Hacker News! Hive of the world's most cunning start-up minds! Lend me your ears and delicious brains.

I've been running a SaaS app for the last 5 years or so. But customer growth has been slow. Last year was a good year - the best yet, but I'm not getting any younger, and these fancy yacht parties aren't going to throw themselves:

Sign-ups:

2023: 102 new companies joined the free plan, 12 converted to paid plan

2024: 125 new companies joined the free plan, 6 converted to paid plan

2025: 129 new companies joined the free plan, 19 converted to paid plan

So 129 companies installed the app on the free plan last year, 19 of them became paying customers. Maybe that sounds like a lot? But the year before only 6 and the year before that, 12. So it's a bit wibbly wobbly.

Looking for a better way to get this into the hands of developers and sre/devops teams. The feedback I get is (overwhelmingly) positive, everyone bloody loves it - and there's almost zero churn - I just need to get it in front of the right eyeballs.

I've had some google ads going on and off for years. They appear to be useless and expensive. I've also dabbled with reddit and linkedin ads with little impact. But I reckon my target audience probably has ad-blocker anyway.

It's a bit of a niche - a Slack/Discord app for helping teams take turns with their tech (mainly servers/services/hardware/docker containers/staging environments in particular) and there are rather a lot of SEO experts on the web who may or may not be broadly helpful, but I think at this stage I need specifically helpful.

Who can I talk to? What do I focus on?

Anyway. This is a good problem to have. But I'm just a bit stuck.

(ps: it's sort of damned if I do, damned if I don't mention the app, let's just say it helps you call dibs on various things via Slack and Discord commands)

user:	jerryjobrien
created:	September 21, 2023
karma:	1
about:	I help founders get clear on what actually drives growth, then scale it faster jerry@obrienbiz.com