Introduction

This is a new series where I’m documenting the entire process of building my 6th SaaS product.

It’s an app that connects all the knowledge in your team and makes it super accessible:

It’s called Horizontal

Marketing? pls don’t

Marketing is hard. Especially for us, developers. You need to deal with things like:

• People

• Colors

• Copywriting

Ugh… what a nightmare.

Let’s forget about them for a minute.

Can you remember the first time you needed to implement a CSV export in your Laravel project? Maybe not the first time. Let’s forget about that (now only God knows what you were thinking back then anyway). Think about the 3rd time.

The process probably looked like this:

• Let’s see which packages can export CSVs

• Hmm, there’s laravel-excel. There’s FastExcel. And there’s this thing called openspout.

• Let’s test what they can and cannot do

• Okay, so laravel-excel is pretty simple and feature-rich. FastExcel is very fast and memory-efficient, but it misses some important features. Hmm, openspout looks a bit complicated

• laravel-excel can do pretty much everything we need, and it’s quite fast, so let’s go with it

12 months later, when you reach the limits of laravel-excel you might take a look at FastExcel.

This is a pretty typical process, right?

It turns out, we can do the same with marketing as well.

The bullseye framework

The bullseye framework comes from the book “Traction.”

Usually, when business people talk about “frameworks” and “systems,” I immediately label them as a scam.

But this is different.

It works for me, so I want to share it with you.

Step 1: Possible distribution channels

First, you need to brainstorm about every possible marketing channel that you can use.

This is very similar to when you brainstorm about packages, system architectures, databases, etc.

Here’s a list to get you started:

• Targeting blogs: contacting “popular” or even small blogs and getting featured in their articles.

• Publicity: getting displayed on classic media outlets and news websites.

• Unconventional PR: doing publicity stunts to get more eyeballs on your product.

• Search Engine Marketing: running paid Google Ads to be on the first page when people search for a problem or solution.

• Social ads: running paid ads on:

  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Reddit

  • etc

• Offline ads: buying ads on billboards, newspapers, etc.

• Content marketing/SEO: publishing articles related to your product and targeting SEO terms.

• Email marketing: building your own email list and sending engaging emails.

• Engineering as Marketing: launching free tools that are related to your product. Or even better, launching one of your features as a free, standalone tool.

• Business development: connecting with business owners and potentially converting them into your customers.

• Sales: in-person sales.

• Affiliate programs: asking your users to spread the word about your application and invite new users.

• Existing platforms: launching and talking about your product on existing platforms such as Twitter, ProductHunt, etc

• Offline events: going to offline events, conferences, and building relations with people.

• Speaking engagements: speaking at conferences. While wearing your company’s t-shirt.

• Cold outreach: sending Twitter DMs or emails to people who don’t know you.

These are just examples. Every project is different. Your product might require a bit different marketing approach than mine.

The bullseye framework tries to model a dartboard.

First, we identify all possible channels, and then we niche down and select the best approach.

Step 2: The outer ring: what’s possible

The outer ring should contain every possible marketing channel and strategy that you can think of.

You take the possible marketing channels from step 1 and come up with ideas for all of them.

For Horizontal, I came up with ideas like these:

Targeting blogs

• Laravel news

• Daily bite newsletter

Laravel news should be a pretty great target for me. I can reach out to them, and some readers already know me. They are all developers, so in my target audience.

I don’t personally know Daily Bite, but Joschua from Postel had some success with them. They are an AI-related newsletter with 240k readers. A perfect match for Horizontal.

TODO: I need to find more newsletters and blogs.

How to reach those blogs?

Usually, they have some contact information on their website. I can track down their founders on Twitter/LinkedIn and contact them personally.

Some of them offer paid sponsorships as well. For example, you can get features on Laravel Daily for $1,500. I’d like to avoid paid sponsorships at the beginning, but it’s an option for sure.

Smaller blogs that are not “brands” or companies are easier to reach. For example, this SubStack is a smaller one with 16k readers. If you contact me with your product, I might say: “that’s a great app, I’ll mention it for free.” There are lots of creators like me.

I think I can contact at least 10 smaller blogs in a day or so.

Publicity

I don’t want to target news sites and media with my product. I mean, they offer crazy high distribution, but they’re hard to reach.

But the software engineering industry has a kind of special media site. It’s called daily.dev

It collects the most interesting tech news/developments/apps in one place. You can submit links, and if users like it, it gets featured on the “first page.”

This is definitely a great opportunity for Horizontal.

Content marketing

I’ll start with the two most obvious ones:

• “Build in public” articles on my SubStack. The “Lacunhing your own SaaS” series that you are reading right now.

• Posting the same content on Twitter but in a different format.

Joschua (whom I already mentioned earlier) was able to build a 10k audience in a year by simply posting about his product.

So if you don’t have an audience right now, you can fix it in just one year.

“Build in public” works, but you have to provide high-quality content for your audience.

SEO

Other than that, I’ll create a dedicated blog for Horizontal where I’ll post articles related to the product. I haven’t come up with articles yet, but here are a few ideas:

• Top 10 knowledge management apps for developer teams (Horizontal will be number 1 🫣)

• How to connect Jira and Slack. The solution will be: Horizontal

Developers usually hate Jira and Slack. So I think writing about them is a good opportunity.

This is how I’m going to approach this:

• Analyze trending and high-quality keywords with Google Trends and hrefs

• Generate 100s of article ideas based on the keywords with Claude

• Select the best ideas

• Write the articles

To boost my SEO efforts, I can buy backlinks from Backl.io

Email marketing

This is an important one. You need to capture emails by:

• Giving free stuff (lead magnets) in exchange for an email address

• Offering free trials

The vast majority of people from free trials and lead magnets won’t become paying customers. But you can still convert a percentage of them by sending valuable emails to them.

I didn’t spend too much time coming up with email ideas for Horizontal, but here are a few:

• Showcasing every integration available in the app and why it’s great

• Writing about real use cases and success stories

Every use case can be a dedicated email, for example. Every great feature can be an interesting piece of content.

And of course, I can repurpose these emails to blog posts, tweets, etc.

Engineering as Marketing

Marc Lou is a master of this. He showcased many examples on his blog.

It means that you build a free tool that is highly relevant to your product and publish it. Then you can drive these free users to your landing page.

I didn’t really come up with good ideas yet, but I can imagine a free tool like:

• Chat with your Google Drive

• Visualize your team’s knowledge based on git commits

I think the second one has some virality to it. It would be a free CLI tool that you can download, run within your repository, and it would create a graph showing which developers contributed the most to which features, etc.

Viral marketing

Marc Lou is also a master of this.

Viral marketing typically refers to a viral YouTube video that showcases your product in a funny setting.

I’m a big fan of The Sopranos. One of the best TV shows ever.

I’m thinking about editing a scene where Tony Soprano talks to Dr. Melfi. I would rewrite the script to something where Tony describes how hard it is to find information for a 6-month-old feature, and Dr. Melfi introduces Horizontal to him:

Or maybe Chris’s intervention scene:

Where Chris would be Jira or Slack.

Or when Tony is on a horse. In the house. While casually having a conversation with his wife:

There’s a Reddit discussion with 213 comments about which is the best Sopranos scene.

Business development

I have 10 companies in mind that I can reach out to.

For 8 of them, I connected their founders on Twitter, and we had discussions about business-related topics.

For 2 of them, I did some freelance work.

They are the perfect targets to be my first customers.

Actually, this can be the most important marketing channel for lots of SaaS products.

You absolutely need to go out and introduce yourself to your target audience.

Affiliate program

I haven’t thought about this one too much. This will only become relevant when I have a working product.

This would be the classic “invite a friend and get 1 month for free.”

But there are companies that are the masters of affiliate marketing. My plan is to get familiar with their strategies. These companies include:

• Dropbox

• Godaddy

• Hostgater

• Sprout

Existing platforms

You can leverage existing platforms to market your product. I collected a few that are relevant to Horizontal:

• TIAAIFT (AI directory site)

• Futurepedia (AI directory site)

• Awesome AI apps GitHub repo (https://github.com/Arindam200/awesome-ai-apps)

• ProductHunt

• Peerlist (similar to PH)

• SmallBets community

• Uneed

• Reddit (Marc Lou has an excellent article on how to launch a product on Reddit)

Offline events

This is similar to “business development.”

You need to go out and talk to people about their problems and your product.

I’ll go to three events in the following two months:

• A smaller Laracon in September as a participant

• Another one in November as a speaker

• My last employer will organize an event for ex-colleagues in September. I still have a good relationship with them. I got drunk with the founder many times (I’m a proud Eastern European. Getting drunk with someone is the ultimate sign of respect here). In my mind, they are going to be one of my first customers.

I might do some online events in the future, for example, Twitter Spaces.

The goal of the outer ring is to have as many ideas as possible. If you don’t know how to get these ideas, have a session with Claude or contact me, and we can brainstorm about your product.

In the next post, we’ll explore the inner circle of the bullseye framework.

By the way, “Traction” is a fucking great book written by the founder of DuckDuckGo. He literally built a new search engine. They have ~100 million users now.

Support

If you want, you can support Horizontal in different ways:

• Join the project as a marketer

• Join the project as a developer

• Bring your team as beta testers

If you’re interested, drop me an email at martin@martinjoo.dev or book an appointment in my calendar here.

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