Before starting

Don’t you dare write a single line of code before you know who your customers are and how you will reach them. For example, my users are architects and my co-founder already has a large architecture network.

Having a network of people to sell to is a massive advantage. I’ve previously created apps that got zero traction because I didn’t know how to reach my target users.

Even better, talk to potential users and see if the app is something they’d be interested in before you even build it. This isn’t a sales pitch though. Ask probing questions to see if they’d pay for a solution to a specific problem without mentioning your idea. That way, you get accurate feedback.

Nowadays, people are vibe coding SaaS businesses to launch into the void. Don’t be that person.

Building the app

Today, AI is so powerful that coding an entire SaaS by hand is analogous to deciding you will do your taxes in your head rather than using a calculator. Claude Code and LLMs are very competent programmers and work at speed. Some engineers at even the largest companies are no longer writing code, only checking code generated by LLMs.

For example, I offloaded the production of a language toggle in maquete.ai that I built because many of our users are based in Brazil. I’ve previously done this using the i18n language package and it took me the best part of a day to finalise. Claude Code did it in 30 minutes.

That speed comes with a caveat, however. Bear in mind that AI generated code contains 1.7x more issues than human-written code. That doesn’t mean don’t use AI. Just be aware of potential vulnerabilities and plan to resolve them. To assist, use Claude Code or CodeRabbit to review your pull requests in GitHub. Alternatively, grant Claude Code access to your codebase and ask it to perform tests with a specially engineered prompt, such as the one in the footnotes1.

I personally don’t like the idea of letting Claude build your entire app from scratch, especially if you don’t verify it’s security. Hackers will be able to steal user info if your API routes aren’t protected. However, using Claude to build specific features or enhance the UI is an excellent idea. That way, you still consider the codebase to be fundamentally under your control.

Managing the codebase

Next.js is a popular framework for creating frontend applications. It’s easy to set up and host on Vercel for free. API routes can also be placed in your Next.js app, allowing for a full stack project to be deployed in one codebase.

Be aware, however, that serverless function billing can trigger high Vercel costs. Founders often spin up a quick MVP using Next.js and Vercel and forget to enable any limits, often not expecting that their app will take off so quickly. One founder was hit with a shock $96k bill after reaching 650k users. She didn’t have any usage limits set and didn’t enable cached responses on API endpoints. After 56 million function invocations a day, the bill grew. What was otherwise a fantastic product was hampered by a large server bill because the founder didn’t take the time to add guardrails.

To avoid high Vercel function costs, I built a separate backend in Python and hosted it on Railway.

MVP

MVP stands for Minimal Viable Product. A lot of people focus on the word ‘minimal’ rather than the word ‘viable’. Build something thoroughly tested that won’t break in users’ hands. If a user arrives at your site and it doesn’t work, they’re not going to sign up and they definitely won’t pay.

However, you shouldn’t spend months and months building the perfect app to only then realise that no one would pay for it. Build a few key features that work well and then get it into people’s hands. Once they’ve started using your app, ask them for feedback to better inform your product roadmap.

Asking your users to join a Zoom call with you so you can view how they interact with your app is a well-thought-out idea. Conversing over email won’t give you the same understanding of how they use your app.

Pricing

Understand your costs and margins to inform your pricing. Don’t guess. I once opened a supplement business where I had no idea what my revenue was. We went out of business.

Let users experiment with your app by offering a free tier. This can take the form of a free trial, limited free credits, or a permanent free tier with paid features.

At maquete.ai, we offer 10 free lifetime credits.

I’ve built. Now where are my users?

You should know exactly where they are from your pre-build planning. It’s time to reach out to those potential users and offer to demo your app. This can be friends and family at the start. Don’t just send a link because they’ll forget.

Social media

Social media is a tried and tested way to organically grow your app, and some businesses become an overnight success with one viral reel. Use your own account following to help get initial followers, otherwise you may end up posting into the void. Fun reels do well - such as street interviews or other natural-looking videos that blend in with people’s feeds.

Reddit

Besides social media, forums such as Reddit can be a good way to promote. Many have successfully grown a user base by posting on subreddits such as r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur, or subreddits relevant to their niche.

SEO

Another common way people tackle marketing is with SEO (search engine optimisation). SEO measures how high your site ranks on search engines. One way to achieve good results is by including popular ‘keywords’ on your site. When people search those keywords in Google, your site is more likely to appear because it includes those keywords. To find relevant keywords, you can use Google Ads Keyword Planner (just create a Google Ads account without putting any money in). Enter your industry and find what people are typically searching for in Google when finding relevant results. Then include those search terms in your site.

Having a blog on your site can also help, as you can create posts around keyword terms that may show up on Google. For example, top 10 supplements for energy.

If using Next.js, you can add metadata in your layout file that is optimised for SEO. I like to ask Claude to create me ‘god-tier metadata’.

Backlinks

SEO ties in nicely with backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other sites that link to your website. Having “good” backlinks helps with SEO ranking. List your site on directories such as Product Hunt and Beta List. A good Product Hunt listing can also help get early users. Make sure to plan assets, videos/GIFs, and good tag lines to post.

Another way to get backlinks is to reach out to blogs asking them to write a post about your site or offering to write a post for them. This shouldn’t be your first priority when building a SaaS, however.

Affiliate marketing

What’s better than selling your own app? Having other people sell it for you, of course. Creating an affiliate program can benefit you by letting influencers with a following advertise your app in return for a revenue share.

At maquete.ai, we will be giving architecture influencers a ‘free trial’ promo code to distribute to their following. When someone eventually converts to a paying user, the influencer get 25% of the first month of that user’s revenue.

Paid ads

Don’t. It’s not worth paying for traffic until you know people would pay for your app. That’s it. Once you know people are converting, you can find suitable keywords and run Google Ads or boost Instagram/TikTok reels that achieved high engagement organically.

Don’t let Google advise how your Google Ads should look. They want you to burn money. Ask Claude for help there if you aren’t sure what you are doing.

These are various ideas and tactics I deployed with maquete.ai. I hope you found them useful.

Social media is full of wannabe founders trying to vibe-code the next billion-dollar app. These budding entrepreneurs are getting SaaS creation the wrong way around. They build first and then hope users will just magically arrive. Terrible idea.

You must know how you are going to get your first 10 customers before you write a single line of code. Better yet, have 10 customers who are interested in your app before building it - either via a waitlist or people that you know. So many people are building an app and just launching it into the void.

But how to do the dreaded marketing, I hear you ask. And I’m with you. I understand first-hand how difficult it is to market a SaaS. Building an app isn’t the hard part anymore - it’s getting users.

Early-stage growth

Over the past year, I’ve been deeply invested in SaaS products and what makes them successful. After learning to code, I launched several apps in different markets.

I built a garage rental app in Brazil. To get my first users, I reached out to people already renting their garages on Facebook Marketplace, onboarding my first users over Zoom. This accounted for my first 20 or so users. Classic startup advice is to do things that don’t scale at first. While that’s true, it’s also important to think about how the app will grow long term.

In an attempt to get more traction, I handed out flyers on busy high streets, used referral schemes, and social media marketing. Much of this was useless. The first users need to be people deeply invested in the idea. In my case, it had to be people already renting out their garage. Convincing people to rent out their garage on a new platform with few listings is an extremely difficult task. My biggest mistake was thinking users would naturally trust the app.

Getting your first 100 users manually is often the best strategy for early growth. From there, you can get testimonials and referrals to grow the app.

Once you start to grow your app, there are various bootstrapping methods to consider. Mike Hill, a SaaS founder doing over $200,000 in MRR, talks about offering lifetime deals on AppSumo to fund further marketing. He talks more about this in the below Starter Story podcast.

The money raised can be used for high-ROI marketing strategies. This does not mean throwing your money down the drain with Google Ads. Test ad strategies with small amounts until you have a positive ROI strategy. Only then start funnelling money in, constantly tweaking it for maximum return. If paid ads aren’t working for your model, experiment with other strategies such as paid referral schemes.

More than ever, talking to customers is incredibly important. There are so many apps available, but people aren’t always building what users want. There is an advantage in building in a niche you understand, as it drives credibility with users. For example, I was recently speaking with a former fixed-income trader who had built a SaaS platform that solves many of the laborious and manual processes he faced when he was trading. Now, he is better able to sell that product as he has been where his customers are.

Find what your customers need most and then build an MVP. Talk to them about their workflow, what they like, and what they don’t. Then you’ll have a better picture of what features to build out next.

A problem many people face is that they start talking to friends and family about an app idea they have. Naturally, their friends and family are supportive and tell them it’s a great idea and that they’d definitely sign up. However, in reality, they were just being polite friends. Always probe about people’s problems and whether they’d pay for a solution without telling them that you are building an app. That way, you get a better idea of whether it is worth building. To learn more about this thinking, read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

If you find that people would actually pay for a solution and be willing to join a waitlist, then great, build the app. If not, don’t waste months building another SaaS nobody wants.

Some successful SaaS businesses

Angus Cheng built and scaled Bank Statement Converter to $40K MRR. Like the trader I mentioned who built a SaaS, Angus worked for Credit Suisse and regularly had to manually input data from PDF bank statements into a CSV file. Bank Statement Converter does this automatically. He knew a problem existed in his industry and worked on solving it. That’s how you find a lucrative business idea.

Go Online Tools is an extremely simple tool suite. The founder built things that he wanted to use in his daily life and made them public. Over several years, that app grew and now has over 600,000 monthly users. The founder created a Reddit post discussing what worked for growth. He found that page speed and targeted keyword research mattered more than paid ads and social media.

Founders today continue to focus on building an app before thinking about how they will get users. For your next idea, have a solid distribution plan first. Then, and only then, build the product.

The generational divide

Younger people have naturally adopted AI faster. Like many in their early 20s, I first started using ChatGPT the moment it was released. In 2022, it was a fantastic companion for ideation, planning, and much more.

Fast forward a few years and AI is completely flattening the competitive landscape. In 2026, a 22-year-old graduate has the power to launch a software company at a speed and scale that previously required a large team.

The challenge at many firms is getting veteran employees to pick up these skills. Some companies, such as Accenture, are now tying AI adoption to senior leadership promotions.

Resisting AI today is akin to resisting the internet or the smartphone in the 90s. There is a clear danger of falling behind and being outperformed by competitors. Unlike the internet or the smartphone, AI is changing at an incredibly fast rate. Stark changes are not year to year, they are month to month.

The biggest mistake companies make

Some companies are trying to do too much at once, hoping that AI will solve all business problems in one go.

Instead, focus on a specific area where AI can drive positive business outcomes. Get the product into people’s hands and iterate quickly, expanding outward from there.

What is the wrong first move for AI integration?

Companies should avoid dumping an entire knowledge base into an LLM (some of which is outdated) thinking it will be a panacea for all business ills.

This is a mistake because most business problems are ambiguous in nature. Without a clearly defined ROI, you are just guessing at best. Besides that, LLMs can produce confident yet incorrect answers (hallucinate), posing legal and reputational risks.

Smart integration should begin with low-risk tools that don’t require exposing highly sensitive data. Identify one painful workflow, measure the time and cost saved, and then apply AI narrowly. There, you can prove measurable improvement. Only then should you expand.

How to start with AI

One example could be creating an AI bot aimed at helping support teams answer questions faster on the phone. The average phone call drops from 4 minutes to 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and client satisfaction scores increases from 3.4 to 3.8 out of 5. There, you have quantified time saved and improved client satisfaction.

Other examples could include an AI meeting summariser, usage analysis to identify clients at risk of churn, or email analysis to find urgent chains. These are narrow in scope, with an ability to measure its success.

AI is not just a chat bot

The recent shift in AI is from a response-generating chat tool to one that embeds directly into existing applications.

Claude Integration: Claude can connect to Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel, giving it the ability to search emails and create error-free documents.

GitHub Copilot: An AI code companion embedded in VS Code, useful for autocompletes and debugging.

Cursor: An AI-assisted IDE allowing developers to build applications faster.

Of course, there are many more. The broader narrative is that AI is no longer a separate tool you switch to. Today, AI is being embedded directly into the software companies already use on a day-to-day basis.

AI models are widely accessible. We’ve all played around in ChatGPT. Companies won’t succeed just because they use AI. They will succeed because they make smarter decisions on how to apply it.

What are the risks of AI?

Some business leaders are concerned about the cost of integrating AI. They should, however, consider the cost of not integrating it. The risk of being left behind with this technology is not worth taking.

Yes, AI incurs costs - but here are the questions to ask yourself:

• Are human resources freed up to work on more lucrative projects?

• Does client churn decrease?

• Are you attracting new and larger clients because of more advanced products?

Firms are also concerned about security and data leakage. This is a valid concern. However, if companies decide not to provide AI tools because of security concerns, employees are still going to use them anyway, only perhaps in a less secure manner.

AI and the future of the workplace

The AI landscape shifts fast. For example, ChatGPT 3.5 scored in only the 10th percentile of the bar exam, whilst GPT-4 scored in the 90th. On February 19th, Sam Altman claimed that we could see superintelligence as early as 2028. Superintelligence is the phase of AI where its cognitive abilities surpass those of any human across any domain. At this level, AI would not just assist workers. It would outperform them. At everything.

However, we do not know for certain the future of AI. What we do know is that the businesses that build AI into their workflows now will be better positioned to adapt the fast-moving world of AI than those that don’t.

I spent a lot of time building a marketplace for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu drop-in classes, believing that because this app didn’t already exist, its success would be guaranteed.

There was a reason it didn’t exist. No one was asking for it.

I posted the app in a subreddit and offered a solution to the problem of dropping into gyms while travelling. In Reddit fashion, the response was blunt. People were apparently not having that problem. A typical response was: “Gym owners are good at responding to DMs.”

Many business owners are stuck in this loop. They build an Airbnb for X that no one was asking for. As such, they have no customers or revenue. Time wasted.

Build Something That Already Exists

Save time and money by avoiding trying to validate an untested idea with a slim chance of success.

The best businesses already exist. Find a business that already has paying customers and build a competitor.

Once you have found a model, search Reddit and X for complaints about that business and work out how you can differentiate your product to solve their specific issue.

It’s far easier to market your SaaS when you understand the pain points you are solving.

Then, you can reply to threads discussing your app and how it solves those problems.

That is how you get customers early.

That is how you do not waste your time and effort.

YourTimer.io

For my latest venture, I decided to build something that already exists and generates revenue.

YourTimer.io is a B2B SaaS where companies create countdown timers for launches, events, and sales. They can then embed the countdown timer on their site.

Additionally, they can get a branded link to distribute publicly (test-company.yourtimer.io).

New-Age Marketing

Traditional marketing has been one-way, such as Meta, Google Ads, TV ads, etc. This all costs money. A lot of money. Business owners who are bootstrapping their products don’t have that kind of budget.

Founders are now turning to two-way channels: forums such as Reddit and X.

Subreddits such as r/Entrepreneur, r/SaaS, r/Solopreneur, etc., are popular channels for advertising SaaS products.

Self-promotion posts are discouraged and usually removed, so it is important to make your posts value-driven. This doesn’t mean telling everyone how great your app is. Rather, discuss what you’ve learned along the way and how this can help other founders in the community.

Additionally, find threads where people are discussing a problem that your app solves. There, you can gently introduce your SaaS.

Founders have moved away from traditional, blind advertising. There is a growing movement towards conversing with customers early on. This gives founders instant feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what features they should add.

SaaS Saturation

In the vibe-coding era, anyone with an internet connection and Claude credits can build a SaaS company. SaaS is becoming as accessible as drop shipping was in 2019.

Adapting to client needs and being willing to actually speak to them is the differentiator.

AI-generated slop is now easily detectable. Any Reddit posts made with AI are inundated with complaints about how it was obviously AI.

Being a real human, another ape just like your customers, is the best way to create and sell your product.

Anyone can build a marketplace business. It’s easy. But building a successful one? That takes some skill.

Last year, I gave it a go. I built Aluga Vaga, a marketplace for garage rentals in São Paulo.

There are several challenges that come with creating this kind of business. I hope to help you overcome those challenges with this blog.

Building an MVP

Ship something fast to verify whether customers would use it before wasting time building something no one wants.

Version 1 of Aluga Vaga was a WordPress site with a Google Form attached.

The questionnaire asked users where they wanted to park in São Paulo and for how long.

This initial feedback made me pivot away from the short-term parking app I had originally planned. Instead, I focused on creating something for long-term parking.

I decided to create a real application after receiving 14 sign-ups in the first week.

Creating a full stack application

I built alugavaga.com.br using React.

Creating an app has never been more accessible, given the wealth of online tutorials, courses, and documentation.

If you hate the idea of coding, find a technical co-founder or pay someone to build the app for you.

Cold start problem

Getting the initial supply is one of the first and biggest problems you will face when starting a marketplace. Most marketplaces die here.

Opening an empty marketplace site does not foster much trust. Users will be reluctant to list on an any app that isn’t already being adopted.

100 listings is the classic benchmark required for a marketplace to have a shot at becoming successful.

Cold start solution

All marketplaces have had to overcome the cold start problem. Let’s take a look at how Airbnb and Uber tackled this.

Airbnb

Airbnb famously created a bot that would email hosts on Craigslist to pitch moving to Airbnb.

Later, Airbnb built a “post to Craigslist” feature where hosts could upload their property to Craigslist for more exposure, and traffic would then be redirected back to Airbnb.

Craigslist eventually caught wind and shut this operation down. But by then, Airbnb had already experienced significant growth.

Uber

We all know Uber as a commission-paying car ride business. That was not always the case, however.

Uber had to pay a flat-rate fee to drivers to incentivise supply during their early days.

In some areas, drivers were essentially paid to sit idly in their cars for a few hours.

Uber wanted to avoid the case where someone opened the app and saw that there were no rides available. As mentioned earlier, users will not trust an app with no supply.

Uber’s competition with Lyft

Things heated up once Lyft entered the market.

Many drivers signed up to both companies and chose to drive for whichever was offering the most lucrative incentives on the day.

To address this, Uber evolved its incentives from daily to medium-term. For example, instead of: “Earn $X per ride.”

They switched to: “Complete N trips this month, earn $Y,” locking drivers into their company for more time.

Additionally, referral bonuses fuelled growth, at a cost. At one point, Uber was offering $750 to the driver and $750 to whomever they referred.

This was naturally very expensive. Venture capitalists were willing to subsidise years of losses to sustain this business model.

Takeaways

• Fake listings: Some companies actually placed fake listings to mimic growth on their marketplace. Instead, you could add products that you own at the start. For example, list your own Nintendo games on your Nintendo marketplace.

• Growth first: Rather than worrying about profitability at the start, focus on getting as many listings on your site as possible.

What I did

• Initial supply: I reached out to people already listing a garage on Facebook Marketplace to convince them to list on my site. Tip: Tell them that they have been exclusively chosen to list for free, creating more demand in your marketplace (even if it isn’t technically true).

• Referral schemes: Once I had some listings, I integrated a referral scheme which suddenly took off. Be warned that this can get expensive. Eventually, I closed the scheme due to cost.

How to grow after achieving initial supply

Once users start using your platform, word of mouth will become a crucial way to grow.

For this to be successful, people must want to tell their friends and family about the platform. It has to be something they love and trust.

How to cultivate trust

• Employ clear rules for both sellers and buyers.

• Create a sense of community through forums and discussion boards.

• Resolve issues promptly and apologise. Don’t hide from them!

The level of trust required depends on your product. For example, a car-rental platform requires more trust among users than a garden tool marketplace.

Uber removes drivers whose average rating is under 3 stars, which is a way to ensure trust and quality in the marketplace. Whilst Airbnb takes document information to incentivise guests to behave appropriately in the accommodation.

Who are your top suppliers?

• Often, a small group supplies the majority of a marketplace.

• Treat your top suppliers like royalty and keep them happy.

• Airbnb gives out “super host” badges and provides special rewards like reduced fees.

How to make money with your marketplace?

Platform fees

Take a percentage fee from every purchase. For example, Airbnb currently takes 15.5% from the host.

Users avoiding platform fees

Buyers and sellers may try to coordinate the exchange outside of the platform, meaning you won’t receive your platform fee.

Solution

• Build internal messaging so you can track when users are trying to exchange outside of the platform and prevent it.

• Incentivise sellers to only take payment in-app. Airbnb provides host insurance, which is void if a guest doesn’t book via the app.

Ads

Place relevant ads on the site. For example, a second-hand wedding dress marketplace that allows wedding companies to advertise on the site. This makes the ads seem more natural and also allows you to charge more to advertisers.

Boosts

Charge to boost listings to the top of the page, something spareroom.com and gumtree.com use.

Many companies use a mixture of these strategies. Test and analyse which works best for your marketplace.

Final thoughts

There are endless options for what your marketplace product can be. I have recently launched bjjmat.io, which is a marketplace for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu drop-in classes. Many niches exist that are desperately calling out for your marketplace to fill the gap.

In 2024, I founded a supplement business, generating a modest £15,000 in revenue. Ultimately, the business failed, leaving me demoralised. However, I failed so you don’t have to. Here are some top tips on how to run a successful business—straight from someone who didn’t.

Lesson 1: Iterate

Have you ever heard of lean, agile methodologies? If not, I highly recommend reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

To summarise, the lean startup approach emphasises launching a minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly as possible, gathering real customer feedback, and iterating rapidly to improve the product. This method reduces waste by preventing you from investing time and money into something your customers don’t actually want. The key is to build based on real-world validation, not assumptions.

What we did well: We naturally adopted an iterative approach, but it should have been a core element of our strategy. We did launch a basic website and made incremental improvements based on key performance indicators (KPIs), such as adjusting call to action (CTA) placements i.e. making the ‘Buy Now’ button more visible.

Mistakes: We wasted a lot of money on assumptions by buying products in bulk before demand was validated. Additionally, we neglected gathering customer feedback as much and as often as possible—a crucial aspect validating concepts in a lean, iterative approach.

Takeaways

• Start with small samples, or better yet, no stock at all.

• Test demand first by launching a website, listing products, and if someone buys, refund them with an apology: "Due to overwhelming demand, we're currently out of stock." Then, once demand is confirmed, buy the stock.

• We wasted £1000s on stock that we never sold, closing the business partly because of this waste. We could have made more lucrative decisions had we been more reluctant to part with money earlier on.

Collecting customer feedback

We didn’t focus enough on gathering insights from real customers. We incorrectly assumed that customers would navigate a website like us—young, tech-capable users. To test this, I conducted a usability test with my dad to see how he navigated the website. Watching a middle-aged man struggle to find certain products was ... eye-opening. Perhaps frustrating is a better word. Customer feedback is a crucial aspect of an iterative approach as it drives change. The key is to release an MVP and iterate rapidly based on continuing customer feedback.

Lesson 2: Assume You’re Not as Clever as You Think You Are

Being overconfident can lead to confirmation bias—the tendency to interpret data in a way that supports your existing beliefs. This is fatal for a business, as data will be used to support unsuccessful ideas, rather than driving improvements through change.

What we did well: We mimicked some of our competitors' products and features, understanding that existing businesses had extensive knowledge. Analysing competitors’ products and strategies can be valuable as they have already validated that a market exists for these products.

Mistakes: We thought we were geniuses in this space. Our competitors seemed like idiots. And honestly, they may have been. But their model worked. Ours didn’t. This arrogance led us to believe that better information, a more appealing user experience (UX), and a superior web design would make us overnight millionaires. It didn’t.

It took us far too long to realise why our competitors were successful. We were drowning in confirmation bias, assuming that customers were starving for fresh web designs and information surrounding supplements. This wasn’t the case. Our competitors' success was partly because they had been in the market for a long time, building a strong customer base and brand loyalty—things we lacked and couldn’t just throw money at to gain. We refused to accept this reality for a very long time.

Takeaways

• Consider why competitors are successful despite their flaws.

• Be aware of confirmation bias creeping into strategy and actively analyse potential flaws in your assumptions.

A Pre-emptive Post-Mortem

Conduct a pre-emptive post-mortem—a proactive strategy to analyse risks and failures before they occur. It forces you to confront the potential weaknesses in your strategy and address them before they become fatal flaws. Had we done this, we might have spotted the cracks in our plan early enough to course-correct.

Lesson 3: Pivot based off hypothesis changes

Have a clear hypothesis for your business that describes your customers, their reason for choosing you, and the product. For example, ours was “Young, information-hungry supplement users would be interested in buying our supplements because of a cleanly designed website and informative blogs that would facilitate trust in our business.”

Once you realise that an element of your hypothesis is incorrect, you must pivot.

A change to your hypothesis can include:

• Your customers are different from who you originally thought.

• The reasons people buy are different from what you assumed.

• Y​​our product is different than expected (e.g. if you were making ad revenue from blogs instead of selling supplements).

Pivoting can involve changes to web design, pricing strategy, marketing funnel, or any other aspect of business operations in response to new data.

What we did well: We pivoted away from our original assumption—that young, information-seeking customers would buy our products—towards a more accurate understanding that our actual customers were middle-aged men looking for quick fixes. We stopped writing blogs and started including key bullet points on our landing page instead, using language we believed older generations would find appealing. 

Mistakes: We pivoted too slowly, partly due to confirmation bias and a reluctance to accept that our entire strategy was flawed. Not having regular discussions on pivoting cost us valuable time.

Takeaways

• Write down a clear hypothesis in your business plan: “These types of customers will buy our product because they want this.”

• Schedule regular ‘pivot’ meetings—maybe every six weeks (though the frequency depends on the business).

• Ask: Has anything in our hypothesis changed? If so, pivot.

• Accept that changing your strategy is a part of having a successful business.

• Most business owners, after a pivot, only regret that they didn’t pivot earlier.

Lesson 4: Track metrics

Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, and customer life-time value (LTV) are key aspects of maintaining a business. Clear targets must be set from the outset, with regular reviews to assess whether they are being achieved. Analyse the areas where the business is underperforming compared to a baseline metric. Perhaps a thorough review is required or maybe the target was overly ambitious.

For example, you may set a target of a 5% conversion rate. If you find the conversion rate is 1%, you must use tools such as google analytics to find where customers are dropping off in the sales funnel.

• Are all users hitting the landing page, not adding anything to cart, and dropping off? That may suggest your landing page sucks or your pricing strategy is off—remember having low prices may infer poor quality so it isn’t always the case that prices should be lowered.

• Are users adding to the cart but not checking out? Perhaps the cart is poorly designed. Ensure checking out is easy for the customer. Consider adding a buy now button to the product page.

• Are users checking out but not completing the purchase? Perform a test order to ensure the payment system works correctly and confirm there are no unknown costs being added to the total price.

• Or perhaps a 1% conversion rate is standard in your industry and a 5% target was too ambitious.

What we did well: We made many changes in response to poor conversion rates, staying true to an iterative approach. For example, we enhanced our product price display by replacing the default dropdown with a clear, side-by-side comparison of all three subscription lengths and their respective discounts.

Mistakes: We didn’t track enough metrics consistently to the extent that we didn’t even know how much money we were making or losing, blindly believing that success was guaranteed.

Our conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who actually bought a product) was often less than 1%—extremely poor. We did make some tweaks to landing pages based on that metric, but we were riddled with confirmation bias. If one day our conversion rate jumped to 5%, we’d assume our latest change was incredible. But then, when it dropped back to 1% the next day, we’d assume we just needed another tweak. We weren’t diagnosing issues properly, just reacting blindly. 

Takeaways

• Set clear KPI targets before starting (e.g. 5% conversion rate).

• Track KPIs consistently, using tools like Google Analytics.

• Regularly review performance—are you meeting your targets?

• Diagnose the actual causes of poor performance by talking to customers.

• Make data-driven decisions instead of waiting too long to react.

Lesson 5: Have a solid marketing strategy

Determining a marketing strategy—how you are going to acquire customers—is key. There are two main ways of doing this: organic growth and advertising. Organic growth can consist of search engine optimization (SEO)—having your website rank highly on search engines, going viral—such as blowing up on youtube like this blender business, or word of mouth. 

Advertising is paying companies such as Google or Meta to display your ads on their platforms.

What we did well: We eventually pivoted to reels after much trial and error. But honestly, when it came to marketing, we got very little right.

Mistakes: Where to begin? We threw money up the wall with terrible advertising strategies, starting with AI-generated static ads which had an awful CTR and even worse conversion rates. After some time, we switched to informative reels on TikTok and Instagram, but we were probably boring people to tears. My biggest takeaway from advertising? Quick, fun reels are the way forward.

Takeaways

• Learn to sell. I cannot stress this enough. If you can’t sell, it doesn’t matter how good your business is, no one will buy your products. We all know of terrible products that are successful simply because a charismatic celebrity is pushing them.

• Focus on organic growth as well as advertising. Try going viral and implementing strong SEO strategies.

Good luck!