I'm not a developer, but today I launch my side project as a full consumer SaaS product: Readwise
Readwise started out as a side project when I was on sabbatical and reading at least one, if not two, challenging books per week. I was frustrated that I could hardly remember a book I read fewer than 3 months ago and this pain hit me while I was dusting off my coding skills and mastering a flashcard app called Anki.
I thought: What would happen if I downloaded my Kindle highlights and periodically reviewed them as flashcards in Anki?
This was purely a personal project with no commercial aspirations at the time, but the practice was so beneficial that my friends and family started asking me to hook them up. One thing led to another and I got sucked into the world of "reading tech".
This led me to have coffee with my now partner Tristan, who was also interested in reading tech, while he was in SF. (We met through Hacker News.) We hit it off so we decided to collaborate on an MVP of my personal project that'd download your Kindle highlights and send you an email with a random assortment each day.
We called it Rekindled. Rekindled seemed to resonate with the ~100 or so users we manually onboarded, so we pressed forward, launching a beta.
A year later, we've since developed Readwise into much much more and we're proud to launch Readwise 1.0 to the public -- fully bootstrapped! Would love your feedback :)
nice! ;)
(I'm dan's partner, and vouch for this story :P)
We also wrote out a blog post about the decision to bootstrap Readwise (rather than take VC) here:
https://blog.readwise.io/why-were-bootstrapping-readwise/
Would love to hear if you guys have any feedback on the blog post, or our landing page!
Hi just asking if you don't mind, how did you validate your idea? Getting the first 100 customers?
It was a complete slog -- to this day, one of the biggest challenges we faced :P
I started, of course, with talking to every friend or family member whom I knew read and trying to get them on board. That got us to maybe 25 users.
I then just searched the internet for folks who had written articles or forum posts about reading better, taking advantage of Kindle highlights, etc. I'd manually hunt down their email addresses and send them a cold, but thoughtful email.
The response rate was pretty discouraging to me (as the sender), but Tristan encouraged me to just keep going.
Around ~75 users, something tipped. We got a few big names who liked the product and tweeted about it, netting us 10 users at a time (which back then was HUGE).
I applaud for your persistence. This is what gets us through hardships.
Wow , thanks lots. I will add this to my arsenal :D
Congrats Daniel, well done on the launch. It looks great.
Congrats on the launch Daniel and Tristan!
Congrats! I really like this idea! Sounds like you found a creative way to scratch your own itch. I also find this problem frustrating but I'm not a kindle user.
Released my product.. got 2 upvotes, good job! lol
This sounds like an awesome product. Just created an account!
Congrats! Great launch and product!
I am not a Kindle user, so if you could make an app that I can create my own notes it would be great.
If I can take a picture of the paragraphs I consider important and make them into cards, it would be awesome
On one hand I think this is a great product, like super duper great (and haven't even downloaded it yet), I do think $60 seems like a steep price, how are sales currently? Upvoted on PH and downloading now, good luck guys!
Hmm I checked it out and am now of the opinion it is actually a fair and perfect price point, the product is very mature and full-fledged, a lot of config options and useful features. I really like too that you went for the web-app! You've got a new happy customer😄
Aha, thanks so much for the feedback and kind words Rutger :)
We did try to get the price as low as possible -- if a user wants to opt for the Readwise Lite tier (which does contain all of the core features except for tagging) they can get that for $2.99/month (this was the lowest we could make it while still building a sustainable biz). It's only if you opt for the Full Readwise AND pay annually that it's $60 upfront.
That's around the price of a coffee -- most of our users are spending upwards of $20-$50/month just on purchasing books (not to mention dozens of hours of their time; the real cost!), so we thought that this type of pricing is reasonable -- even if it only helps you get 20% more out of your books it's well worth the investment :)
Yes you are totally right, I wonder how many customers you would loose if you'd stick to only offering the higher price point, once I rationalized the cost it happened to be around the maximum I'd pay for it, so pretty well selected I'd say. Also directly receiving some of my older notes after signing up for the free trial was a very nice experience, that got me properly excited for this.
how much did you pay to be featured in producthunt?
Daniel,
Do you support the Kobo platform?
Hey -- unfortunately we don't support Kobo currently because as far as we can tell there's no way to export your book highlights from Kobo!
Hey @ddoyon congrats on the launch. I too released my product TrafficTicker yesterday on ProductHunt. It was #3 Product of the day yesterday.
Great story. I will be publishing mine soon.
Congrats Kaushik! Was nice sitting on the front page with you all day :P
Pleasure is all mine my friend. 😊
Hi Daniel . Congratulations for the launch. Are you a complete self taught guy ?