This is pre-launch, but I am afraid that I will struggle finding even my first user for my SaaS. Do you have similar experiences? I have been reaching out to my ICP for days now.

The situation that happened:

I see how some creators on Subtsack are monetizing their content (they have a section for subscribers who can pay to access articles, videos, and private chat).

I hated meetings. Still do. But I noticed the problem was not the meeting itself. It was the scheduling, the setup, the thirty minutes of context before anything useful happened.

So I tried something. Instead of booking time, I sent a voice note. Just me, talking through the thing I needed to say, for two minutes.

I spent two years trying to explain what my product does. Different copy, different angles, different frameworks. Nothing landed the way I wanted.

Then a user described it to me in passing. One sentence, in their own words, using language I would never have chosen.

Have you noticed that when you post to the forum, your posts have 0 upvotes? Wouldn't it make sense that the OP would want to upvote their own content? Asked another way, why post something that isn't worthy of your own upvote?

I had a bug that reproduced about once a week and never when I was looking for it. My tests passed. My logs were clean. Then I would get an email from a user describing something that should have been impossible.

I could not see it for a month. And then I caught it because I happened to leave a terminal open overnight and came back to a strange line of output.

I learned more from a failed launch than I have from every book I have read on the subject.

The books made sense. The principles were clean and the examples were instructive. And none of it stuck until I had felt the thing go wrong in my own hands.

Last month was slow. Nothing was working the way I wanted and every day felt like pushing something uphill.

Then someone sent a one line email saying the tool had saved them an afternoon. Nothing dramatic. No details.

Someone asked me a technical question last month. I gave them an answer that was accurate, well reasoned, and did not help them at all.

I could tell because they thanked me politely and asked someone else.

I automated a task last month. Replaced about two hours of weekly work with a script that runs in seconds.

I felt efficient for about a week.