| There are many things that might influence the result and therefore your decision. I once worked for a product in the SaaS business and what helped us is understanding "where are our customers".
So, where are _your_ customers? How do they come to your product, how do they discover your product? After having this answer we focused on improving that conversion rate (for us it was all about being first on google and having a high-converting landing page, but in your case forums might be a better place to look at. It all depends on the target customer) Also, one issue I've often encountered is that knowing the customer and selling to the customer might be very different things.
Did you only sell online? One great piece of advice is try to sell the product IRL and record the audio.
After many failed and successfull attempts you'll have recordings of _what works_ and what doesn't work for the kind of customer.
That information will be useful to convey the benefits into your landing page / homepage. Back to your question: How much growth should you expect? It is a generic question. How many people are impacted by your product? How many have that specific itch to be scratched? How fast can you get to them? How good is your product at scratching the itch?
The (partial) sum of these questions might lead to the answer.
If you have many people impacted by your product, if the product scratch a big itch and you can reach all the people at the same time, chances are you're going to grow fast. If you grow slow, is it bad? It might be bad if you're asking 5$/month for an extra. If it is 100$/month maybe a slow growth might make sense. In the end, if I were in your shoes, I'll wait a year to decide if it's time to give up, but at the same time I'll set some monthly checks to see how growth is going, what are the feedbacks and how the community is reacting and test each month a different way to market the product. A good book on this is "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg PS I also run a side business creating cosmetic products (not saas) and my growth has been relatively slow. The product (in my case) fixes a big itche and had no competitors. Reason for that is that achieving a stable efficient result is quite hard, but we somehow made it (bootrapped obviously). In our case slow growth was a good thing because it allowed us to fix the issues in the product before being too much known in the public. |