Me good code. Bad marketing. How is user formed?
I’ve built a dozen-plus small SaaS sites over the years, mostly free tools that solved problems that annoyed me personally.
A couple examples:
Whisper Meter - Anonymous Feedback
Most of these were built because the paid options were too expensive, too bloated, or just didn’t exist in the way I wanted them to. They both have 1000's of active users, but I can't seem to replicate that :/
Now that I’m trying to branch into an actual paid SaaS, and I’m realizing that building the product is the easy part. Getting even basic qualified traffic is where I apparently fall apart.
The product I'm working with is Incident Index. It started as a scratch-your-own-itch tool I built for myself after getting tired of turning messy incident notes into structured RCAs and stakeholder updates by hand.
I’ve since expanded it into a SaaS that helps teams turn incident chaos into clear follow-through: structured RCAs, executive-ready incident reports, corrective actions, and runbooks. The goal is to help teams capture the learning from each incident instead of ending up with scattered notes, half-finished postmortems, and no real operational improvement.
I’ve posted in the obvious places and got a little traffic, but it died off quickly. I’m not looking for a magic bullet, but I would appreciate practical advice from people who have been through this stage.
A few questions:
What worked for you when you were trying to get your first real SaaS users?
Did you have better luck with SEO, cold outreach, Reddit, LinkedIn, paid ads, partnerships, or direct community participation?
How did you figure out whether the issue was traffic, positioning, pricing, or the product itself?
For a niche B2B SaaS like this, would you start with content, direct outreach to the target user, founder-led LinkedIn, paid search, or something else?
I’m happy to share what I’ve tried so far if useful. Mostly looking for grounded strategies from people who have gone from "I built something" to "people are actually finding and using it."