Why I Couldn't Get Customer Interviews for My SaaS

I built a SaaS and never got a single customer interview.

The closest I got: one email reply and one short chat in the support widget. Neither told me anything I could use.

In my post-mortem I said the biggest problem was that I never found out why people didn't pay. This is the longer version of that sentence.

What I tried

Here is everything I did to get feedback.

Onboarding emails. Six emails over about 12 days, 1,131 sends in total. Two of them asked for feedback directly: reply with one thing to improve, or fill in a 2-minute survey for 7 days of Pro. 8 clicks across all six.

Three emails that only asked for feedback:

• March 23: a plain feedback ask, 100 recipients
• April 14: "Honest questions", 124 recipients
• June 16: feedback in exchange for free Pro, 194 recipients

0 clicks on all three.

One offer. August 4: "2 minutes of your time = 7 days of Pro, no card needed." 218 recipients, 0 clicks.

Reddit. I gave two people free Platinum trials. The deal: fill in a short question form at the end. Neither of them did. I reminded them once. Nothing.

Across about 2,100 emails, one person replied. One more person wrote to me in the support chat. I gave him a 7-day trial.

What I didn't try

X DMs.

I could have written to people who post about the problem my product solved. It would have taken an afternoon.

I didn't. I sent another email campaign instead.

Why nobody answered

These are guesses. I never got the answer.

My list was the wrong list. More than half of my signups came from ChatGPT, mostly people looking for a free tool. They signed up. They had no reason to help me.

I asked strangers for work. A form is work. A free trial doesn't change that if the person doesn't know you. They took the trial and skipped the form.

I only used email. One-to-many email to people who barely know you is the weakest way to ask for someone's time. The people who might have talked to me were on Reddit and X, not in my list.

Why I didn't push harder

This is the part that's harder to write.

I built it for myself first. I was the user. It felt right, and that's exactly why I never asked anyone else. I already knew what I wanted.

I also liked this kind of project partly because it needs no conversations with people. Talking to strangers drains me. Cold outreach is not for me.

That's a real preference. But it turned into an excuse. Every email campaign felt like work on the problem. None of them were a conversation.

What it cost

I know a few people got as far as the checkout and then stopped. I don't know why. About everyone else I know even less. Was the product missing something? Was the price wrong? Did they just not need it?

Eight months after launch I have 411 signups, 1 customer and no answers.

The data told me what happened. Nobody told me why.

What I do differently now

Conversation before code. I'm in a 90-day build-in-public challenge, and on day 60 I decide what to build next. My rule: I don't build until at least 2 or 3 people tell me they would pay for it.

Start in writing. For me, a conversation works best when it starts in writing, a reply or a DM, before any call. That's the lowest-stakes version, so I can actually do it every day.

Ask about the last time, not about my idea. "When did this last happen?" gets a real answer. "Would you use this?" gets a polite one.

Ask where people already talk. Not a list I collected for the wrong reasons.

Until day 60 I'm not building anything. Instead I log every problem I run into myself. How that works is in the next post.