About eListings SaaS

As I talked about in an earlier post, e-Listings is a simple Laravel SaaS (Software as a Service) for Real Estate professionals as well as for sale by owners. I originally started building the app earlier in the year when I had accepted a job offer for a job that was primarily in Laravel. This app was a learning tool for me to learn the ins and outs of the framework, and to build something useful for my mom, who is a real estate agent.

As I worked on the project, I decided to try and monetize and market the app, to see if I could earn a small income on the side. This proved very difficult for many reasons, but I have learned a lot.

Social Media Marketing

I had never used social media outside of my personal Facebook page, or just skimming over posts on Twitter. How do I get noticed? How do I get people to see my posts and get interested in my product?

My first thought was to just pay for it. I ran a few small ad campaigns on Facebook, only to just waste my money. Only a few of the impressions actually ended up having users interact with the ads, and none of them actually went to my landing page (which was set up to take email addresses to let users know when the app was fully launched). I then moved on to Twitter.

Twitter seemed a little easier to get people to follow me. I did some research and started following some tips I found on the internet; I followed real estate professionals, retweeted hot real estate posts, and commented on a few things. Showing interest in real estate got a few followers, but nothing to write home about, but it did give me a small audience to try to pitch my product to.

Launching the Product

eListings is currently in BETA, and I decided last night that I would launch this morning. Launching was easy. I use Laravel Forge to publish updates to the production site. Development work is done on a dev branch, and anytime I want to deploy, I just merge it into master, and Forge handles the rest.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

-Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder LinkedIn

I decided last night that the site worked, all tests were passing, and it did what I set out to do: allow a user to create a website for a real estate listing. There is a lot left to do in terms of design and user experience, as well as more themes for the users. It could take me a while to get everything completely done, and as time goes on, I will start to lose focus and enthusiasm for the project.

Launching now gives me a sense of completion. And, if I continue to market and get a few users, I am sure I will be motivated to continue building the product. If not, then I've lost a small amount of money and time to learn a lot about building an app in Laravel, social media marketing, and a lot of things not to do on my next project.