6 Signs Your SaaS MVP Is Not Good Enough (nobody teaches this)

0:00You found a brilliant SaaS idea, but when your MVP went live, it completely flopped. Zero sign-ups, no traction, the world just doesn't care. And even if you got 20, 30, 40 sign-ups, if no one uses your product, it's a failure. So, you start to spiral. Did I build the wrong features? Is my pricing off? Is my design terrible? You question everything because you aren't quite sure what's broken. I'm Rob Walling. I founded multiple SaaS companies, written five books on startups, and after seeing thousands of MVPs launch, I've identified six real reasons that MVPs fail. In this video, I'll walk through all of them to help you figure out what

0:38mistakes you might be making and what your next steps ought to be. Make sure you stick around for the last one because I think it's the reason that most MVPs fail. But honestly, this first one is also a doozy. The first reason your MVP might fail is that you're solving the wrong problem or frankly,

0:54not solving much of a problem at all. And you're going to know this, the symptoms of this are when people use your product or you demo it, they say, "Oh, yeah, that's nice. Oh, yeah, I have that problem, but I don't need to solve it now." Or they say that what you've built is interesting, but they never buy. And if you're doing interviews, customer development, customer conversations, whether it's via Zoom or over email, they kind of end in a polite nod with no sense of urgency. Why is it so easy to solve the wrong problem or not solve a problem at all? One reason is you can easily pick a problem that's

1:28mildly annoying that exists, but it's not mission critical or where there's no clear budget owner or a measurable pain that really gets people motivated to whip out their credit card. The reality is founders fall in love with their idea instead of solving a problem. And you can also get too attached to solving a particular problem if in your customer conversations, you're realizing this just isn't desperate. It isn't an aspirin type pain point. It's more of a vitamin. It can be hard to find a problem worth solving and this is where validation comes in and not validation as a one-time thing, but during the entire duration of building your MVP and

2:06every conversation you have as you build your pre-launch list and as you talk to customers in advance of building. Does this sound familiar? Cuz a lot of you out there are not doing any of those things. You're not having customer conversations, you're not building pre-launch list, and that's why when you launch, you launch to crickets. So, in addition to reading The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, a couple things you can do as a quick test, ask a potential customer, "Would you pay X dollars for this today if it worked perfectly?" And while that's not perfect validation, you

2:34can start to build up a list of yeses. And even if only 50% of the people who say yes actually become customers, well then you know, maybe I need 10 people or 20 people to give me a yes before I continue building this. To fix this issue once you've encountered it is to go back to these interviews, right? You're going to focus on frequency of the problem that you're solving, how often do your customers encounter it, the intensity of the problem, and whether they have budget to actually fix it. Finding a desperate pain point and solving it right the first time is extremely unusual, and this is why

3:07throwing a bunch of things at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't actually helpful. It is inevitable that you are going to need to iterate on both the problem that you're seeing and on the solution that you're proposing. The second sign that you have a problem with your MVP is that you don't know exactly who it's for. So, some of the symptoms of this might be you get random sign-ups from different industries. You're getting conflicting feedback, which will always happen, but what you don't want is 20 different voices. You want to start getting groups of people who are requesting the same thing. And if your

3:39messaging feels generic and unfocused. The reason this happens is maybe you built it for everyone who needs anything instead of a defined niche. I'm not saying you always have to niche down. People get in this mind space that you should only go after this product category for this particular vertical, and I don't think that's the only nor the best way to launch products, but it does help in your early days if you can figure out a few ideal customer profiles. One is perfect, two or three is fine. If you want to be a truly horizontal tool, that's actually okay as well. It just means you're going to have

4:13some headwinds when it comes to marketing and selling, and a lot of the horizontal tools you're going to be competing against are going to have more budget and be further along than you are. So, in a perfect world, if you could describe your ideal customer in one tight sentence like marketing ops managers at 20 to 100% B2B SaaS companies using HubSpot who need accurate attribution, that's a perfect world. You're not always going to have that early on. You might have a couple hypotheses. I remember in the early days of my last SaaS company, we had three or four early ICPs, I think they're called ECPs, early customer profiles. And we

4:47were kind of building for all of them to see who stuck around more, who had budget, who we had reach into, and we slowly whittled that down to two or three ICPs. We actually at one point had five that we were looking at. I think we got it down to three, and that's when the growth really kicked off, when we really started building things for those ICPs. So, one way to approach this is to commit to one ICP for 90 days or in the case that we did, we had two, maybe three, but I also had some budget from prior startups to be able to fund

5:16development. And again, two developers working full-time at this point. So, commit to one or two ICPs for a certain period of time, probably 60 or 90 days. You can rewrite your homepage, you can rewrite emails, your sales conversations can change, and you can disqualify people outside that target. Now, I don't I don't tend to turn people away if they're not in an ICP, but I will often explain, "Hey, this tool's not made for you, and the odds of it being perfect for you are pretty low." And from there, you look at your conversion rates, right? Demo to paid, trial to paid, and you see if you start retaining people

5:48and lower your churn. The third reason your MVP's probably failing is you're trying to do too much. This is when you're saying things like, "I'm still not ready to launch." Early users say, "It's too complicated. I don't know where to start." And your product can feel like a buffet with no signature dish. It's easy to fall into this trap as a founder. You're trying to prove value with width and breadth instead of clarity. And you have this fear of judgment or the competition has a lot of features, so you overbuild. And an MVP should be minimal. The idea of an MVP usually is, "Can I get a user to reach

6:24the first aha moment in a few minutes or less? Is that possible?" And if not, it could be the case that you've perhaps built too much. There are a lot of different ways to fix this once you've gone on this road, but it it can be hard. And it includes things like cutting features and really improving your single compelling path, like that first minimum path to get someone to their aha moment. And then launching, not launching to your whole list. If you have thousands of people on a list, launch to 50 of them. Get them in, see the feedback, see what they say. You might be missing some things, you might

6:59have built a little too much in this other area, and so this is where iteration is key. And the thought or the idea that you will nail this from the start with your first iteration of your MVP is highly ambitious and would be highly unusual. What you're looking for is an activation rate above, let's say, 35 to 50%. That's like sign-up to first success. I mean, gosh, with my last startup, I think we had an activation rate upwards of 70 plus percent by the time we had product-market fit. But with an MVP, especially if you're if you're hand-holding and sending emails, getting getting 35 to 50% is probably a good

7:38early goal to shoot for. The fourth reason your MVP might not be very good is that your onboarding kills momentum. So, people sign up, they poke around, and then they disappear. And there are support tickets saying, "I'm confused." Or they never they just never get in touch with support. And so, your usage drops sharply after day one. The tough part about knowing if it's your onboarding or that you just haven't solved the problem is that you really can't figure that out without having conversations. And the fix to this is going back to square one, right? Which is replacing blank states with sample data, pre-filled examples, or templates,

8:10adding short guided checklists or first-time setup tours, and even considering offering done-for-you onboarding for your first 10 or 20 customers, whether that's paid or not. You can also add a tool like FullStory that will actually record user sessions, and you can watch five or 10 new users use your product. And while that can be painful, you can see where they hesitate, where they backtrack, where they leave, and where you might need to make tweaks. So, what you're looking to do is improve day-one retention and your activation rate. The fifth reason your MVP is tanking is that you shipped, but you forgot distribution. This is where you have crickets. You have barely any

8:49traffic aside from a Show HN post and a post to Product Hunt. You have no real sign-ups, maybe you get 30, 40 sign-ups, no one does anything, you have no feedback. You've launched five times on social media, but you have no users. And this is the build-first, market-later trap. Don't do it. And this is what I talk about so much on this channel, in my books, on my podcast, is if you're a builder, you should really push sales and marketing to the forefront and put way more time, effort, and energy into those than you think you need to. And posting on social media is not marketing. Audience building is not

9:22marketing if you're building a SaaS. You can do that if it's fun, but don't kid yourself that you're going to close a bunch of deals by posting on Twitter. But you can pick one or two channels and run small experiments. There are only 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. I list them all and talk about them in my book, The SaaS Playbook. Things like cold outreach, SEO, content, partnerships and integrations. And look, let's say you

9:46picked cold outreach to a specific ICP. Let's say you want to do integration marketing. Let's say you want to do SEO test pages or put community content out. Or if you've listened to me and built your network, not your audience, you can go to that network now and say, "Hey, can you promote me to your audience or can we do some type of joint venture or an affiliate deal or just help me out, mention the launch and try to get more folks to the MVP." In a minute, I'm going to give you the sixth reason that your MVP is failing, but before I do that, I want to tell you about my

10:18course, SaaS Launchpad. It's available at saaslaunchpad.co and it is the best course that I know of for early-stage founders trying to get a SaaS off the ground. The course covers everything from coming up with ideas to vetting them to building a pre-launch list to how to spot winning SaaS ideas, why some SaaS products thrive while others fail, and key criteria that make a SaaS idea scalable, growable, and maybe even fundable if you want to go down that path. You can get free access to one of the 27 modules. It's called the DNA of a great SaaS idea, 28-minute video module that you can get for free

10:57at saaslaunchpad.co. And if you use promo code thanks50, you'll get $50 off. Thanks50 if you want to grab the course. And the sixth reason your MVP might be failing is that you over-promised or you misset expectations. So this happens when users feel disappointed. They say, "It doesn't do what I expected." Or you get bad reviews, refund requests, and you feel demoralized post-launch. It's really easy to over-promise results, especially in the age of AI, where we can say, "Hey, we're going to do all this stuff for you and look, AI is going to magically do it." But when you sit down to try to get AI to do it, the results

11:32actually aren't that good. Maybe you over-marketed or over-sold, and I don't mean that you put too much time into those. I mean that you over-promised. So based on user feedback and perhaps your honest look at your homepage, your demo, and your copy, ask yourself, "Do I think this really matches what the app does?" You can fix this by tightening your positioning, setting more realistic expectations, framing the MVP as a beta or a first version. I call it early access usually. And make it focus on solving one painful problem. The idea here again, to get an MVP to be relatively successful, is that you're getting new demos or trials, that those

12:11are converting at a decent rate, and that those folks are sticking around so that your churn is not through the roof. If you have 20, 25% churn, you have no product-market fit. And if you're not getting your MVP in front of enough people, you probably need to do some marketing. I made a whole video about the best low-cost SaaS marketing strategies that you should deploy in the early stages. Check it out. Thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe for more videos like this, and I'll see you

12:36next time.