4 examples that helped me learn that money is not hiding in my IDE.
I have a lot to learn about SaaS. Here is a lesson I have read about many times, but it hasn't really sunk in until now.
Here are two things I have just had people agree to pay 50/mth to use:
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A service for churches where they send in an email with their announcements on Friday, and on Sunday morning a chatbot sends a text with the announcements to subscribers. Zero code involved in this project: https://meetkin.church/
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A pdf with two screenshots of a super simple CRM. The font is normal in the pdf, just got messed up in the upload: http://imgur.com/a/F8EuK
I like soccer, so I have wanted to work on soccer software and here are two things that I have spent a lot of time building and haven't yet managed to sell:
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Simple online registration for soccer leagues: http://register.playonside.com
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Simple fee collection for soccer club coaches: http://collect.playonside.com
I certainly would have thought the value from created from online registration or fee collection would be equal to or greater than yet another simple CRM or texting service. Maybe I haven't yet found the right customers for those products, or maybe I'm bad at identifying business value. I believe those products can be sold, but the fact that someone agreed to pay 50/mth based on a pdf I emailed him is opening my eyes to how much time I have wasted coding on side projects.
Lesson learned: Don't think about an IDE until some agrees to pay money based on a description or a design. Ask for money early.
Cool!
<shameless plug> BTW, if Meetkin uses Twilio, and your users would be interested in two-way chat (i.e. the ability to respond to the weekly broadcasts, and have a human engage with them) you might be interested in my side project: www.smsinbox.net </shameless plug>
Yeah, Kin is twilio and rundexter.com(awesome chatbot tool)
I had actually already checked smsinbox out. I'd say there is a good chance I'll want to give it a shot in Kin before long. Seems like a great service with so many use cases.
That's awesome John! Was curious how many folks you had to talk to or showed meetkin and the CRM before you found someone who would pay the monthly subscription? Were they folks already in your network?
This is a lesson I'm needing to learn. I just launched an app that took roughly about 3 weeks to develop, but now I'm cold-emailing and getting folks on board. I kept telling myself I need to get a basic functioning app before I can reach out to folks.
By the way, Kindred looks sweet! Is that a Life Church project?
The second church to try meetkin signed up. Just talked with one person about the CRM so far, but reaching out to more this week. Yeah starting with my existing network and working outward via introductions.
TinyWins looks pretty cool, I may need to give it a shot.
Kindrid is sweet! And it is basically a joint venture of Life.Church and OneHope, but operates as an independent company for the most part, with support from the two parent organizations.
Very cool. I love the simplicity of MeetKin and it sounds like a useful service. Especially with how expensive it could cost to print service programs and what not. With MeetKin you save money and save trees.
Thanks for the kind words regarding TinyWins. I've used it myself to launch TinyWins itself as well as Triangle Tech Jobs. Let me know if you do sign up, would love to see how it fits into your workflow and how I can make it better.
Very nice! I think that's neat that Life.Church and OneHope has an investment in tech that serves churches and their members.
I could see meetkin having other applications outside of just church.
what is the PDF thing? I understand its a pdf, but I was not sure what the value proposition was.
It's just a sketch of really basic CRM, use it to keep track of contacts. Designed it for a college coach, he's not doing sales, he just wants a way to be able to take notes and set reminders on people. You could do everything in there in trello and probably a million other tools. But he doesn't want to figure out his own system, just wants something dead simple to get started with.
I'm talking with a few other people about it this week to see if it's a concept that appeals to more than one person.
it looks interesting, is it targeted at mobile or more desktop devices?
Those sketches are for desktop, but I would definitely build it out to work well across platforms.