Building the Product Is the Easy Part
There’s a version of this post where I give you a neat framework. Five steps to marketing your SaaS, a checklist, something you can screenshot and save for later. That’s not what this is. What this is, is me processing something I’m still in the middle of — and hoping that by writing it down, it makes sense to someone else building something right now.
The Retroly chapter
When we were building Retroly, we took our time. Six to eight months of building the UI, refining the UX, testing with a small circle of people we trusted. We had a clear target audience — teams in Europe who ran agile retrospectives — and we genuinely believed in what we were making. The product was good. We knew it was good. We just hadn’t quite figured out the part where other people find out it exists.
We announced on Product Hunt and ranked #2 on the day. Users came. With zero marketing budget, we converted almost 60% of signups into paying customers at $10/month, which — when you’re a small team that just shipped something — feels like the universe giving you a thumbs up.
Then one user paid an entire year upfront. $100, no prompting, no annual plan nudge. That genuinely blew my mind. Not because of the amount, but because it meant someone looked at what we built, decided it was solving a real problem, and trusted us enough to pay for the next twelve months before we’d even asked. That’s a different kind of validation from a five-star review. That’s someone putting their money where your product is.
I cannot wait for my $40 moment for Papertrail.
And then, in a twist nobody on the team saw coming, lockdown happened. At first it was great for us — suddenly every team in the world was remote and desperately trying to run better retrospectives. We grew. People were finding us. Then lockdown ended, offices opened back up, and a good chunk of our users quietly churned their way out. Turns out some of our growth had been borrowed from a very unusual moment in history, and when that moment passed, we hadn’t built enough of a marketing foundation to hold the ground we’d gained.
That’s the part that stayed with me.
What I actually learned
We had spent the better part of a year building the product and almost no time figuring out how to grow it, talk about it, or keep people around once they arrived. And the painful thing is that the product worked. The conversion rate was proof of that. The $100 upfront payment was proof of that. The problem wasn’t what we built — it was that we treated marketing as the thing we’d get to once the product was ready, and by the time we looked up, the window had moved.
The lesson I took from it: don’t just go write the code. Figure out marketing first, then build the MVP as fast as you can and learn fast. It sounds obvious when you say it like that, but it doesn’t feel obvious when you’re in it. Building is comfortable. You can see progress, you can measure it, you can point at a screen and say “look, here’s the thing I made.” Marketing is murkier. You’re guessing, then testing, then guessing again. It’s not as satisfying in the short term, which is probably why engineers — myself included — keep finding reasons to do one more sprint before they think about it.
But here’s the thing your users are never going to care about: your backend architecture, your choice of framework, how clean your code is. What they care about is what you told them the product would do, and whether it does that. The story you tell before someone signs up matters as much as the product they find after they do.
Now I’m doing it again, this time with Papertrail
Right now I’m building Papertrail — it tracks your documents, subscriptions, and anything with an expiry date, and reminds you before things become a problem. Passports, insurance, gym memberships, the lot. And I’m in a similar spot to where I was with Retroly: zero marketing budget, figuring it out as I go.
The difference this time is that I’m not waiting. I’m planning a Product Hunt launch because I know that channel works for me. I’m posting on LinkedIn, writing things like this, trying to let people see the process and not just the finished thing. We have 10 active users right now, which is not a lot, but 10 real people using something you built is a very different thing from 10,000 people who’ve heard of it. I recently turned on a two-month free trial to take the friction out of getting started, and I’m also thinking about a B2B2C expansion — because I’ve come to understand that who distributes your product is as much a strategic decision as what the product does.
None of this is a playbook. I’m not far enough along to hand you one. But I’ve learnt enough to know that the mind shift has to happen early — the realisation that building is maybe half the problem, and on a generous day. The other half is finding the people who need what you made, making them believe it, and keeping them once they arrive. That’s the bit that doesn’t come with a tutorial.
If you’re drowning in expiry dates and renewal emails — Papertrail is free for 2 months. No card required, no chasing needed.