I Am Closing Another Saas

“PIVOT OR DAMN SHUT DOWN IF IT'S NOT WORKING”

shouted my brain during the late night hours and I knew the time has come.

I decided then and there to close Profiley.me.

It’s a SaaS that I launched some 10 months back when I pivoted ProductPottery (after 9 months waiting for customers…crickets 🦗).

The idea for this pivot came when I found a few large Twitter accounts getting blocked overnight; no reasons given whatsoever; giving them no chance of connecting with their audience and no way to migrate them to another platform.

I thought platform risk is real and there should be a platform where audience building could happen at ease and safe.

We are after all using rented spaces from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and any day we may be dropped off the radar.

I was contacting so many people inside and outside Twitter ecosystem, DMed 100s of people and shared with my local groups but free signups did not go beyond 7.

If you are one of those “Super 7” I genuinely thank you for trusting me. You are a super hero 🙌🏻.

But the project is not sustainable in it’s current state and I’ve no motivation to add more features.

In introspection, I’ve a few reasons for this failure.

1. Without a USP, your product is just one drop in the sea

The SaaS was an all in one platform for writing Blogs, Newsletters, Building Email Lists, and also had a Link-In-Bio page, lol. Over-ambitiously I was trying to compete with a sea of established players like WordPress, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Substack, Linktree…without any damn USP.

1. Painkillers sell. Vitamins kill.

There was literally nothing special in my product that solved a pain point that any of these platforms had. It was a Vitamin.

And people don’t take you seriously unless you treat their pain. This has been reiterated many times by many experts over many years, but you don’t learn till your hands burn, do you?

1. Learn marketing or Die closing

I didn’t market my product enough and I know that no matter how many more products I make, if I don’t learn to market them, I am doomed.

Marketing and Selling are two things that every Entrepreneur should learn. Essential if you are a techie. No other option. Period.

Next plans?

I have a couple of ideas. One is of creating a boilerplate based on ASP.NET Core and open source it.

My codebase is versatile enough to quickly create any webapp; a headless eCommerce software, a helpdesk software, a product SaaS and then another SaaS.

You think it might be something you would use?

My focus right now is on some client projects.

Speaking of which, we’ve launched an exciting game for one of our excellent clients. It’s a word game that we’ve been working on for quite some time.

Currently it has been released to a closed demography. So if you are in the US you should be able to install it on your android device.

We’ll be releasing the game in more demographics in sequential manner fixing and improving the game along. If you happen to be into gaming I would love to hear your feedback.