How to Increase Website Traffic While Building Your SaaS in Public

To boost website traffic while developing your SaaS in public, transform the issues you resolve into helpful web pages. Promote those pages through public updates, then analyze which visitors reach a significant action in your product. This establishes a practical link between development work, content, and customer acquisition.

During the development process, you'll encounter questions that may also matter to potential users. The key is to write answers they can apply directly. Begin with a problem your future users can recognize. For instance, if you're creating a CSV import tool for developers, you might uncover various ways an import can go wrong, such as missing headers, unexpected separators, or inconsistent fields.

Each issue could be the basis for a useful explanation for someone implementing an import workflow. Before deciding on a specific topic, check if it's mentioned in customer conversations and relevant search results. Review existing answers and look for ways to contribute. This could be a clearer example, a reproducible failure, a helpful diagnostic step, or an explanation of a limitation.

Google's guidance on helpful content stresses the importance of original value and assisting an intended audience in achieving their goal. A well-structured page that answers a problem you can demonstrate will provide the material needed to meet that standard. To create a useful guide, explain the error and its likely cause, show a small file that reproduces it, walk through the diagnosis, and demonstrate the corrected file.

Be sure to show which cases the fix covers and doesn't cover. Place the answer prominently on the page so readers can quickly identify the next step. Utilize actual examples from your work, including screenshots or short code samples, to aid understanding. Optionally, include a product invitation, such as a link to a CSV validator to check a user's sample file.

Convert the guide into a public update that stands on its own. For a CSV import tool, this could involve explaining how a well-formatted CSV can still fail an import due to inconsistent fields across rows and sharing a small check to identify the mismatch along with a test file. Link the complete guide for those who need the full walkthrough.

Tailor the emphasis to your audience—developers might focus on the failure and fix, while a founder update might explain what the issue taught you about onboarding. Share the product progress behind the guide and invite feedback from other SaaS founders on platforms like Buildside. Ensure the links you share include campaign parameters, such as utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign, to help identify traffic from specific sources.

Measure both distribution (e.g., referral traffic and Google search traffic) and discovery (e.g., Google search impressions and clicks) to gain a comprehensive understanding of your audience's behavior. Implement relevant events to track product use, such as a visitor's first successful validation in the CSV tool. Measure referral traffic and Google search traffic separately to understand how visitors are finding your content.

If a single traffic change doesn't explain itself, consider it a hypothesis to investigate further. Continuously monitor questions that arise during product use, record them along with the publication date, places shared, and the desired customer action to maintain a manageable publishing process tied to your product development.