Justin McGill
October 30, 2014 7 Comments AUTHOR: Justin McGill CATEGORIES: Behind the Scenes, SaaS

Two days ago I wrote about what I did the day before launching, and yesterday I discussed what I did the day of my launch. Now I’ll be going into detail about what I did the day after I launched my first SaaS product.

First things first, I began to start getting the word out beyond my initial interest list.

I took the blog post I wrote announcing the launch and began promoting it to my social networks:

Facebook Launch Post

 

Twitter Launch Post

I then went to work on writing a new blog post about how I used and implemented the tool at my own digital marketing agency.  This was going to serve three purposes:

  1. The idea was to share some techniques and how it was used so people could understand how it functioned within another agency.
  2. It also served as fresh new content I could share on social media.
  3. The primary purpose of this post was to actually link it within one of the email sequences I had already prepared within Trak.io.

Trak.io Launch Email
You can see how I used Trak.io to determine when and who to send the email to. In this case, it is an email that goes out 5 days after you signup for a trial.

The next step I did was go through my 1,600+ LinkedIn connections and sort through all of them to determine who was involved in digital marketing. There were about 150 or so that actually had an agency or were involved in some way.

The plan was to send all of them a message individually. Here’s the message I sent:

LinkedIn-Launch-Message

This took several hours to contact the ~150 people who matched the criteria I was looking for, but through this I received some solid feedback and lined up a couple of in person meetings here locally.

Guest Blogging

After this, I reached out to Kristi Hines who writes about digital marketing. I have been a fan of hers for years. I wanted to see if she would be willing to write up a review on Workado on her blog and she accepted.

In addition, I really wanted to get a writeup on a major SEO related website. I targeted Search Engine Journal for this purpose.

Of course, they aren’t accepting any guest contributors. However, I found out who heads up their editing and tracked her down on Twitter. I reached out to let her know I had a great piece of content for them on growth hacking. She said to send it over to her and we’d go from there.

Luckily, she loved the piece and that’s going through the editing process now. It is now scheduled to be posted on November 6th!

This is a huge credibility boost for me because now when I go to ask for guest posts on KISSmetrics or HubSpot, I can reference this post on Search Engine Journal (in addition to the piece on SEMrush that already went live).

Going forward I have a list of about 200 different websites that accept guest blogs. I will be going through those carefully and looking to add more. I’ll consider releasing this list in a future post as well for those interested.

App Crashed

Of course, I couldn’t get too high on the news of my SEJ piece, as the app crashed. Of course it did.

We got it back up without anyone noticing, but needless to say this pushed me to get an account with New Relic.

In addition, I came across Bugsnag previously in some of my research and ran that by my developer. He liked the idea of tracking and had actually already used it before, so I signed up for that account also.

Entrepreneur Communities

Good news did manage to roll in though, as on this day the Micropreneur Academy opened.

It is a forum and community of primarily founder/developers with a forum and reference material.

I had been waiting to get into this academy for a few months after I first found out about it by listening to the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us.

I recently read this blog post from David Schneider about different entrepreneur groups and am looking into these options as well.

Up Next

Since the launch was nearly two and a half weeks ago, I have been focused on listening to customers and continuing to refine the product roadmap. I have several new features planned, but I’m also trying to balance that with various bug fixes and customer requests.

Once I have a couple more differentiating features in place, which should be within the next few weeks, I plan to go hard after key guest blog placement. I will basically be a content producing machine.

I will then scale back once I have a nice wave of new customers to see what the onboarding experience is like, what requests they have, and just continue to assess the feedback I receive. I’ll still be doing a little marketing in the background as well, but being a bootstrapper and going at this alone, I have to take these things in waves.

Conclusion

I really had no roadmap to follow for these three days. There are books out there that discuss when you should launch your product, how to talk to potential customers, etc. However, there wasn’t a day-to-day checklist I could implement.

I couldn’t rely on previous experience, as this was my first SaaS product. So my hope is that by sharing my process and what I went through I can provide a bit of a roadmap for others in a similar situation.

 

7 Comments

  1. Minhaj 9 years ago says:

    I loved your post-lunch ideas. Especially, sending message to Linkedin connection. Though it is time consuming but effective, speaking of my experience.
    Guest blogging is a great idea too. But targeting and geting blog owners write about your product seems tough, but achievable.
    Can you share how you managed SEJ to write about Workado?
    Good luck with your startup!

    Reply
    • Justin McGill 9 years ago says:

      You bet, I’ll cover it in my “Month in Review” post next week.

      Reply
  2. joseph 9 years ago says:

    Congrats on your launch!
    joseph recently posted…Case Study – Keyword Research For Penguin Penalized SiteMy Profile

    Reply
  3. Sunday 9 years ago says:

    Hi Justin,
    Indeed, your experience can ideally serve as a road map to others. After launching the SaaS product, you went into proactive promotion. This is a lesson.
    Getting exposure for the software is necessary and its good to learn of how you have followed through.

    One good thing about this post is that it will help you become accountable. Yes, by publishing your experience, you will increase commitment to your readers and target audience!

    By the way, congratulations on the launch of the WorkAdo App.

    I left this comment in kingged.com where this article was found.

    Reply
    • Justin McGill 9 years ago says:

      Thanks Sunday. It’s all about being proactive with the marketing efforts. So many developers of SaaS apps have a “just build it” mindset and think when they launch, they will be on their way to riches. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.

      Reply
  4. Dave 9 years ago says:

    Thanks for the shout out Justin. I think you’ve making the right decisions (well they match mine so does that count?). This is going to be a sweet ride!
    Dave recently posted…Monthly Growth Report – October 2014My Profile

    Reply
    • Justin McGill 9 years ago says:

      I completely agree. I think it will be fun, but it will test your patience lol.

      Reply

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"Justin is the proto-type of a 21st century business leader. Unmatched skills with evolving technology, combined with the social and emotional intelligence required to handle an increasingly advanced consumer." ~ Michael Lambourne of Blend.