Ask HN: Profitable SaaS? How did you grow your business?
I run a one man B2B SaaS (www.hrpartner.io) and marketing has proven to be a real mystic art for me.  I always thought the programming would be the tough bit, and the marketing the easy part, but it has been totally the opposite in my experience.<p>My biggest issue has been finding the right channel to market.  I&#x27;ve tried Facebook and Twitter advertising (on a small scale - about 5 campaigns at $100 a pop) without much result.  I&#x27;ve spent over $2K on Google AdWords with limited success.<p>In all above cases, I got a lot of people visiting my site, with about one in 20 visitors actually signing up.  But after that, very few signups stayed around for more than one or two login sessions, and even fewer signed up for paid plans. (We use Intercom to track conversions and activity)<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I am not really complaining as I have a steady core of users who seems to use the app regularly, but I am mystified at the very low rate of converting visitor and initial account creators into regular users.<p>Next step is to look at specific review sites such as GetApp and Capterra.  Our product also integrated tightly with Xero so we just advertised in the Xero User Magazine this month which will be distributed to thousands of users at their US convention soon, so we will see what comes out of that.<p>My biggest struggle is that because I am still actively developing and adding new features to the app, I have problems putting down the coding tools and building momentum with marketing.<p>Oh, and as for pricing, I&#x27;ve got a free forever plan for smaller companies (up to 10 employees), with paid plans after that.  Expectation was that smaller companies could onboard for no cost, then as they grew, they would upgrade to a paid plan, but because we have only been live for a few months, still too early to tell if that will be a great strategy. I may drop the free plan later this year.<p>We also built a totally free companion site (www.staffstatus.io) that integrated with HR Partner and made free to ALL sizes of companies to see if we could get some side business (similar to what crew.co are doing with unsplash.com, but so far it doesn&#x27;t seem to be doing what we intended - though it is really early days for that too).<p>Looking forward to keeping an eye on this thread to see what other solo SaaS drivers are doing.  Feel free to ask any questions or critique any of my methods.