Ask HN: How do you grow a new SaaS business?
I have some bad news for you. For a solo founder, a 70:30 marketing:development mix is on the low side. At this point, unless you&#x27;re getting a financially backed feature request from a majority of your contacts, you should really be spending almost all your time on sales&#x2F;marketing. When I say &quot;financially backed feature request&quot;, I mean that a majority of your contacts have said if you build $x, they&#x27;ll pay you $y for $z years.<p>I checked out your website and I&#x27;d argue that your problem is bigger than SAAS marketing. You won&#x27;t be able to keep restaurants signed up unless you deliver customers to them. At the same time, you won&#x27;t be able to attract customers unless you have a good set of restaurants.<p>The restaurant industry is hard to reach, but your best bet with them is to fuck marketing and go straight into sales. To this end, change your website so it&#x27;s specifically about your city.<p>Go into places outside their rush hours and ask to speak to a manager. Make your pitch. Ask yourself what went right and what went wrong. Repeat for ~ 3-6 months. In the beginning, you&#x27;ll do 80% of the talking, but with a few months of experience, you&#x27;ll do about 20% of the talking. Ironically, that will mean that you&#x27;re getting good at sales, but you won&#x27;t believe that until you&#x27;re already good at sales.<p>Be prepared to take a major loss on the first 10 businesses you sign up. Good restaurateurs are enamoured with change, yet they&#x27;re highly risk averse. At first, they won&#x27;t want to partner with you unless you eat 100% of the risk and increase their margin on sales booked through you. If I were in your shoes, I&#x27;d expect to pay my first 10 customers 10% of each order total extra plus agree to pay 100% of the customers&#x27; bills when my app fucks up (or they think I did). You&#x27;ll also find that it&#x27;s easier to get a &#x27;no&#x27; out of a venture capitalist than an FOH focused restaurateur. You&#x27;ll have better luck hearing a firm no from a head chef, but if you ever hear yes from a head chef, apply to Y Combinator ASAP. You have product&#x2F;market fit...:)<p>As far as straight up marketing, at this point, paying for media (ie - advertising) looks like it would be a waste. If I were you, I&#x27;d spend your ad budget when you have at least 20 restaurants signed up and want to get them some customers. At least then you&#x27;ll have an easier time coming up with and testing a hypothesis about what will trigger your users to order food through your app.<p>I&#x27;d focus on earned media (ie - journalists). I don&#x27;t know enough about your business to suggest a hook, but young entrepreneur are usually an editor&#x27;s dream on slow news days. The problem is that kind of coverage tends to be long on &#x27;aw shucks&#x27; and short on converting actual customers. If you tell me more about your city, its local media landscape and about some of the best reporters, I can maybe give you some better pitch ideas.