2 Paid Users After 2 Years

Hi IndieHackers! I’m Ishini, co-founder of HYVOR.

We got our first 2 paid customers of Hyvor Blogs ($18 MRR) right after 2 years. This is a big milestone for us but there is a huge story behind it.

2 years ago, I and my partner @supunio built an all-in-one blogging platform that anybody can use easily.

Why we built Hyvor Blogs

We have used other platforms which can be used to do blogging such as WordPress, Medium, Ghost, Webflow, Wix, etc. None of them are not just made for blogging: for website building, e-commerce sites, blogging, etc.

There is no other platform that is made right only for blogging. That is how 2 years ago we start building Hyvor Blogs.

Starting Developement

Then we started designing and development right away. @supunio did the developing while I was focusing on marketing and designing.

Along all this time of 2 years, we developed so many features. Some of them are,

• Multi-language supported (Including auto translation with one click)
• Right-to-left (RTL) language supported blogging
• Fully-customizable free and open-source themes
• In-built SEO
• Powerful blog console to manage the blog in every possible way (including team collaboration)
• Data privacy and ownership
• Developer friendly blogging platform (Data, Delivery, Console APIs and Webhooks plus Framework integrations like Laravel, Symfony, Next.js, etc.)
• Easy custom domains set up

Free Plan and Becoming Premium

We had a free plan along with the paid subscriptions. We thought that the free plan will make things work and we will get paid customers eventually. And those free plan users will upgrade to a paid plan once their blogs are grown more.

And yes many users came to Hyvor Blogs and started blogging but it was a BIG NO when it comes to converting them to premium plans. At the same time we realised it was not sustainable at all with all the maintenance cost we had.

Hence, we thought of making Hyvor Blogs a fully premium all-in-one blogging platform.

Hyvor Blogs and Hyvor Talk

While everything was running, I had a thought of interconnecting Hyvor Blogs with our other product Hyvor Talk. I saw a good potential between both of them as a combination. I discussed it with @supunio and we came to a decision of implementing that. So, we have given our Hyvor Blogs users the privilege of using Hyvor Talk for free on their blogs.

But yet that has not brought us much as we thought. However, I’m still positive that this idea gonna do better in the near future.

Marketing

With all that being said, I must mention that we tried bunches of marketing strategies when it comes to marketing of Hyvor Blogs.

For example content marketing, Google ads, Twitter ads, Reddit ads, Facebook ads, Bing ads, link building, collaborations with other blogs, affiliate marketing, etc.

Appsumo

Plus, we tried Appsumo's life time deal. And that brought us lots of customers who bought that life time deal. We earned more than 2750$. We got lots of reviews from Appsumo buyers. After several days passed, we realised that Appsumo was a double-edged sword in our case. Therefore we stopped the lifetime deal.

I will post more about our Appsumo deal and how it went through another new post.

There is a positive side of this Appsumo deal, we got nice user reviews from those Appsumo buyers. We got some ideas about what the users are thinking about our product.

At the same time we started showcasing customer testimonials, and customer blogs on our homepage as I learnt customer testimonials and their reviews are the key to successful product marketing.

Learning from Mistakes

We thought that marketing for Hyvor Blogs would be kinda easy like we did for Hyvor Talk. I personally as the marketer of Hyvor, tried all the marketing strategies I mentioned above but nothing brought us premium users in this case. As the time passes, I learnt so much things trying those marketing strategies, and I’m happy about that. I will publish another post about this marketing journey, the tools that I have used in more detail.

The most important thing I realised is the the market where Hyvor Blogs lies is huge, and highly competitive. Even when it comes to ads WordPress, Squarespace, Wix are bidding higher for different different essential keywords.

When it comes to content marketing, most of the keywords are highly competitive too. I think the most important thing when we are marketing our product is identifying the breadth and the depth of the relevant market that we going to enter. It took me lots of time understand it.

However, we are still struggling to do our best in this competitive market but yet we are happy to have 2 paid users! Cheers to that!