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BuildingNov 30, 2025 · 9 min read
What we learned launching a SaaS in public
Ninety days, one paid pilot, and a lot of things that did not work. An honest retrospective with the numbers included.
Sofia MarínFounder
We shipped the first version of Lumen to 12 people we knew. Ninety days later we had 80 teams and a clearer sense of what the product was than any amount of planning would have produced.
The numbers
- 1,400 landing page visitors in week one, mostly from two forum posts.
- 9% signed up. 31% of those connected a real document source.
- Only the ones who connected a source converted to paid. Every single one.
- Median time from signup to first question: 4 minutes.
What did not work
A generous free tier without an activation nudge. People signed up, uploaded nothing, and churned silently. Adding a single onboarding step that required connecting one source doubled activation in a week.
What we would repeat
Writing in public before the product was ready. Two of our first five paying teams found us through a technical post about chunking, not through the landing page. The content was the funnel.