A Single Tweet May Have Just Saved My Product
I've been working on NoCo.io for a long time. As a single developer, this is a really really dumb product to try and build.
- It's massive
- It's endless
- It involves an insane amount of teaching before customers get value from it.
In short, it's a bad solo-founder company.
I've struggled with it. I've struggled to keep up with feature requests. I've struggled to get people to pay for it. And truthfully, I gave up on it.
As you read this, I don't have a production instance running. That's how much I gave up on it.
And last night a new Twitter friend graciously tweeted that. I got no warning. By some stroke of luck I had earlier that day set up a waitlist so I could onboard people personally, and slowly, ensuring each and every person that got on the platform got value from it.
That tweet has so far gotten over 20 of the right kind of people looking at NoCo. These are the kinds of customers I'd been trying to reach for months. It's given me new perspective on what I was trying to build and has reinvigorated the possibility that my long (loonnng) search for a good idea is over.
I claimed once that I'm settling in for the long haul on NoCo. And I did for about 6 months. I gave up on it for 2 months.
But now I'm back. Here are a few things I'm going to do differently.
- Ruthlessly let people know it's a one man shop, and I'm doing the best I can.
- Personally start writing every day about the experience. NoCo blog will be a solo founder monologue.
- Personally onboard all users. Resist the temptation to let everyone in at the same time. I've done this and hundreds of people got frustrated and immediately walked away... never to return.
- focus on real use cases. knock them down one by one until I have a platform many many people will get value from.
This is an unusually galvanizing post for me. I hope it reinvigorates some of you.
I'll end it with one of my favorite quotes from a genius writer.
“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.” - David Foster Wallace.
... let's get to work.
Hugs,
Hi Andrew, I just read this and thought that you needed some kind of feedback since this is the first comment on this post.
It's awesome you're going at it alone and despite that, you're already on my browser favourites as something to pay attention to. (You're doing something right)
Until now I haven't tried Noco.io but if my opinion helps, you need to provide some kind of screenshots or mockups of what it is/ will be.
It'll help those of us that are more cautious about filling forms decide if this could be right for us.
Keep it going!
much love brother, appreciate the positivity and am flattered to be on your watch list!
I agree, I need to make it look like a must have on the home page a la superhuman.
I'm currently trying to get through about 300 people who have requested access one by one. It's slow and grueling but will perhaps be worth it.
How much you will be charging? I don't want to invest my time in something that later th pricing may be more than I would like.
I understand that. The truth is I don't know yet. It will likely be around bubble and https://uibakery.io/'s pricing.
I'm just going to be working with a handful of customers at a time and so once there are a few more apps out in the wild I can settle on a price.
Hi Andrew,
I have registered for the first version of NoCo and saw your journey with a few articles you wrote. Here is my honest feedback:
On a bright side here is where I see potential:
all of these are building on top of existing infra and platforms and are manageable workload wise from the solo developer perspective. Therefore it feels more viable to build apps on top of that infra. Just my 2 cents :)
I’m amped this worked out so well!
Go to market strategy sounds solid.
Good luck!
Neat name!
Looks great Andrew, I feel your solo founder endless coding pain! Best of luck with your new potential customers, that's the real validation either way
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
ugh, spelling... Thank you for the corrections!
Let's stay in touch. I'll email you, I'm keen to hear your experiences with internal enterprise apps. Not sure if that's the direction the wind will take NoCo but I'd like to explore it and (optimistically) make your day job a little better.
Essentially NoCo is a code generator. So you visually build the front end and back end and we generate code (React / NodeJS). DB is mysql (or maria, postgres, memsql).
The code get's committed to github (without the user seeing any of this) and goes into a simple CI/CD pipeline to get it on the internets.
Hope that helps you wrap your head around it.