Ask IH: How did you come up with your product?
How did you find your idea? Did you fix something for yourself and then decided to release it to public? Or did you try finding something to build that can generate revenue from the first day and came up with/found your product idea?
I had posted a thread in the Shopify forum a year back asking for tips on building X feature for a client of mine.
Nobody responded, I figured it out on my own after a while.
The thread still stands, and over the past year I've had a few people discover it, respond to the thread / or email me asking if I figured out X feature as they really need it for their Shopify store.
Those people are now my beta-testers for the app which is about to be sent for a review before being published to the app store!
It's worked out lovely thus far. Hopefully other people need the feature as well!
I solved problems I had, because if you go looking for other peoples problems - you'll never quite hit the nail on the dot. You can't be a carpenter and make an app on issues doctors have without being one, can you? You'll just never fully grasp it, or understand it.
I went out and 'patched' the small annoyances I had in my life and developed them into a product, and because I know my problem, I know my desired solution for the problem. Chances are, other people will also have the same problem too.
This is the same experience I had only with building websites as a designer and a coder. No one really built something for my problem area. Either it was pure point and click or command line. Anything in between was terribly slanted towards one perspective or the other.
Then when I had to hand the site off to my clients they couldn't use the editing tools without repeated training and hand holding.
So I built my own CMS and used it first for my own sites then setup resellers.
I could not have done this without the pain points related to doing this work to start with.
I wanted to build my own Reddit-style community (with upvotes and threaded comments), but I also wanted to be able to make my own money off of it with things like ads or ecommerce options.
I learned to program to build the idea, and once I had an MVP done, a few other non-developer friends said they'd like something similar but they didn't have the time to learn how to program.
I took that pain point and decided to evolve the idea into a community as a service similar to how Shopify is an ecommerce site as a service or Wix is a website as a service.
Spent more time developing the features needed and launched Threadbase.io.
This is actually super sick. Congrats on launching!
Thanks for the kind words! If you have any feedback, let me know!
From an outside perspective, it seems like there could be a lot of parallels between your site and https://carrd.co/, both are site builders with little to no programming required.
Perhaps you could take some inspiration from there in regards to presenting your product. I'm a fan of showcasing features through gifs, but yours are too small and fast sometimes.
Thanks! We definitely need to improve our landing page. Next up, I’m working on docs to provide a better walkthrough of the product and address some FAQs. Then, the landing page is next.
Congratulations 👍🏽 How has the market responded to Threadbase so far?
Is it growing, or is it still difficult to make people understand why you wanted to build something different and why they should pay attention?
So far, getting new community owners to try it is pretty easy. Communities like this or using Reddit and Quora to bring in traffic isn’t too hard because these users feel the pain we are solving for.
The challenge is getting them to upgrade to a paid tier. With that, we know we just need to focus on adding new features that deliver enough value so an owner considers it a no-brained to upgrade.
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Thanks for the feedback, Anthony! The issue is that there's actual real incremental costs associated with custom domains (e.g. getting a custom SSL for the custom domain, getting a load balancer dedicated for the domain, etc.). In contrast, allowing you to switch your own ad pixel in instead of ours costs us almost nothing so we had to put custom domain in a higher plan.
But, we plan to release more features for both Basic and Plus so that there is a clearer sense of value that you unlock with each tier.
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There’s actual host associated with each custom domain. Getting an SSL cert and paying for a new load balancer for each custom domain has to happen for every new custom domain which we estimate will cost more than $19.
But, I think what you’re getting at is that it might make sense to have a tier between $19 and $99 that allows for a custom domain. It’s something we’ve been thinking about too and this is good feedback that validates that tier.
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How is it different from Discourse?
From the users we’ve talked to, they’ve felt like Discourse was good but was limited in their ability to customize the theme, the lack of threaded comments, and the lack of surfacing content and comments via votes like Reddit or Product Hunt.
With Threadbase, we really wanted to take the one-click customization options made popular by tools like Squarespace and Wix but bring them to community and forum platforms. We also believe that upvote-style communities make for better communities and wanted to make it easy for non-developers to make them.
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Yes definitely. We're finishing up custom domains (E.g. satvik.com points to your threadbase.io community), and once that's done, we think an enterprise customer will be more willing to come on board. It would be a big win for us.
Started with a single annoyance. I had flown across the country, alone, to be a groomsman in a wedding. Rented a car, drove 2 hours to the final destination. Only to find out that one of the bridesmaids (i didn't know her), was on my same flight, and rented her own car.
Seemed real dumb that you couldn't coordinate with other wedding guests prior to the event to save some money.
This was the start of Guestboard.co, which has evolved into a self-serve event platform, applicable to really any group event that has lots of moving parts.
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Let's do it!
I am currently working on www.ScraperPalace.com.
It is Friday today. On Monday I posted (to IH) a random idea I had here while walking to the coffee shop about turning webscrapers into web services and offering as as a service.
There was some incredible commentary and suggestions. This morphed into a market place for web scraper libraries.
I've decided to roll with this for a while and will launch an MVP, charging customers to list their scrapers for $4.95.
Most ideas come up by three ways imo:
I think the real trick is to getting validation and feedback quickly. Ideas are cheap and you will come up with many.. so if something doesn't seem to resonate with people then try and churn something else out.
I do both.
When I want to generate some income, I filter my own problems with existing solutions that already sell very well (books, courses, seminars, etc...), find the overlap, and try to add a personal twist to it.
It doesn't work 100% but it's the path that leads closer to building my income.
When I want to have fun I lower my expectations and just solve a problem that I have. If no one cares, that's still a win because I had no expectations.
I try not to rely on luck when it's about business.
I didn't like my previous job. So did a few colleagues. When asked why not switch jobs, they often say they don't wanna start from the bottom again, not sure of whether they can secure an interview given that they have no experience, etc.
So I built a way that someone can build their own work portfolio based on real world adapted projects to prove their competencies.
Can you share the link? :)
It's at https://talentail.com. Initially my hypothesis was candidates being willing to purchase and attempt projects from project creators without anything else.
Enough feedback made me pursue the idea of getting companies on board the platform too, to complete the puzzle.
Wish me luck :)
I'm a mobile app developer that's not great at building websites or managing marketing materials. So I built Flycricket to help with the process of creating a landing page, managing screenshots, links + campaigns, etc.
So purely a function of necessity for myself, with the assumption there are many others like me, so I turned it into a product.
I would save lots of images from internet browsing and it was tedious to keep them organized. I was learning about deep learning at the time and I wanted to try to solve my own problem. So I built Stowbots (stowbots.com) to automatically organize my image downloads using AI / deep learning. After that I just had to validate the market (how many others save images, would they use the tool). With that, I could start working on a beta.
This reminds me of "Not Hotdog" in the show Silicon Valley 😂
Was reading an article where China has huge farms of people busy classifying images to build up enough dataset. Forgot where the link was. Is deep learning really there already? If so, why are countries like China and even companies like Amazon hiring people to manually classify them?
I can't speak for everyone in the industry, but the basic idea is that in order to do deep learning you need a labeled dataset to start with. Labeled means that you already have the correct answers for a set of inputs, usually we're talking about classifications for images. If you aren't starting with a labeled dataset then you'll have to build your own, and that's what Amazon mechanical turk is used for. In my case I already have labels so I don't need to farm out classifications.
I was dreading the struggle to stay awake and pay attention to a lecture. I remember thinking how it would be nice if I could just pay someone to sit next to me for an hour and nudge me occasionally to keep me focused. I realized that there was probably an Apple Watch app that could do that.
To my surprise there was none, and that's how Nujible was born!
I had been using spreadsheets as a lightweight CRM, and decided there's an easier way to keep organised with contacts. (I wanted a "Save for Later" button for people I want to remember and get back to later. )
Just curious, but why didn’t you go with one of thousand other CRM’s out there? Assuming CRM is the product you sell, are you able to compete/stand out in so much traffic?
I'm actually using the developer instance of Salesforce to help with crm work flow. But I agree a little to what @theBrandonWu mentioned. Can get really messy fast. I am thankful I did get some training on Salesforce in my past job.
I tried a bunch and just didn't like any of them. The ones I tried are very sales-focused, and I just need something that's visually appealing, easy to use, and less form-filling.
In the case of both of my startups, I needed the product myself. There was nothing available quite like what i wanted, so I built them.
Ditto. I and a friend are working on automating visa applications for business travels because we hate having to draft invitation letters, send them to overseas colleagues, send them to the travel desk once they come back from the colleague with his signature, and so on. After searching a lot for an existing solution and having not found one, we said, let's build this for us. Now we are building it for the world.
Nice! Good luck :)