I built my SaaS app fast. Now it's marketing time.

A few weeks ago, I gave myself the challenge of building and marketing a SaaS app to $100 in 1 month.

While I've slightly missed the mark since it's taken me ~25 days to build and launch the app, I'm happy to say that the app is now live -- https://blogbannergpt.xyz !

What is the app? It's an image generation tool that generates blog banner images based solely on your post's title!

In fact, the banner for this blogpost was made with it. Cool, right?

So, now, you might be wondering why I took on this challenge, and it's simple really.

As developers, we're living in the golden age of solo SaaS app development. With AI-powered coding tools like Cursor, and batteries-included full-stack frameworks like Wasp, we can launch apps in weeks that used to take a team of developers months. Insane!

Also, I'm the creator of Open SaaS, a free, open-source SaaS boilerplate starter, and I’ve been seeing other builders using my boilerplate share their success stories, such as getting their SaaS apps acquired within a couple weeks.

So I got inspired to try and build and market more SaaS apps of my own.

I've been documenting my progress through this self-imposed challenge on TikTok, where I've built a nice little following so far. I shared all the tips, tricks, and tools I used while building the app.

Now I'm going to share my entire marketing journey as I try and promote the app and make some real money with it, so follow along if you're interested :)

Of course, marketing is always a difficult task for a developer, and I don't have a huge social media following. So part of this challenge is to help me build my marketing muscle. And by documenting the entire process via videos and posts, I'll get better at “building in public” and finding marketing channels for the right audiences.

Here are some of the marketing ideas I'll try out, and post about, in the coming weeks:

1. Direct Emails to potential customers
2. Product Hunt launch to help me organize promotion materials and create good messaging
3. Reddit replies and maybe some posts -- I have to be careful here to not get seen as direct marketing or spam
4. Twitter/X and TikTok marketing posts on my personal channels.

Come follow along on my journey and see if I make it, or just make a fool of myself :)

There's never a better time than now to build!

Comments

[Matija Sosic]

This is amazing - our whole team is already using it for blog posts! This is what I got for an interview with a SaaS founder 👇

[Martin Šošić]

You should add building in public under that list of marketing ideas, including this blog post :D!
The question I often get is "I made an app (SaaS), how do I market it now?". And then I start writing about finding relevant communities, being part of them, sharing about it, writing content that is valuable on its own but also mentions your app, ... . If you document all this stuff in details through your blog posts, this could be a great replacement for what i usually write, I could just share the series of articles you wrote! It is also much better when there are real examples like in your case vs me talking generally. So yeah, that would be exciting to see: you documenting each of your steps as youa re doing it, regardless if step fails or not. So I am excited to read more!

[Isaiah]

Nice post.
Good luck on this:

Reddit replies and maybe some posts -- I have to be careful here to not get seen as direct marketing or spam

Reddit's pretty aggressive with any kind of marketing. I did see some success with people who marketed via telling stories with their posts.

[Milica Maksimovic]

I love the "clay art" images!

[Hardik Gohil]

Awesome tool 🔥🔥

I've also made a simple app called LetterLens - an open-source text analyzer for quick character and word counting.

Try it out → letter-lens.netlify.app

GitHub → github.com/HardikGohilHLR/letter-lens

[Mihovil Ilakovac]

We need more examples of banners it generated! The styles are nice. Did you fine tune some models for this?

[Mihovil Ilakovac]

OG image generation is nice

[Filip Sodić]

Bitchin' thumbnail

[Digvijay Shelar]

Loved it !

[Benny Schuetz]

Great project. Keeping my finger crossed that it turns out successfully revenue wise.

[Herche Jane]

First of all, congratulations on completing this challenge! It is not easy to build and launch an application in one month and successfully launch it. As a programmer, I am really happy for you.