Ask IH: What’s your biggest challenge this month?
Saw a post asking this question a while ago and I figured I would rehash it.
I’m nowhere near finishing my MVP but my biggest challenge is figuring out potential pricing tiers. Right now with the planned MVP, the most appropriate model is pay-per-use, which worries me because I’m hoping to retain users for additional features that will be released down the line (of which would be more appropriate for subscription models).
So, IH, what’d your biggest challenge this month?
My biggest challenge this month is definitely user growth. It's slowed the last few weeks and I'm trying to find ways to get my product in front of more people.
Thought I'd drop a quick note here, both for @jakelazaroff and you: I am doing an AMA on IndieHackers this week specifically focused on user growth. So, if you have any questions, need any inspiration, or want to figure out what might work, feel free to drop a line in the AMA and I am happy to give you some insights and helpful feedback so you can get back on that user growth horse.
Link to AMA here -> https://www.indiehackers.com/post/hi-im-frank-heijdenrijk-founder-of-early-user-growth-marketing-expert-and-ikea-once-stole-my-idea-ask-me-anything-efdb7a8ee1
If you can provide some background info on what you've done so far/obstacles/ideas you might have, it'll make it easier to give you a better and insightful answer.
Same! I released a very rough MVP of my app around six months ago, and while it was successful enough to validate the idea I ended up going into a dev hole trying to build a version that could actually retain users. Between that and other life things, my marketing efforts were nonexistent, so now I'm trying to kick the wheels on that again.
I like your idea (fits a need), but lack of mobile is a no-go for me. What are your plans for mobile?
Where have you tried marketing? What's been successful so far and what have you learned?
(for others who want to see the app: https://lunchmoney.app/)
Hi there, thanks for replying. I'm a one-woman show right now who can iterate quickly by focusing on one platform (web). I don't have the bandwidth to maintain high standards on both a mobile app and a desktop app and features are still constantly changing from user feedback.
With that being said, I do foresee an app coming in the future. The first iteration would be a companion app for users to input cash transactions on the go. I'm also planning to release an API soon and if someone wanted to make a mobile app, I wouldn't discourage it.
With all that being said, I do have to say that our users are satisfied with a desktop web version only. The tool is designed for thoughtful and purpose-driven budgeting and personal financial management and not something to do when you have a minute or two to spare while you're on the go. I have gotten feedback from users wanting a mobile app but it's very rarely a dealbreaker.
I hope you can give the desktop version a try :)
Interesting. Now that you go into it a bit more, no mobile isn't a huge deal if you have the banking integrations -- maybe it's even preferable if you market it the right way (i.e. don't have to worry about logging everything on your phone).
I might consider making the banking integrations more prominent on your landing page to emphasize that benefit to users ("automated entries"?). Might seem like a table-stake, but I think it's an important one to emphasize?
In general, I would try to re-word the landing page a bit more towards benefits vs features.
When I really pay attention, it sounds great. If I was scanning it like I usually do for a landing page, I'd probably miss all of the great ideas you have.
The landing page looks really polished and I'm sure the app is too. Great job so far and good luck moving forward.
Thanks for the suggestions and thoughtful response!
Same thing here. Finding quality users is definitely the most difficult challenge to overcome. I've been writing Medium posts, sharing milestones on IH, tweeting here and there, shared on subreddits. People visited my website (https://oneprofile.info) but many of them just don't stick around. Either my product is not compelling or I'm targeting the wrong audience. Still figuring it out.
Why would people keep coming back to your website? What is drawing them back?
Do you need to draw them back?
How many users do you have now? How many times per month are they visiting the website?
The nature of my business doesn't really need users to stick around every day. I'm building a webpage builder for about pages. In essence, they would just need to signup, create their profile page(s), and just update it whenever they feel like updating.
I'm building out in the open with a focus on user privacy. I don't track my users with what they're doing or spy on them on a separate screen. These are all the stats that I have and you can view those stats here: https://simpleanalytics.com/oneprofile.info
For number of users who have published their profiles, you can visit the homepage and it is stated on the action button, https://oneprofile.info :)
Can you see if they are coming back to update their profiles?
Are those paid accounts?
What’s your long term vision for the site? What features are you going to add?
My biggest challenge this month is to finish up building a simple calculator web app such as linking sendgrid to firebase, point the web app to ios/android and launching this web app. I have no programming background so I am relying solely on the Internet.
good luck
Getting a premium version of Brooklet out before the sponsored Youtubers post their videos in December. Its a bunch of work and this will be the first time I test out the payment model even though its been several months.
Its just a good chunk of work and I'm still working a day job.
@caitlinjohnson I'm in a similar boat with divjoy.com. I just rolled out one-time payments last week and it's going pretty well, but I'd really like to get the product to a place where users have a reason to keep coming back and I can charge monthly. My big challenge this month is SEO. I think there is a lot of potential, as my product involves picking different combinations of tech (like Bootstrap + Next.js + Firebase). So I'm hoping I can start to rank for a bunch of long-tail searches for different combinations. Haven't done much SEO so it's all a learning process for me.
Oh man, I haven't even started on SEO yet, and that will all be completely new to me as well. But I hear you - my planned product makes more sense for the pay-per-use model but I'd really like to have a somewhat predictable stream of income, so I'll likely just reach out to end users and see what they wish they had access to and figure it out from there.
Yeah good plan, that's exactly what I'm doing. So much easier to figure out priorities when you have feedback from paying users.
My biggest challenge will be to have my first early users and then customers for my product:
https://churntarget.com
URL is not working. Happy to help by giving you some insights if you comment the working URL.
Made a typo when writing down the website... My bad!
I edited my comment!
My biggest challenge this month is organizing my time between contract work and finishing my MVP, and still having a somewhat visible social life. :D
Same here, such a struggle
About your challenge this month, we've made a whole guide on software product pricing, which might come in handy for you for figuring out the best pricing model for your MVP. Leaving the link down below. More power to ya! 💪
https://blog.keyzy.io/software-pricing-7-things-to-know/
Thank you so so much for providing this info!
Getting new users to try AXSAR Solo is the biggest challenge. Building a SaaS solution is one thing (easier thing I would say now that I have built it), growing it rapidly is a different beast, and requires different set of new skills which I am learning every day.
https://www.axsar.com/axsar-solo/
IMO: Pricing should change with the use-case.
Price it how it makes sense now, get customer emails, and let them know when you have new features.
If you provide benefit for your users, that will prime them for whatever you build in the future.
This makes sense! I suppose I can allow them (or make it mandatory?) to create an account prior to utilizing the product so that I have a reaching out back to them when I release additional features. Lots of thinking to do about this, but I feel like I'm heading in the right direction now. Thank you for this!
Sounds like a great plan.
Will you get the users email during the payment process? Having an account creation now could be a good idea, but you want the right level of friction (hard to know what makes sense without knowing what your product is)
I think that added touch points and interactions with users early on is a huge positive to really understand their needs. I would consider emailing every user to ask how the product was and if they want to have a chat. Even if they don’t respond it builds rapport to hear from an app founder.
Good luck!
Most likely will get the users email during the payment process. I plan to have a free product available that anyone can use without signing up, but I want to use it as hook to get people to keep moving forward in the process and pay for the core product that I'm developing.
A comparison would be someone answering a couple of questions about their credit score only to get just an overall number as a result, but the paid product would be (1) details about the credit score (e.g., areas that need improvement and areas that are in good shape) and (2) actionable and achievable ways to improve the credit score.
And those are good points re: touch points and interactions. Definitely something I'll need to keep in mind.
For https://caseconverter.pro
Who are your competitors?
How many paying customers do you have?
[1] What kind of content are you going to use to draw people to a case convertor app?
[2] Who are your users? I think your content could be way more tailored to the end user. Does someone who is going to pay for a case convertor really need to be told what it does?
[3] This is probably the highest value item on the list, IMO
(sidenote: your link is broken because of the : at the end)
Goal is getting to ramen profitable ASAP.
That involves getting a lot more paying customers.
So currently looking at strategies to get quick growth, not sure if even possible with a SaaS.
We added a done for you service so that will hopefully start bringing in customers, but the end goal is to work on the SaaS full time.
How did you decide on $83 for your agency pricing? And to go from largest to smallest in terms of price?
(I'm curious because I'm guessing you have good reasons for this)
Small note: Should be "60 custom domain websites" in the pricing chart.
Also, what does the name versoly mean / why did you choose it?
Your templates look really nice, but the one you're using for your own site -- something about the white header/blue background throws me off. Usually wouldn't consider it a big issue, but since you're selling landing page builders I think this is something to ask other users about.
It is to do with price anchoring if we start smallest to largest free will be anchored in their minds and $15 might look expensive.
Thanks, will change.
Verso means "a left-hand page" or "the reverse of something such as a coin or painting." so we build web pages and we're not the same as everyone else we do the opposite. Then we just added ly :)
Interesting most people have liked it. Will think about it and might change.
Interesting, I find that the pricing is unnatural and that makes me think more about the price, since I am used to going from lowest to highest. Generally thinking about price is a bad thing for users.
Would be interested to A/B test this.
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I think the name is a little bit confusing/hard to remember. Landen.co for example is memorable for me in the same space (? not sure if it's an exact competitor).
Something more descriptive would be better. I usually don't think names matter too much, but I've seen yours quite a lot and it still sticks out as a bit odd to me.
Probably not worth thinking about much at this point, but if it's something that comes up consistently might be an issue.
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Will you be writing a post on your product hunt launch?
Yeah we plan on adding a new package soon so will most likely remove free from the list.
Coming up with a good name was very hard. I like the name Versoly as it means we aren't locked to our name like Landen, we plan to expand the feature set a lot and having a name like that would limit us I feel. We also have the .com which is always nice.
Will do. We had 1000+ visitors so far thought it would have been a lot more but PH seems to be dead this time of year.
Getting our first 100 clients :)
Same we want to get to 100 customers :)
Just checked your site about/blog give 404 errors.
Also I would separate the testimonials.
I'm having difficulty finding a job, had a few interviews but no offers...
My current project is a two sided market... So the biggest problem right now is making the service desirable enough on its own for one party that it will gain users and attract the other side. I'm optimistic.
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