SAUL and how we launched a product in one afternoon

by Tiago Leão / April 20, 2017

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Smart. Angry. Unlimited. Lawless. If you have been following Angry Ventures, I’m sure you heard about SAUL, a simple drag and drop website creator, that has no plans nor limits. The features of the product are simple and can be used by anyone. And that’s precisely where SAUL is different from other similar tools.

But, first things first. A couple weeks ago, Fernando came up with a challenge: launching a product in just one afternoon. The rules were pretty simple: the product should be fully functional and also be something that adds value to ourselves and everyone else. More like a test, SAUL wasn’t intended to be something elaborated. Instead, we wanted to just launch and see how people reacted.

Now you ask: aren’t there enough website creators on the internet? Yes, though we admit that a website creator is not something new, we had some trouble finding one that didn’t ask us for a paid upgrade when we want to unblock specific features. So, we thought: if a website creator is something relatively simple, why not having one of our own? And so SAUL was born with the promise that we would keep it free and unlimited for as long as it exists.

Finding a name for a product was something quite organic. Here, at the office, we’re really big fans of TV series and, at the time, Fernando was watching Better Call Saul, a spin-off of the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad. In both TV series, Bob Odenkirk plays Saul Goodman, an unconventional, but incredibly smart lawyer that always has a trick on his sleeve. Checking the similarities between the character and the project, we decided to baptize our tool as SAUL.

better-call-saul-angry-ventures

Create, design, promote

Developing a website creator from scratch in just one afternoon is almost impossible, even if you have years of expertise. As a solution, we decided to go for a simpler option and used a white label tool that we adapted and customised. After that, we decide to create a small landing page with a description of the product and a call to action.

A logo, a few prints and a copy and we were ready to go. To have access to the platform, users only needed to leave their emails on the landing page. Yes, we’ll send you our newsletter, but we promise we won’t try to convince you to buy anything. Plus, you can unsubscribe if you want.

After the launched we submitted SAUL to Product Hunt and, up until now, the reactions have been quite interesting. What people usually highlight is the fact that SAUL really has no intention of making money out of it. It’s simply a tool we want to use and share. As simple as that.

The case ended up being an example of Engineering as marketing, working in our favor and getting us over two hundred new contacts in our mailing list in two days. Somehow, we believe that the users of SAUL we’ll remember Angry Ventures for what we shared with them and hopefully get in touch to give their feedback and discuss their ideas, whenever they want. For that, we thank you, SAUL!