What massive challenges are you experiencing right now?
Hi Indiehackers,
I'd love to know what are the massive issues, challenges are you experiencing right now? Perhaps we can tackle them together or someone surfing this forum may help you out! Let's start.
Mine are:
- Cold calling - never been a salesperson. Hence, here is a quite challenging task for me. If you have any good resources that helped you, please share.
- Task prioritisation - heaps of things on the plate, being a solo-founder never was an easy task. Personally, I use Trello boards to look at Marketing, Sales, Tech, Operations. However keep forgetting simple things, like non-sales meetings, calls, updates, etc. Google Calendar comes handy, though.
Making something users will kill and pay for.
People expect apps to be free or super cheap and yet they take so much time and money to develop. I don't know if this is a perception problem but it blows my mind that most people won't blink spending $5-$10 for a coffee or beer but will complain that an app is $2.
I'm struggling a bit with product/market fit, user feedback and discovering what people will pay $$$ for.
My experience has been that people will complain that the app costs $0.01.
So whether you choose $0.01 or $5, it doesn't make that much difference.
My advice would be to spend time talking to your customers about the problem, not the product directly.
Oh and don't forget to think about magic moments for your users. They'll probably be more willing to pay after reaching a magic moment than upfront...
thanks! can you elaborate a bit more about this magic moment?
Sure, what does your app do?
It's a crypto price alert app but positioned for traders who need fast alerts and be on top of the market. An alert 5 mins late can mean you've missed an opportunity or lost money. Currently I have a free version with alerts for 1 exchange and a subscription that unlocks many more exchanges.
Ok, well a magic moment is a moment in which your user realises the value of the product.
So in your case it might be the first alert they get, or the first time they make money due to your app...
The idea is that at that point, they'll have the value of the app in the forefront of their mind and be open to paying (more) for it/taking some action you want them to take.
Ideally, you want to get as many of your users to reach a magic moment as possible, and upsell/convert them to paying straight afterwards.
Good luck!
I'd imagine trading happens on desktop not mobile, so why do you need an app? People pay thousands of dollars per month for SaaS webapps, yet you're trying to sell in a format that is synonymous with free/cheap.
A few tips for product structuring:
Can you provide a plugin or integration that allows traders to set alerts directly from where they work? TradingView charts, some trading platform, etc.
Give people a choice of mechanism for the alerts. This automatically implies that you should not box them into an app's way of doing things. Take a look at how metrics platforms do alerting, since this has been beaten to death already. They let you define the alert's delivery mechanism: email, Slack, HipChat, text message, Whatsapp, web hook, PagerDuty, VictorOps, etc.
The trading itself most definitely happens on desktop. The alerts are for when things happen. You might be out when your price triggers so you'd want to know. And not worry. And if you do get a trigger you can run home or decide what to do. That's the rationale.
Interesting point about the free/cheap format. You've inspired me to try a quick Chrome extension to input and track alerts on desktop. I'll see how that does and maybe i'll be able to upsell having alerts sync across desktop/mobile.
@apski, what exactly is your struggle about? Is it about knowing who to go after, or in reaching them, or engaging with them - pre-signing up?
I guess it's mostly about reaching them and getting feedback. I have some users but they're not responsive to email which makes that feedback/iterate process tough.
They say that after you speak to enough people a pattern will emerge. I'm not yet able to say I see a pattern yet.
If the users you have now are not responding, there are two possibilities - (1) They are not your "ideal" users or "perfect" users (2) They are potentially ideal users, but messaging that is used in "talking" to them is not working. I can help you out in figuring out which one of the two is true in your situation and suggesting some way forward. Send me a PM if you are interested.
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I feel overwhelmed with all the work on my plate. Coding myself + marketing + support + hiring a dev for a different platform + managing the community (kind of).
And yet I don’t want a co-founder.
And even if I hired a co-founder who would be skilled in marketing (because I’m not), I don’t want to stay a coder. I’m not enjoying coding anymore, I’m just doing it for my product. On the other hand, I cannot afford to hire more than one coder for now, and I wouldn’t delegate coding entirely because I care a lot about product quality.
So, for now dealing with all the pressure myself.
I can relate to this 100%. Checked out your site -- interesting concept.
Thanks!
My biggest challenge is finding the time in my schedule to actually commit to finishing my products. I have two project in the works (one feeds the other and is scheduled differently to accommodate) but with a 40 hour day job and 10 hours of commute, I can't fit much time in between normal upkeep of my life and sleep. I have more interest in the projects than I thought I would need though, so I'm not completely discouraged.
It's tricky, but not un-resolvable. Methinks I have to be better about splitting tasks into smaller time chunks so I can squeeze them into the bits of downtime that I do get.
Here's to the indiehackers just working it so they can one day quit their day job.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Not in particular. I tend to be pretty good about scheduling my day and single tasking as much as possible (unless I'm in a meeting where i might being doubling up with some low focus rough work). It's more that I just have a temporarily over-full plate at the moment. Attempting to finish a masters in CS and make time for a live-in girlfriend both steal time from just about everything.
Glad to see some iteration in the todo space. Nothing quite fits my style in that space, though I love Todoist. I'll probably give artemis a try at some point.
My day job :(. I spend the time doing 'work' but it's not really work but for some reason I get paid. My night job is my side project that I'm turning into a business. I don't get paid at the moment but the work is real and fulfilling.
With Polar we're getting nice gradual adoption and not much churn.
Which is great... but:
It seems that our product base has a LOT of wide feature requests. It's not a simple product which means a lot of feature prioritization
Due to the nature of the app, people want to make sure it actually becomes part of their workflow before buying. I think this just means we need to wait 60-90 days and REALLY make sure it's polished with no subtle bugs.
Distribution is another problem. I'm trying to do as much content marketing as possible. Had a HUGE win on this post recently:
https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/08/top-pdfs-of-2018-hackernews.html
Got us about 20k pageviews from Hacker News.
... I think we scored about 1k new users due to that.
https://getpolarized.io/
Looks like a great app. Will download and try. I've been lamenting the fact that the info on the web is there but whenever I need to find it again because I've forgotten, I turn to Google, and submit a query again. I'd like to have a personal repository of information that I curate.
Ideation, surprisingly. A decade ago, I'd have a million ideas a day. Now, I'm lucky if one or two pop into my head on a weekly basis.
I can't remember the exact post, but some time ago I read about how one person would make themselves write 10 ideas down every day, no matter if they were good or bad. That way they get in the mindset of brainstorming and thinking instead of waiting for an idea to happen. This blog post is basically that although I don't know if it is where I found it. https://www.chriswinfield.com/ideas/ Maybe try that out? Could be a fun experiment at least for a week or something.
You don't need ideas. They're overrated.
Quote:
"Don't waste your life waiting for The Big Idea. Just follow the path where it takes you. Whatever you do, it will open the door to new opportunities."
Katie Keith | Age 37 | Devon, UK | Barn2 Media
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I used this blog post helping me prepare for cold calling:
https://blog.close.io/b2b-cold-calling-tips
Good luck :)
Blog promotion
How to drive real... non bot traffic to my website? I wasted so much money advertising doing cpc, cpm, popup, pop under, banner... the list goes on.
Making marketing to get users on my beta and try it out to give me feedback what they like and what they don’t like.
Where would you search and promote your work to get users to test out your beta and give feedback? It’s about beta.playlists.io
Marketing for flpbk.io
My issue may be slightly different. While working on the MVP, I am using Python to work with the API since that's the only language I know (sort of). Now struggling to figure a way to build a web app that uses the code on my local environment.
Take a look at Flask for building the web app in Python. Most of it is straight forward and the docs are good. Used it recently for a small tool with Zappa for deploying on Aws lambda.
Thanks for the tip. I am exploring Django currently, would that be good enough? I also know about Flask helping me in this task. Just trying to explore for an easier method to implement
I just started working with Django for my latest project. I'm very positivly surprised. Really like the choice and can recommend it.
Havent't used django for a long time but it was a fine framework. Delivered much out of the box but that was also its problem for smaller projects. So, it depends on what your app needs.
You can build with both.
+1 for the close.io stuff on cold calling mentioned by @OliverRechnitzer
You'll always have too much to do. The real struggle is to learn to differentiate between task which are important, and tasks with are urgent.
You'll tend towards wanting to prioritise the urgent tasks, but really you should only focus on the important ones. Setting clear goals (no more than 3, quantified, per day, week and month) helps there.
Good luck@