Here are the key lessons from the video “My failed SaaS story” by developer and YouTuber Tom Gregory.
TL;DR:
- The Core Mistake: Tom built a product (a SaaS boilerplate) based on a competitor’s success and assumed his own audience had the same problem, without any real validation.
- A Waitlist Isn’t Validation: He confused waitlist sign-ups with purchase intent. His actual waitlist conversion was 1.5%, a fraction of his expected 10%.
- Fixing the Wrong Thing: He wasted weeks tweaking his landing page and driving more traffic when the real issue was the product itself—not enough people needed it.
- The Painful Lesson: Pre-sales are the only true form of validation. Getting customers to pay money before the product is finished is the ultimate proof they have the problem and believe in your solution.
Tom Gregory set a goal to make $1,000 from a new SaaS product. He had what seemed like a solid plan, an email list of over 4,000 people, and a high degree of confidence. He ended up making just $236. This is his story of failure and the lessons every indie builder should learn from it.
1. The Plan: A Seemingly Perfect Strategy
- The Idea: Tom decided to create a “SaaS bootstrap project” called Dev Launchpad. The idea wasn’t new; he was inspired by another indie hacker who had found great success with a similar product. Tom believed he could improve upon it with his own tech stack and more automation.
- The Goal: Sell the product for $50. To hit his $1,000 target, he only needed 20 customers.
- The Marketing Strategy: He created a waitlist page and promoted it in every YouTube video he published. He calculated that if he got 200 people on the waitlist, a 10% conversion rate would get him the 20 sales he needed.
2. The Launch: When Reality Hit Hard
On launch day, Tom’s waitlist only had 74 people, short of his 200-person goal. However, he remained confident because he also had another email list of over 4,000 subscribers built up over the years. He drafted the launch email and sent it to everyone.
The next morning, he woke up and checked the results: only one sale.
Tom then spent weeks trying to “fix” the situation:
- Hypothesis #1: It’s a landing page problem. He added tiered pricing, rewrote all the copy using a template from Dan Koe, and even changed the color scheme. The result: nothing changed.
- Hypothesis #2: It’s a traffic problem. He ramped up promotion on YouTube, driving a total of 3,600 visitors to the page. The result: he picked up a couple more sales, but the conversion rate was a dismal 0.1%.
After all that effort, he had a grand total of four sales.
3. The Diagnosis: It Was a Product Problem
At this point, Tom had to admit a painful truth: the problem wasn’t the landing page or the traffic. The problem was that his product didn’t solve a big enough pain point for enough people. He had built something he found useful and simply assumed others would too.
4. Three Painful (But Valuable) Lessons
Despite only making $236, Tom learned three invaluable lessons for his next venture.
Lesson 1: Solve Someone Else’s Problem, Not Yours (and Get Proof)
Dev Launchpad solved Tom’s own problem—saving time on new project setup. But assuming others shared this problem was just that: an assumption.
- Action for Next Time: Before writing a single line of code, find and validate that at least three people actually have the problem and are willing to pay for a solution.
Lesson 2: Pre-Sales Are the Only Validation That Matters
Tom assumed a 10% conversion rate from his waitlist, but reality was 1.5%. A waitlist shows casual interest, not a commitment to buy.
- Action for Next Time: Ask customers to pay upfront (pre-order). Cold, hard cash is the only real proof that they have the problem and believe in your proposed solution.
Lesson 3: Your Landing Page Copy Is for Your Customer, Not for You
Tom’s landing page copy was about “creating an independent income online,” a narrative that resonated with him personally. But that doesn’t mean it resonated with his visitors. You are too close to your own product to be objective.
- Action for Next Time: Find someone else to help write or at least review your landing page copy. The potential payoff makes it a worthy investment.
In the end, Tom views every launch as an experiment. If you can improve by just 1% after every failure and simply increase the number of times you “swing the bat,” success is inevitable.