---
title: 'SaaS Marketing for (Laravel) Developers'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q9gMgdiU4X4'
video_id: 'Q9gMgdiU4X4'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 1454
---

# SaaS Marketing for (Laravel) Developers

> Source: [SaaS Marketing for (Laravel) Developers](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q9gMgdiU4X4)

## Summary

The video discusses the critical importance of marketing and sales for SaaS products, especially for developers who are natural builders but often neglect distribution. It provides structured advice on idea validation, product presentation, and distribution strategies, emphasizing that in 2025, video content and genuine community engagement are key.

### Key Points

- **Coding is not the bottleneck** [2:36] — Speed of coding was never the real bottleneck; successful products need great ideas, marketing, and sales.
- **Market research should start with the problem** [3:28] — Start with the problem, not the idea. Research how many people have that problem and what they currently use.
- **Target a specific niche** [4:15] — The more targeted your audience, the better. 'Everyone' means no one.
- **Validate willingness to pay** [7:49] — Ask 'Would you pay for this to exist?' not just 'Would you use it?'
- **Presentation: Show, don't tell** [11:33] — Use visuals like videos, GIFs, and screenshots. Show, don't tell.
- **Distribution: Engage genuinely on social media** [15:14] — Participate in discussions around the problem, reply to fresh posts with valuable advice, and let people discover you naturally.
- **Video is the key distribution method** [17:37] — Video is the best distribution channel in 2025. Create consistent, problem-focused content.
- **Content: Teach, don't sell** [21:04] — Don't sell directly; teach people how to solve a problem. The tool should sell itself.
- **Marketing is a long-term effort** [22:56] — Marketing is a long game; expect spikes and troughs. Keep creating content consistently.

## Transcript

Hello guys, happy new year and in the
first video of 2026 I have a gift for
you. So before Christmas I released a
course building a typical Laravel SAS
and the last section of this course is
about marketing and sales and I think
this will become a crucial topic in 2026
because with AI there will be a lot of
builders a lot of products from
developers but not necessarily also VIP
coders will release their own SAS
products and probably you will release
something as a side project because you
will have time to basically prompt the
agent to do a lot of work for you and
actually implement a project that was on
your mind for a long time. But with so
many projects on the market, this will
be actually crucial marketing and sales.
And as developers, we are builders, we
are creators, we like starting things,
starting new project, doing lot of new
and stuff like that. But for marketing
and sales, I think I have quite a few
insights from my experiments with my own
projects and clients project. So I will
release three lessons from this course
as one YouTube video you will see now in
roughly what's 22 minutes. My advice on
marketing and sales of your own SAS or
maybe that advice could be useful and
you can be useful for your client
projects and just in general. A lot of
that advice may be applicable for
example for Laravel package
distribution. So yeah, let's talk about
how you can promote your product and be
successful. And if you want the full
course, I will also link that in the
description below to our course about
technical creation of Laravel SAS and
then at the end marketing and sales that
you will see right now. I wish to you
that 2026 will be productive for you
releasing a lot of projects your own or
for your clients. And now let's dive
into the video. In this video, let's
talk about SAS marketing. And this will
be different style video as you can see
full screen without any screenshots
because we need to talk. Marketing and
sales are very important for your
product for SAS. Maybe more than ever
because of AI. So recently Ian Lansman
on the podcast of mostly technical was
really passionate about AI being better
and allowing us to create more stuff
faster but at the same time reminded I
liked his thought that now we have more
software products created that
developers are still unable to sell to
anyone. So in other words speed of
coding was never really the bottleneck.
Successful products are about great
ideas, great marketing and sales. This
is what I want to emphasize. We are
builders. We are developers. We are
creators. But if you want to earn money
with your product, you need to put on
the hat of a business guy, a business
developer and stop thinking about
building features and start thinking
about the audience, the distribution of
the project and so on. And in this
video, I want to give a few pieces of
advice structured by topics. Topic
number one is idea. A lot of people say
that idea is the most important for
startup success. But actually I would
argue that idea on its own means not
that much. What means a lot is the
market for that idea. So if you have an
idea for a product that you want to
build, I would advise to make market
research. And that market research
should not be from the side of whether
someone would use that idea or not or
whether similar products exist or not. I
would start with the problem. So your
idea should solve someone's problem and
you need to Google and find out how many
people have that problem or similar
problems. For example, if you want to
create a CRM for I don't know hair salon
for example, you need to research the
real problems of hair salons. What
software do they use now if any and what
are their problems with existing
solutions? And then from that iterate on
your idea to propose a better solution.
For that of course you need to know the
target audience first and the audience
everyone could use that is not the right
audience. In my experience everyone
means no one. The more targeted is your
audience the better you know them and
the better you can solve their
particular problem. For example if your
audience is developers then I think the
audience is too broad. Of course, it is
possible to get away with it, but it's
better to serve not just developers, but
for example, Laravel developers or
junior Laravel developers who can't get
a job. For example, someone would offer
a solution for juniors to get job
better. That would be a great example.
Or for example, Laravel business
companies from 50 developers and up.
This is a target niche. But basically
with the market research your goal is to
answer the question of who is the user
of that product that you want to build
and who is the buyer which may be
different things. So for example users
of Slack or linear or other similar
software are developers or regular
employees but who pays for that is
usually companies. So yeah, basically
you need to find who would pay for that
and do they have a problem and is the
problem big enough so they would
actually pay. Of course, there's another
alternative way called scratching your
own itch. For example, you want to
create a product for yourself with hope
that more developers or more people
would use the same thing. This may work
if you are the target audience. You can
probably imagine similar people and
solve your problem and their problem in
the same software in the same product.
But still, I would make market research.
Are there enough people like yourself
with the same itch or similar itch to
scratch? Unless your goal is to actually
build the product for yourself to use.
So even if you don't have paying
customers, you would be happy on your
own, then it is fine. But in this video,
I want to target someone who want to
earn real money. And speaking of real
money and ideas and AI specifically, be
careful with ideas around AI. So if you
want to create a software that would
call AI like OpenAI API or claude API or
some other API to perform AI
transformations like transcribing videos
or finding similar text and stuff like
that calculate the cost because recently
I've seen quite a few stories of
startups burning money with such a big
speed that their revenue MR it's
successful on the surface but the cost
of APIs for AI I may be astronomical. So
the idea can be good on the surface and
AI allows us to do many things but
calculate because you may end up paying
the providers more for quality result if
you want the quality than you would
charge your customers. For example, one
story of a mobile developer recently I
saw on YouTube. His price point for the
application is $10 per month because
that's how much it costs for him to call
the AI APIs and $10 per month is the
minimum cost that he can afford to
basically break even. So the real cost
in his calculation should be even
bigger. So yeah, just a word of caution
about AI niche specifically. And the
final word about market validation and
market research is talk to customers.
Actually talk. I mean it may be online,
it may be on Slack, it may be on
Discord, Reddit or whatever. It may be
in real life. It depends on your
scenario. But actually without talking
to real people who would use your
software or your product. Do not make
any conclusions. Ask that specific
question. Would you pay not would you
use would you pay for this to exist? In
ideal scenario, if you trust your idea
enough and if you have enough audience,
you may create landing page already
pre-charging your future customers to
support your product and to kind of
prove to you that it's worth building
the product. So build a landing page,
build a waiting list, build something
like Kickstarter campaign and that would
be the best proof of your idea before
even building that. As developers,
again, we are creators, we are builders,
and we like to create stuff and be in
our cave and then show something to the
world. But my advice would be to save
some time and do at least some market
validation and market research before
any coding. Of course, a little better
way is to vibe code something with AI or
some prototype version 0.1 and then show
something to the world already working
or already in prototype stage. But it
depends on the product. Not for every
product. It's possible to show something
really minimal. So there's a risk that
version 0.1 people would dislike
immediately, but that would be maybe
false positive. It depends on the
project. But basically spend time on
market research and talking to real
potential customers. The next thing I
want to talk about related to marketing
your SAS is presentation and positioning
of your product. So I see a lot of
developers while releasing their
packages for example they fail at readme
stage basically. So they release a
package which has a great potential and
they are too lazy or maybe not qualified
enough to show what the package actually
does visually. A lot of read me files
for packages I've personally reviewed on
YouTube were too textbased listing the
features of the package or the product
without emphasizing what the product
actually does the package what is the
before and after. What is the use case
visually as developers we're kind of in
love with the features of our products
but actually the presentation is even
more important because this is the first
impression. So for example, I get a link
to your product from somewhere and then
I go to your landing page and then
basically you have like 30 seconds of my
attention max. Convince me quickly that
what you do is interesting to me. And if
on that website or on read me I see a
lot of text that I need to read and try
to understand myself. So basically I
need to turn on my brain on 10x level to
even understand what you do. Then I'm
out. And I'm not even talking about
visual design of your website which is
also important but that can be generated
by AI these days with pretty good
quality. I'm talking about positioning.
So basically you need to come up with
tagline or even the title of the
product. The product name is important
if it can explain what the product does
clearly. But also the main taglines and
the titles and the headers on the
website should clearly explain what you
do for whom and how exactly. One of the
typical kind of framework people suggest
is we help the audience to achieve some
result without pain or with some other
constraints like in 5 minutes without
digging deeper or some other condition.
So three parts of kind of slogan and
what do you actually do? So that should
be your kind of first answer clarifying
the question of what you do and then the
visuals. I cannot emphasize enough that
you need to show product in action in
video in GIF, in screenshots, before and
after. It depends on the product. But
there's a golden evergreen rule for
hundreds of years which says show don't
tell. People buy with their eyes. People
buy with their emotions. So as soon as
you trigger any emotion and the emotion
is triggered usually by visuals, then
you are on track to something. Another
option for doing that is anchoring to
another product or product category. So
for example, you may call yourself like
cursor for dog owners or cursor for
designers or whatever. So you can
compare your product to something that
people would be familiar with your
audience. So for example, your product
could be described as for example
deployment to server without knowing how
to SSH or knowing docker or git which
may be the actual problem for example
for vibe coders who don't know any of
those things but they do need to deploy
somewhere right so your main headers and
titles should trigger that pain point in
other words you need to work on the
presentation of your product similar
like a slide deck so imagine you have an
audience of 100 people and you need to
prepare the presentation the talk about
the product so they would not fall
asleep and you have only like brief 5
minute slot of that audience or
so-called elevator pitch of 60 seconds
or so. Get to the point and impress your
audience because so many ideas
especially by developers actually over
my career I've seen potential good ideas
presented in such a poor way that they
didn't take off. Now let's talk about
distribution of your product. How do
people find out about your SAS? And
there are so many ways here. And this is
probably the number one problem for
developers. Again, we are creators. We
are builders in our own cave. And to
distribute the product, we need to get
out of our cave and tell the world. And
of course, you probably realize by now
that the approach build it and they will
come does not work. Unless you are
already very popular startup or
household name like for example in
Laravel if you are spotty and you create
a new package that would get immediate
traction but not everyone has such a big
audience right so basically what are the
options how to tell the world of course
the classic is SEO so for example you
can blog about your product on your
website and then hope that you would
target keywords and people would Google
and land on your website but this is a
very long term And with AI SEO becomes
really risky because AI overviews and
chat GPT give the answers to people
without visiting any websites at all. So
posting on your website with hope that
someone would come is not what I would
advise in 2025. The next approach is to
post something on platforms on social
media. The classical would be Twitter or
Facebook or LinkedIn where you just
create a post, a video or image and then
try to catch your target audience. That
approach is fine but also probably long
term because if you have zero followers
today, the Twitter and LinkedIn
algorithms would not necessarily show
you on their feed automatically. Then of
course you can cold email people find
the target audience and try to basically
spam them so to speak. So direct sales
via email or on social media maybe
LinkedIn direct messages but you
probably hate them yourself right if you
get such emails of like I have a product
for you right it's kind of like
doortodoor salesman it's sleazy it's not
really what developers even do in their
heart again we are builders where
creators were not direct sales people so
yeah this is something that I would not
advise but what I would advise instead
of direct messaging people is reply
replying to their social media posts.
So, you need to find people with the
problem you're solving and reply to
their tweet, to their LinkedIn post in
not a salesy way. Just explain the
solution that you suggest and then maybe
post a link to your product or maybe
just leave it as it is and your product
will be in your bio somewhere and then
they would discover that. But also, of
course, don't do that for the posts
which are like months long. It should be
relevant. It should be hours ago. Fresh
natural conversation. In general, what
works is participating in discussions
around your problem, around your target
audience, replying with valuable advice
to a lot of people, and then someone
would discover you. To be honest, what
worked for me back in the days, like 20
years ago, on forums when I was not
really looking for developer job, but I
was a developer freelancer at the time,
and I was helping people with
development advice. And then suddenly
people started DMing me on that forum
asking for like real paid help with
coding. That happened not overnight
after like hundreds of posts. But then
you get so-called karma points on forums
or on social media. You get followers.
Again, this is a long game. But that's
what may actually work in 2025. human
contact, genuine value on social media,
not posting at people, but participating
in their world where they are on their
posts, on their feed. The next option is
to go to paid ads and go for Facebook
ads, LinkedIn ads, Google Adwords, and
stuff like that. But this is a game of
numbers. I know so many people who tried
ads on whatever social network or
Google, burned a few hundred dollars,
got a few hundred people and only a few
signups and then they don't know what to
do next. Of course, it may be because of
the ad content and the whole funnel of
converting to paid user of the product.
That may be also leaky bucket but still
typically you would turn on ads on
already working product to amplify the
sales to amplify the SEO results on
Google to be on the first page on top
but the product should be already having
sales even without the ads at least
that's what I've seen on the market and
finally where I'm getting at is what
works in 2025 is video so the same
thought that I mentioned in the previous
video about positioning and
presentation. Presentation of your
product is the key. You need to
demonstrate the product on your homepage
but also outside of it. You can shoot
videos on YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram
reels or longer form. Any social network
now can accept longer videos including
Twitter, LinkedIn. So you can repost in
many places resize and recrop into like
one minute demonstration or 15-minute
demonstration or full presentation. But
basically again show your product in
action but not in a way like here's my
product the title. No the title should
be I can solve this problem here's my
process and then during that process you
show the tool. And getting back to the
idea of SEO is getting down. I heard so
many marketing people now talking about
SEO is down. Social media algorithms are
unpredictable especially Twitter and
many of them bet on YouTube as the
platform to go. I know a lot of
entrepreneurs who started or got back to
YouTube channel to video after 10 years
of being off camera with successful
business. But now a lot of founders,
CEOs, and entrepreneurs go on camera and
go on YouTube. Of course, maybe I'm
biased because I'm a YouTube creator
myself, but it took me like 10 years to
be more comfortable on camera. And it's
not necessarily that you need to be on
camera, by the way. You can hire someone
to make a video. You can do a video with
AI. You can do a faceless video. It
doesn't necessarily have to be you. But
of course, human touch does help.
Getting back to previous points around
human touch. So people still want to buy
from people, not from faceless channels.
But basically what I would advise in
2025 is start with video post in a few
different places. By shooting that
video, you would have also presentation
material for your website. If you're
lucky, you will get comments on your
videos from real people who would be
interested. Then you follow up with
second video showing some other features
of your product and then it goes in
circle. And then the most important
thing, it rarely works with one or two
videos. It needs to be a consistent
effort of new videos, new pieces of
content showing different features or
even better different use cases for
different problems for different niches
of your customers. So for example, when
I was trying to advertise our quick
admin panel generator 10 years ago for
Laravel, I made a video about how to
create a sports league website with
quick admin panel, how to create a CMS
with quick admin panel and it targets
different audience. Each video was like
30 minutes and I was very bad at videos
back in the day, but it helped a lot
actually. And each video is kind of like
a lottery ticket. It's not necessarily
going to work. It may not work for many
reasons. It may be quality of your
video, but you need to kind of keep
shooting in like basketball analogy. And
at some point, you get better at video.
You get clearer on what you want to
present on those videos. And then
usually what happens for YouTubers
basically after like 30 videos, 31st
videos suddenly unexpectedly goes viral.
You never know if it does and you never
know which one. Sometimes it's very
random but you need to keep shooting.
Also important in your content in your
video don't really sell. Teach people
something. Show how to solve the
problem. Talk about the problem. Talk
about the idea behind the solution. tool
should be kind of in the background
selling itself if they want the result
faster but they need to believe in you
as a founder in your philosophy in your
solution first before buying the product
around that solution I like the phrase
don't remember who said that that sales
and marketing is basically debugging
customers problems in live mode for them
so if you take that approach and work on
the problems of the clients find the
angles the storytelling way to convince
them that you know what you're talking
about and again video is the best way to
explain that to impress people visually
then you have a good chance the final
note kind of as an example I talked to
one founder of one plug-in one package
and I told him I asked him did you post
any videos recently showing your package
and the answer was no why should I post
because it's on my website it's on
YouTube it's on GitHub everything so I
basically showed everything why would I
bother repeating myself and this is a
very wrong approach for the same idea
for the same product to showcase that
you need to find different angles. You
need to not be afraid to repeat yourself
with a bit different keywords, different
words, different phrasing, different use
case scenario. So for example, if I have
a Laravel plugin, I can demonstrate that
in different Laravel projects, totally
different niche, but the same plug-in
powering that. And that would already be
different separate videos to target,
maybe different audiences with the same
problem, just different use cases and
different keywords for SEO as well. So
yeah, these are my pieces of advice for
marketing your SAS. Probably the
overarching message is don't expect it
to be quick. It rarely works from the
first demo or first video or first email
or first Reddit post. Most often it's a
long game and even if you do get first
traction from like Reddit or Product
Hunt or whatever, it's usually the first
spike and then no one buys immediately
because they need to think and then it
dies down and then your goal is to keep
it up with some traction, some traffic
until it slowly goes up again or until
the next spike with some post but then
that spike does again and then it goes
in kind of spiral. This is the typical
trajectory I've seen for SAS products
over the years. But of course, there are
exceptions. Of course, you may get lucky
or the other way around. You may get
unlucky and you get zero traction, which
may mean that your product is not good
enough as a business. You may admit that
too. I've had quite a few failures over
the years with that, but that could be a
topic for future videos. For now, I
consider this Laravel SAS course as
finished both from technical and
marketing side. But I'm happy to
continue with any other topics or
related questions. So be active in the
comments and see you guys in other