Ask HN: How do I know if I'm selling a pain-killer (and not a vitamin)?

[sales_is_hard]

I’ve built and am now selling my first SaaS product, and I’m trying to figure out if I’m on to something here or just beating my head in to a brick wall. I’ve routinely heard things like “this is what we need. Let’s loop back next quarter,” and last quarters leads are converting. But we’re not hearing “Can we have this integrated by Friday!?” or “We don’t need this.” I expect sales to be hard, and doubly so when selling the first dozen customers on a new MVP-level product; is this the kind of response I should be expecting?

I’m persistent (possibly to a fault) but how do I know if this is the right thing to persist on?

[moshiasri]

well the first thing you need to check in a pain killer is "is your product solving the most crucial problem" like something which can not be ignored, can not be avoided or cannot be dealt with later, if those three things are covered,then your product upto some degree is a pain killer.

second you need to check weither the product you are offering is the best solution to address the problem in the most possible sense, and with a good ROI, or is the product just fixing one problem while leaving the rest, your are not expected to build a swiss army knife of sort but even then, a product which is not usefull in the sense of usability is just a vitamin.

to summarize in short, any product which is handling a crisis situation and providing a good ROI, without being much of a hassle is a pain killer.

~there are other aspect as well but i believe these two are the most important one's among all.

[sales_is_hard]

We offer high-alpha low-beta ROI (our fees are structured to align with our customers unit economics) and I think we're solving an 'unavoidable problem.'

> without being much of a hassle

There's room for improvement here, and improving it is our main development focus. It's a bit of an hassle to set up, and then easy to use. We think that's where our "lets task next quarter" comments come from. Leads don't think that they have the dev time to integrate right now.

> is the product just fixing one problem while leaving the rest

There are other adjacent problems that we plan to solve, but we excluded them from the MVP.

[sharemywin]

It's hard to say:

1. is CLTV > 3 * CAC?

2. do you have a way to get leads consistently

If so, keep going. even if it runs out of steam you can sell it if it generates cash flow.

[sharemywin]

Next step, Are people actually using and paying for your product?

Also, if your not getting any resistance about price you may need to look at charging more.

[sales_is_hard]

Yes. 2 customers are paying, and we're never lost a paying customer. 2 others have signed service level agreements but aren't in production yet.

We get light pushback on price, but we've never had to give ground.