Why Social Proof is the most important factor when it comes to sales

On October 1st, 2023 I launched a brand new SaaS app Auto Page Indexer to a whimper.

The app is a simple tool that automates Google Search Indexing requests via their API. I completed the app towards the end of September but the effective launch was on October 1st via Product Hunt. My following on Twitter and LinkedIn is insignificant which is why all of my launches up until this point are an uphill battled!

I built Auto Page Indexer as a competitor to a novel application that was achieving over 100% month over month growth! I couldn't simply sit idly by while their application dominated the market unchecked, hence the 3 weeks that I spent building Auto Page Indexer were well invested from a conglomerate standpoint.

My primary goal with Go Ideal Software is to build a collection of SaaS applications that are all interconnected and provide value to each other.

1. What is Social Proof?
2. Why Social Proof is the most important factor when it comes to sales
3. How to build Social Proof

What is Social Proof?

Social proof is the idea that a high-value individual relative to the potential customer is more trustworthy than the person who built said product. In general when someone says good things about themselves it is perceived as bragging, but when someone else says good things about you it is perceived as a compliment. This is the basis of social proof.

Why Social Proof is the most important factor when it comes to sales

On November 6th a fellow entrepreneurial friend of mine, Fed, the founder of Gummy Search wrote a tweet about how he is indexing around 12000 pages on his website The Hive Index via Auto Page Indexer and it went relatively viral!

The link to The Tweet. Fed purchased his subscription on October 23rd and he immediately began using Auto Page Indexer that day and within two weeks he already indexed over 1800 pages on Google! Below is a screenshot of his subscription purchase.

Now up until this point Fed was my only paid customer and I didn't have any affordable marketing channels to reach my target audience. I was relying on word of mouth and organic traffic from Product Hunt which is a terrible strategy for most applications, IMO.

Fed unexpectedly wrote his Tweet which he apparently had promised to his followers a few weeks before hand but I had missed the tweet. Sure enough after his tweet went viral I immediately received 3 brand new paid customers because they witnessed from a NEUTRAL third party that the application does indeed work as intended and it works quite well! My conversion rate for the spike of visitors was 17%! 3 out of 17 visitors converted to paid customers. This is a HUGE conversion rate for a SaaS application.

How to build Social Proof

some thoughts here are:

1. have genuine intimate conversations with your peers, preferably successful entrepreneurs with a large base.
2. Give them free access to your application, think like if Elon Musk used your app completely for free then his presence alone would market your application.

Example: I believe back in the late 90s and early 2000s Bill Gate's used to mostly receive free food/products wherever he went simply because his publicity using the product alone was worth orders of magnitude more than the cash for the product.

Let me know your thoughts on social proof and how you have used it to your advantage. Find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or message me via email!