A huge part of the failure here is misunderstanding the budget of the target audience. The author genuinely thought that photographers have hundreds of dollars of cash hanging around to spend on this SaaS tool, even after meeting a customer who explained that they weren't willing to pay for this.
How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.
The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.
I didn’t think that photographers had the cash, I thought that developers handling photos in some way had cash. Such as the various AI photo generator sites that might want to homogenize the style of images they create for ads, headshots, etc.
For actual photographers, they’re probably manipulating all of the photos on their own computers with Desktop software.
Photoshop’s pricing for this is 15 cents per image which is prohibitively expensive for nearly any image generation use case.
That’s actually the type of tool I was playing around with implementing when I came across this as an issue I wanted to solve for myself.
My impression is they were excited about the rate that people were joining the waitlist more than the number on the list. They were assuming that if n people were joining the waitlist every month they would get n * 10% new customers per month post launch.
As far as I know, typical conversion from a waitlist is below 2% and that's after you're fairly sure you're dealing with people and not bots.
Neither 100 nor 1000 emails is even remotely enough, both amount to nothing.
How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.
The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.