[Journey] Becoming a SaaS operator

Hello everyone, I'm starting a thread to keep myself accountable. Hopefully it will become one of the longer ones, so let's get started.

Long story short, AI came and ate my lunch - made my current work insufferable. I probably could've stuck around for a bit more, but I decided to call it quits. Not the most fiscally responsible decision ever, but well, here we are. To make things even hillarious, I've decided to dip into my cash buffer and turn a portion of it into a revenue stream - I got myself a SaaS. Hilarity ensues, please welcome to my "operating a SaaS" thread.

Before starting this whole thing, I did what every rational person would do and did a basic due dilligence. Now that I see how naiive I was, I have to count myself lucky. However in the initial "gold rush" frenzy, I went and checked what I could. The site was legit, the domain registrar consistent with the claim. The statistics were decent - not great, not terrible as they say. The google Ad campaign numbers seemed reasonable, the conversion numbers ok-ish. All in all, the deal looked mostly solid. I had a call with the original owner, the guys seemed nice. His personal profile and linked-in was closely tied to the project - mostly green flags from my PoW.
So I decided to bite the bulled and signed the contract. To speed things up, I've (oh the horror) decided to forego any sort of 50% first, 50% last or escrow arrangement and just wired the whole #$%@#$ sum to the guy. Blindly. Yes, I'm awesome, I know. The transaction wasn't all that big, but big enough to trigger my banks anti-fraud wiring and so I had to spend some 10 minutes on the call with an operator from the bank who made me recite several paragraphs worth of: "I'm aware that scams in the online space are on the rise, I was informed of the risks, I want to proceed anyways." I did and they unlocked my account. I sent the money - not a back breaking amoung, but enough to feel it. The guy stopped responding.
Immediately my head was filled with "I just wired good chunk of my rainy day stash to an unkown person. I'm an idiot." My heartbeat was up to twice the normal frequency. Doom.
The end?

Fortunately, no. Apparently the original owner had a perfectly legitimate reason to be busy and got to me some three hours later with an apology. We then proceeded with a slow transition of all the assets - passing over the domains, logins, servers, everything. The whole shebang. It took us almost a week to go through everything - and now, almost a month later, we're still waiting for a final authorization, all the while the clients are wiring the money to his account since the payment gate apparently has response times worthy of a modern payment processor. Notably this isn't the owners fault, but the payment processors. Also I believe the man enough now not to be too nervous, but it is annoying nonetheless.

The hillarity doesn't end there though - even though the original owner was cooperating and transfer was in progress, for the first whole darned week since I took over, the conversions collapsed. Not slowed. Not dwindled. Collapsed. In the hindsight, it was obvious - there are usually only 20 or so conversions in any given month, so variance is quite large. Also, it was Easter - everyone was busy doing Easter stuff, weather was nice and all so who would buy my SaaS.
Awesome. Both things combined cost me some three days of sleep, raised my cortisol to a dangerous levels and I think I lost some of what little remaining hair I have.

Lessons learned:

• Always. Use. Escrow. No matter how neat or cooperative the other party is, it is not worth the stress. I was lucky and my due diligence and estimate of the opposing party worked. This time. I was lucky.
• Only risk the money you can afford to lose. Duh. Not that this money would kill me, but I would have felt it. I suppose I learned something new about my risk tolerance, while increasing it in the process. I will call that a win.
• Do a thorough research. There is a bunch of issues that make me wish I'd done a bit more digging - there is more competition than I expected. The site is in slightly worse shape than I thought. The affiliate network is mostly dead. No issue on its own would be a deal breaker, but if I knew of them sooner (though some were hidden in the administration panels) I could've negotiated the price a bit down. I'm new to this so I jumped the gun a little. I will call that a "payment for the goodwill of the owner" and move on. What is done is done, if things work out, this only sets my ROI date few months.

To not be only on the "doom and gloom" side:

• The site ranks decently
• the organic traffic is approximately the same as the paid one - though not particularly high
• There are reasonable conversions happening
• Maybe not as large as I would like, but then, if everthing was perfect, this wouldn't be a journey worth writing about now, would it?

Not particularly impressive, but at least it's steady. There are some nice things - for one, we're ranking at 6th for some of our more interesting keyword. Then there some worrying signs - there is a steady drop in the average rank - by approximately 0.1 points per month, with some recent acceleration.
Maybe some of this is due to the change of an owner? Also recently some of our older collaborators decided to unlink the page - since it's not been too well maintained. Also there is some new-ish competition around the block. The niche is quite saturated - and recently there were some new entries.

Coming next:
My first month as an operator.
State of the world.
First steps.
Run in with Google Ads.
Battle plan.

Stay tuned!

good luck, im seeing good results promoting some saas through google ads lately

Just a small update so that I don't forget since it's been a while.

Sales so far not great, not terrible. Enough to cover server costs and have some beer money, not enough to be completely happy given the price point. My google ads setup has a hole that I didn't manage to fix yet since for now I'm wrestling with gopay. I'm unsure why the most prevalent payment gate in our country is so terrible from the operator perspective, however I hope that after I'm done with the integration I will not have to touch it again.

• it took me almost a month to get a pre-approval. (like really?)
• now they want me to do a test integration first, which is a pain since the site is live - just using a wrong gate owner. Have I known that, I would've went with the account transfer instead, this was supposed to be easier
• and using a different site for the test integration (like another domain, something you kind of want to do, the whole staging thing) requires another approval. WHY?

I have major clenup in works - ready for deploy. However I'm waiting for a window when I can do it reasonably safely - e.g. no customer needs it operational. This will happen this Monday. I missed last window because life happens, which sucks.
After the update I can finally go into the SEO optimization etc. that I was postponing because working on a not-updated system sounded backwards. Maybe I should've done the SEO first now that I think of it, but I wanted the house to be clean before I start polishing.

Long story short - when customers find the project, they are usually quite happy. However they increasingly can't find it due to an increase in competition. Guh.

So apparently, for a tiny SaaS, the new smart way of calculating price per bid in google ads leads to a doom spiral. Or it always led there, I'm unsure - I'm a lot of things, but not a marketing expert.
What happens:
- low conversions
- this leads to lower bid
- this leads to trash traffic that basically never converts
- even less conversions
- even lower bid
When I finally noticed, the maximum bid degraded to 0.01 and the traffic was complete nonsense - this cost me few hundred dollars I think. Not back breaking, but annoying. Lesson learned.
I recovered the campaign and sure enough, conversions are slowly starting to pick up again.
Could be also that the two prolonged weekends are over so people are back in normal state of doing things. Hard to estimate.

it's impressive, I just want you to keep all of us updated here

So far the revenue is holding for the most part, although the organics took a hit. Last week was quite bad - slipped on the organics from 11 to 12.4 average ranking, which sounds concerning.
My attempt to revitalize via an useful tool is in progress - although two of the potential partners I wanted to beta test with appear to have ghosted me. Will try calling next week-ish, Got delayed due to being busy with finalizing my first larger order after going freelance. Not a life changing one, but something to give me fuel for two more months or so.
Also I had a self-inflicted registration outage, which cost me ~3 customers. Not all that bad, but well, revenue lost is revenue lost and ads needlesly burned. Managed to recover one, one is hard-dead (apologized that he went to other service due to the outage), three pending but likely dead. Not all would've paid, but registration -> conversion funnel works quite well, so customer lost on the registration step is almost a full customer gone.
I still have no idea how to get more people to the site, without bleeding on the acquisition costs, I might just automate out most of the tedium and keep it in a low maintenance sunset mode - some other items are maybe picking up. However I'm not giving up just yet.

Alternatively, I'm considering taking few months of profit and trying to do one small burst of SEO (page redesign, some articles, maybe some backlings) to try and bump the traffic. I'm not yet sold on the idea though - arguably it's my weekest axis. Since the product is seasonal, I'm considering targetting this effort to pre-season to gain traction when the season picks up again. Will see.

Ok. So Google snubbed me twice more - which is honestly annoying. Altogether cost me a ~month of net profit, once due to another PPC collapse that I waltzed into, second time by auto-flagging my account and denying promised credits - I maintain that I didn't do anything wrong, but noone listened. I spent a fun hour arguing with customer support to no avail. Have a meeting with some Google Ambassador this week - I'm genuinely curious what he wants to offer me. Probably some sort of "try spend more on PPC", but I suppose that meeting him can't hurt.
The loss is not back breaking, but annoying enough. I hope that is final PPC misshap, got them finally stable, not touching them again unless necessary - this was the last time I clicked on any kind of "optimize for me" button ever again. My bad, cost me a week of PPC leads and increased ad spend.

To not be only negative:
I might've finally found an interesting SEO play or two to be trying - one of the pages I deployed finally got indexed (took a while because I'm stupid and tried indexing wrong one) and it appears to be working in it's little pocket of a long tail. Now that alone would hardly mean a lot - but I have more in the works.
So the plan is:

1. wait for the designs to come in
2. push out another ~10 long tail pages (would do it sooner, but
3. monitor and hope it helps

Basically the whole point is that the domain is decent authority-wise, but AI summaries had eaten my organics (and competition started appearing for the main KWs in the niche) so I'll try to work around them by going into smaller corners with things that are somewhat hard for AI to summarize.

Some redesign is in process and I will see how it pans out - the page is in dire need of being modernized, but so far nothing clicked too much.

It's been a while since my last report. So after the last round of mishaps, I might be actually getting hang of it. Not enough to feel "yess I made it" but enough to start feeling mildly optimistic:


See that little spike at the end? That is this:


So CTR started climbing. Some of my pages I've managed to pull back to the page 1. and started getting clicks - I'm working on an old domain that was neglected for past several years. So I'm dusting it off and making the authority work. The site lost so much due to neglect - which fortunately means that
Few things are genuinely in tension here:

• Impressions are going down - July is genuinely off-season for the website. (Peak is Jan-Mar as far as GA tells me)
• CTR jumped 2->3%, maybe even higher - but I refuse to claim anything based on few days.
• First half of the month was dead - I was genuinely starting to panic that registration flow is broken. It wasn't. Just a slow, off-season month and a variance.
• Then I hit three conversion yesterday - fluke? probably. But it still made me grin from ear to ear.

But CTR getting higher is only half of the story - since I was lacking in the Gig department and was kind of bored, I went ham on this one - far beyond my original plans - that were mostly "fix, update, let it slowly pay itself back". But well, you only care about Opportunity cost if you have opportunities to select from. And since this one makes a bit of money, I decided to make it into my full blown SEO laboratory. And it seems that my ~three months of flaying wildly are finally starting to pay off.

Part of the efforts is a full redesign - dragging the 10 year old page, that never got updated (and still pulled reasonable conversions - so the old owner never bothered). I'm curious how much that will help - still too early to tell and the redesign is only half done. Still miles better than what we had before though.

One more for the road - yesterday, I found and fixed a bug that silently made ~40% arrivals immediately bounce. Now this wasn't a bug I made - I took over this one three and a half months ago. It was sitting there for 5 years, silently killing conversions. Sad part is (and that one made me scream) is that the old owner knew it existed and I found a code snippet that would've mitigated it. But for some reason, it never got rolled out. Code spelunking at its best.