A year of our customer support tool (free for 10 indie hackers)
We built Emetti as a way to support customers of our other SaaS product (Campnab). It allows us to provide chat support when they have questions. It also lets us showcase updates and news in a dedicated newsfeed on the Campnab website.
A few others are using the product, but we still haven’t narrowed down exactly who this thing is for. (Some of our current users include a direct-to-consumer brand, a mapping company, and a record label.)
My preference is for Emetti to be a tool that other SaaS companies use—because that’d align with how we use it. That said, I’m still unsure as to whether this is the right move.
I’ve always appreciated the talks/interactions I’ve had here on IH—and I love that we’re all similarly motivated to build things. So, I thought we’d open up a free year of full use for 10 startups here. If you’d like to participate in this, comment below, or message me (email in profile).
I see this as a partnership of sorts, in which I’d work closely with these 10 founders to make this product work well for them. I can help with some general content strategy recommendations and offer direct support on an ongoing basis. This interaction will help inform our product roadmap and priorities.
So, optimally, you’ll have a product that’s in active development and regularly pushing out features/updates. You’ll also have some number of users who require your support. If you use Stripe, even better yet! We’re rolling out a Stripe integration, and would like to get some folks to provide feedback on how that’s working for them.
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This is great! I've recently started using Emetti on Product Disrupt and I'm loving it so far. It allows me a way to directly engage with my audience on the website and keep them posted with what's happening with the product.
Thanks for saying so Darshan! We’re stoked to have you using it. :-)
Actively developing ratemymeeting.co still, which seems to tick all your boxes. And no, we don't have a tool today.
Cool—I’ve sent an email your way. :-)
Id be willing to give it a try in my SaaS.
Sounds good—I’ve sent you some information. :-)
Thanks for sharing! Not sure if you're eligible, but I'd look into gearing towards the recently announced Pioneer Challenge
We don’t want to take on an investment, so, this isn’t for us. Also, I don’t want to divert any attention away from building product and working with users.
That said, I appreciate you making note of this. If we were set up differently, it’d be an appealing opportunity.
Don't need to take investment and there are a ton of startups that need support tools on that platform.
Also I wouldn't even try to get people to use the product for free.
I tried that with my product, went terrible (other founders have noticed the same)
Good point about the startups on that platform. I’ll look into that community more.
Also, that challenge is interesting in that it points to a need I didn’t see. We’ve aimed our product at small SaaS companies like our own. It’s interesting to see that there might be a greater need in larger organizations. (I spent most of my run this morning thinking about this. So, thanks for passing the info along.)
I agree on the problems with offering product for free. In part, that’s why we’ve limited this to 10 companies.
I see this as a research exercise, and feel there might be value in the information we find. I doubt we’ll do this more than once, though.
I couldn't even get any companies to try it for free.
We should have been heads down on product or doing actual sales.
Yeah—this stuff is often challenging.
I do a sort of goals review/rethink each morning. The one that stays in there, in one form or another, is YC’s: Build the product; talk to users.
100%
Good luck!"
Sort of off topic but care to share why you're against investment?
For many, funding makes sense. I know it brings some notable advantages. That said, we have a handful reasons for our not pursuing investment:
We value autonomy. As such, we don’t want someone else directing our paths.
We have other sources of revenue. So, we don’t desperately need cash to keep working on this.
We don’t have product/market fit (yet). If we did, and needed money to scale, that might be a different discussion. Adding money at this time wouldn’t fix that problem though.
We only want one customer-type: the one that buys our product. I’ve watched other (funded) startups treat their investors like customers. This often becomes detriment to the product/users.
We don’t want to build decks, talk about valuations, or be forced to hire a team. We just want to build a product that’s useful to our customers, and then put all our effort into helping them succeed with it.
So, I’m not sure that it’s the right approach, but I think it suits our personalities and desires.
Cool man, more power to you! I agree with most of these points.
👍
I don't have customers yet but hope to soon and this might be a good fit. Lakebed is a technical product, that requires support, and will hopefully be rolling out updates frequently.
I'll look into it more when I'm on desktop.
Sounds good. Happy to chat with you about this more.
I see you’re in New West. I’m in Vancouver, near the PNE. In internet terms, I think this makes us neighbours. ;-)
Too funny, definitely makes us neighbours. I've met a few IH's from Vancouver now. Maybe we can actually get out to the meetup when things are safe again.
On the Emetti features page, did you mean to have an extra square box around the rounded buttons?
I've signed up for Emetti and will take a look around. Thanks.
No—that’s just an error. We’ll fix it.
Ha ha ha, better a sympathetic developer notice than a scrutinising CEO...
Sadly, this error is only one in an ever-expanding list.
Totally normal and common. Not sure if you're a technical [co-]founder or not but I've had 3+ meetings about being a technical co-founder/CTO in the last 6 months. The common theme is frustration around bugs and forward progress.
One of the tools I use is when I see something to-do or a bug in the code I mark it with '//todo...'. Then it's really easy for me to see how many exist and to find them. That also means a developer can fix all bugs/todo in a single file/component, which is a more efficient use of time.
Here's what it looks like for Lakebed:
Thanks! I’m on the creative side, but will pass this along to the other Eric (the technical one). :-)
The important part is not to get bogged down in those errors and keep laser focus on the MVP. Bugs may exist but if they're not MVP then they're low priority.
I agree. That said, all those little things add up, too. So, we try to tidy items when we can.
This is in response to your next comment (we ran out of reply space).
We’ll play more with styling and themes soon. We also have a new version of the sidebar in the works (next week or two) that floats. It looks a bit nicer. :-)
Let's see how long we can make this reply chain...
You have another installation: https://lakebed.io/
I'd love a few more styling options. Specifically, I feel like the very thin white border almost ends up looking pixilated. I played around with inline CSS but it looks like style is applied via JS after the element is loaded so it ignores inline CSS.