I did well was to ship something as quickly as possible. I didn't get hung up on making a million features and tried to offer 1 valuable thing to a particular audience.
Anyway, this is where I am now. I'm much more on the technical end of things so if anyone wants to partner up with me on the marketing end, I'm open for discussions! Any constructive criticism is very welcomed. This is my first SaaS I brought to market but definitely won't be my last. What did I do well? More importantly, what did I mess up or leave out? Any creative marketing strategies I should try out? 😊❤️
40 open-source gems to replace your SaaS subscriptions 🔥 🚀
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
We are live on Product Hunt
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You should probably create an API integration and/or widget. People might want to add this part of their workflow on their own website.
Hey,
I saw that you are having trouble creating a functional marketing plan.
Here is a template that I think that can help you out market with a more structured marketing plan so you know what to experiment until you find out where you can get things going.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FGaYC0X9eIRrZDG6TEDGu2ukDn7qsnu4o_hGue6b1es/edit?usp=share_link
If you want a deep Growth Audit, I also recommend this Audit Template:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LjRjzZbR2tHHtXcilFcFxxpS3atnYA7yM8mbvk5N9Rc/edit?usp=share_link
If you are looking for a cleaner template that you can use for Review Butler, let me know and I will send it to your e-mail.
You can reach via growthmarketgigs@gmail.com
Hey Greg! I made saasagreements.co privacy policy generator for SaaS startups. Seems like Review Butler needs one, I'll generate privacy policy and ToS for you at 80% off, for a testimonial. Interested?
How did you "throw together a blog made by AI" was this easy? what tools did you use to do this? wouldn't the content be mostly plagiarised and not original for SEO?
I mostly used ChatGPT-4 and Midjourney
I don't think this would constitute plagiarism or duplicate content. I ran it through some AI detection tools and it seemed fine (although I don't really trust them, they seem inconsistent). A good trick I found is to re-prompt ChatGPT to "rewrite so that it's not detected as AI content"
I fully intend to revisit the blog and write some more meaningful stuff, put I figured it would be beneficial to have some content out there to just pick up on some search queries in my Google console early on and make better content around that later. I don't recommend using AI for a complete blog but I do believe it's better than nothing and a good start to things when you're short on time.
Wow very impressive. Thank you for the detailed response. Great stuff.
Writing reviews is such a thankless task. I dont know how to incentivize that behavior other than delighting the customer.
I would agree. Sometimes even that's not enough though. It takes time and a bit of creativity to write something up, so hopefully this fills the gap in those cases. It's no replacement for a poor job or business though.
Hi Greg! First of all, I think it is a very interesting product. I can see that writing reviews is not everyone's favorite but many businesses depend on them. Trying to reduce the hassle of writing a review seems like a good idea. Frankly, I usually leave reviews for products and services that I REALLY REALLY enjoy (rare), or, which happens way more often, for the ones that I utterly dislike. Even though, there are many businesses that deserve a positive review 🫣
I have a few thoughts regarding what you wrote:
Freemium model seems like a sensible direction. However, so many businesses give out so little at the beginning and try to squeeze da dollars as soon as possible. You don't even manage to fall in love before they already ask for money. I would think who can benefit the most from your product? Probably businesses that rely on a large number of reviews. If I was just starting to grow my audience, I would be resistant to paying a lot of money for a feature that doesn't benefit me proportionally. I would just go to look for another tool that offers more functionalities for free. That's why I would build the pricing strategy around the number of generated reviews, or charge only for the features that are relevant for larger organizations (team features). I recommend you check out this post on IH from Marie Martens, you might find it relevant: post/30k-users-with-0-marketing-spend-how-were-growing-tally-44bc2e25ba (sorry, not allowed to post links yet 😅)
I would think about targeting e-commerce stores with your product. These types of businesses heavily rely on positive reviews for their products. I would search the internet, and Shopify communities and reach out to them directly.
I assume that you have been talking to your users already but instead of asking them about possible improvements, ask them what the best parts of the app are. Which features are their ultimate favorites? This will help you decide which features to highlight in your communication. Also, pay attention to what the users exactly are saying - what words and sentences they choose. You can use them later in your marketing copy.
Hope you find some of it helpful! Good luck ✌️
This is super helpful thank you!
The market for retail reviews is definitely a bigger more profitable one. I think this may be the next step after I focus on the professional service market. It'll be easier to create meaningful reviews for the latter. Ecommerce is definitely a goal I will work towards.
My pricing was inspired by audible so it's kind of a combo of subscription and pay per use as you're mentioning. I hope it's not cost prohibitive, because like you said, I'd much rather be breaking even on a lot of users so I can fine-tune a useful product. I'll check out that post, thanks!
I've been talking to my users, but you make a good point because I've definitely been "improvement" focused. I will pay more attention to what they already like.
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