How Dennis is scaling his server management tool by adding 30 signups per day
In this case study, we learn how Dennis Smink is scaling his server management tool Ploi by adding 20-30 sign ups per day.
Full name: Dennis Smink
Business: Ploi
Started in: 2018
Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, Github
Revenue: UNKNOWN
Role: Founder
Employees: 1
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Who are you, and what’s the SaaS you’re working on?
My name is Dennis; I am a 33 young developer from The Netherlands 🇳🇱
I am currently working on Ploi, a server management tool that makes managing your sites and servers a breeze.
How did you come up with the idea?
I’ve used several tools to host my websites, and my customer's websites, but it was always a pain for me. I could never find a tool that would cover the most basic stuff.
At one point in 2017, I got a bit sick and tired of this, and decided to start scratching my own itch. I needed a decent way of hosting my own websites, and servers and keeping them safe. That’s when Ploi was born.
I’m not gonna lie, this was a financially challenging time as I was putting a lot of time into Ploi to get it started. I barely worked on any customer projects and financial times were hard. But I knew pursuing this would be for good and forever. I worked all day, then all evening, and continued in bed until around 1 or 2 AM.
How did you validate the product?
This is the part where I didn’t have to do that much actually. I already knew the product was validated as I had clear competitors. The only thing I would do different, is add way more features while keeping the UX simple.
To be completely honest as well, back in 2018 when I launched, I had very little SaaS experience and never thought of validating the product. I just went with it.
How did you launch the product?
I started a little Dutch Laravel Discord community a while back (which is fairly large nowadays) and started asking colleagues to test the product. Basically from there, it started going from mouth to mouth.
Obviously, I did all the startup stuff, in order;
What were 3 ways you got the first customers to your product?
Listening to them, is my biggest takeaway, especially since my target group is developers, they can be nitpicky. The 3 key elements I always took in mind;
Listen to your customers
Stay transparent, use a public roadmap for example
KISS, don’t overcomplicate things
What is the SaaS doing right now in terms of numbers?
We’re doing an organic growth of 20~30 signups per day, maybe 5 to 10% of that converts to an actual paying customer. Most find us via search engines.
Our analytics for this month:
What’s the best growth hack or tactic to get new customers to your SaaS right now?
While I didn’t do this, I think validation validation validation is the most important one. If you get some friends or colleagues to get to work with your product, most advertisement will come from mouth to mouth channels.
What is your biggest lesson learned thus far?
SaaS isn’t for everyone. SaaS isn’t just leaning back and wait for the money to role in, it needs dedication, active development and keep thinking ahead what is coming in the future.
What are the 5 tools you use the most?
PHPStorm - My IDE to develop apps
Tower GIT - Manage repositories, easily tag new versions, and keep track of what is happening
TablePlus - Local database management for development
Ray - Debugging tool
Ploi - My own server management software, obviously
What’s 1 book you’d recommend to fellow founders?
Oh dear 🙈 I barely read any books, really. I can’t recommend any.
What’s your advice for (aspiring) founders in SaaS?
If you have the feeling to give up (or imposter syndrome), but have a validated idea, don’t give up by any means, times can be rough and hard, but persistence is key in creating your SaaS. Keep teasing on X, Threads, Facebook or any other kind of social media, to build your audience.