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Justin Jackson's SaaS marketing experiments

In 2024, I'm sharing marketing and growth tips for SaaS founders

I'm the co-founder of Transistor.fm (podcast hosting and analytics). I write about SaaS marketing, bootstrapping startups, pursuing a good life, building calm companies, business ethics, and creating a better society,.

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Featured Post

Almost went bankrupt

A lot of people don't know this about me, but in the early 2000s, I owned a snowboard shop in Alberta called the Real Deal. It almost bankrupted me. I just published a video where I tell the whole story: It describes how I emerged from that failure and was (eventually) able to bootstrap a successful SaaS company. It took a few steps to get there! If you're on your own indie SaaS journey and want a sense of what my path looked like, I think you'll dig it this video. (It also has a bunch of my...

4 days ago • 1 min read

The problem with marketing metrics is that most of them are meaningless: How much traffic did we get last month? How many TikTok views? How many clicks did we get from our FB ads? How many YouTube views? What was our email's open rate? Founders spend thousands of dollars on marketing activities that produce clicks, traffic, views, and opens – 99% of which don't matter. In marketing, the only question that matters is, "Which of our efforts are bringing in revenue?" Matt Paulson, founder of...

11 days ago • 2 min read

First, thanks to everyone for the incredible response to my Calm Companies essay. It's my most shared essay of the year, and I saw it appear in multiple email newsletters and briefly on the Hacker News homepage! This week I want to try to distill some advice I've been giving to aspirational founders. View this newsletter online Iterating towards success My friend Nathan Barry is one of the youngest successful entrepreneurs I know: he founded ConvertKit, which now has $40 million in annual...

25 days ago • 3 min read

It's been hard to watch the recent layoffs in the tech industry. Seeing so many good people being let go has been heartbreaking. Getting laid off doesn’t just rattle your career; it shakes the very foundation of your life. I've seen friends lose their jobs and go into an existential tailspin. It's not uncommon for them to blame themselves and to feel immense guilt and shame. The experience is especially hard on parents whose families depend on them for income. You can read this newsletter on...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read

Launching your product on Product Hunt (in the old days) could get you hundreds (or thousands) of new users. In his recent post, Tibo reflected: "When we launched Tweet Hunter on Product Hunt, I remember what a day it was. 100+ new paying users. Instant 20% growth. +$4,000 MRR." But nowadays, it doesn't feel like many people are visiting the site to try new apps. In the past, the Product Hunt homepage was a curated list of cool products. Today, it's trafficked mostly by bots (and people who...

2 months ago • 1 min read

It's time for another SaaS marketing tip. When you're about to launch something new, your first step shouldn't be buying ads, optimizing for SEO, or posting on social media. One of the highest-leverage marketing activities you can do is this: write a personal email to anybody in your network who might care. I'm advising a startup right now (I'll tell you more about them in the future). They want me to help them get more beta testers. My first step was to list people I know who might be...

3 months ago • 1 min read

Eight years ago, I wrote a piece asking: are we at peak SaaS? My thesis was that people were tired of paying subscriptions for software and that the SaaS market was ripe for disruption.* Late in 2023, DHH and Jason (the founders of 37signals) started making noise with a similar thesis. They bought the ONCE.com domain and published their manifesto: "Today, most software is a service. Not owned, but rented. Buying it enters you into a perpetual landlord–tenant agreement. Every month you pay for...

3 months ago • 3 min read

A local company here in Vernon asked if I could go for coffee. They are in a bind: they need to increase revenue dramatically, or they won't be able to pay their operational expenses. They had heard about my plans to publish my "Marketing Experiments for SaaS" series and wondered if I could give them some tips. I reviewed their website and signup flow. Then, I asked myself: "What's one simple, high-leverage action they could take today to improve their marketing?" The answer: send every user...

3 months ago • 3 min read

I've been a huge fan of the Acquired podcast for a while. They do deep-dive episodes on the history of great companies: Nike, Costco, NFL, Nintendo. They're a big deal, with nearly a half-million listeners. So, I was surprised when they contacted me and wanted to switch to Transistor for their podcast hosting! (Typically, bigger shows want more sophisticated "ad network" features than we offer). But they wanted to switch! They chose us because: They had heard good things about the quality of...

3 months ago • 1 min read

Thanks to everyone who replied to last week's newsletter. I got more responses than I expected! Seems like lots of folks are excited about this year's direction. As mentioned last week, my 2024 theme for the newsletter is SaaS marketing experiments. My first step is to learn more about you and what you're doing for marketing now. I made a quick 5-minute survey for you here: Fill out the survey The form is anonymous unless you'd like me to follow up (in which case you can leave your email)....

4 months ago • 1 min read
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