https://www.indiehackers.com/post/1-400-in-pre-sales-step-by-step-1b03e6f030
Hey all. I just wanted to share my process for generating $1,400 in pre-sales. It's not impressive or anything, but I figured someone might find it useful.
Caveat: I am selling a digital product, not SaaS, but I will make comments here on how you can probably do the same for SaaS.
How do you get people to fork over money? Well, you have to share a vision. In my case, I will be selling a UI kit so that's something I can visualize very easily just by designing it.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/2fe1347a-fb29-4f86-be9e-ca21548f892b/4p94riou47f3lifwrz8mn056kyoc
Of course, I don't need to design the whole thing up front - what if nobody likes it and doesn't even care? Instead, I design a handful of screens and explain what the product will be.
What if you don't have a visually-driven product though?
Well, in this case I would probably just explain what I am looking to build. Write a story about what's broken, why no current solutions exist to properly solve it, and why my solution will be the right investment.
Include potential mockups of the app's UI / functionality.
Even though the product in its current form does not exist, we can sell people the vision. Why would they pay? Well, that's where early support incentives come in.
Personally, I used Gumroad to set up a product, but you can use any of the existing solutions - even just Stripe if you can figure out how to add some context and images on the payment page.
Don't even bother with coding proper payment infrastructure at this point. The common pitfall for indie devs is to go into building mode and start feeling like they are making progress. Unless you know for a fact that your product will be in high demand because you pre-validated it or experienced the pain for yourself, just skip the busy work and get up and running asap.
For a SaaS business, you might think about selling a lifetime deal, or a discounted first year. You can even skip subscriptions at this point and sell a small package that allows access for X number of months. Once you have sales and built the product out, you can manually set those people up in your proper payment system.
Why would anyone buy if you haven't created anything yet? Create a powerful incentive that pays to be early.