Bootstrapping my first SaaS (very early stage) - LetsCommence.com
Hi all,
My first post here, but I'm a long time lurker and listen to all of the IH podcasts :-)
So I'm a serial side project creator. I love being scrappy and doing the development, design, marketing, and everything in between on new project.
I've created a bunch of things before, and learned a tonne along the way. I've made pretty much all of the rookie-error mistakes that one could ever possibly make. I'm super happy to have gotten to this point where I've learned loads and have a few cool projects to show for it, but I've been getting increasingly frustrated by my lack of success (success = side project profits) now having given it a go quite a few times.
I try to build products that solve my own problems. For example, some past projects of mine include http://uidb.io, which is a place to find examples of any UI, and http://www.journeycomparison.com, which is a way to compare minibus hire prices (no longer active).
Whereas initially I'd build things with 95% of the purpose to learn and perhaps 5% purpose to earn money, I'm now trying to shift the balance towards being more money and customer focussed.
For my newest project, LetsCommence.com, I've tried to exhibit as much Lean Startup behaviour as possible. You guys might find the process I've gone through quite interesting, so I'll summarise it below, but let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to go into more detail.
It's worth noting that I fit all my side project stuff around my full-time job (and also more recently my upcoming wedding!). I tend to commute to near my place of work and spend an hour every morning working on my project. That's easier said than done, but basically I'm trying to chip away at it every day instead of doing crazy hours on the weekend.
First, a summary of what http://www.LetsCommence.com is...
LetsCommence is a SaaS that improves the logo design questionnaire process for designers, ensuring that they're given all of the necessary information and business context possible to be able to do an awesome job on the design.
I’ve seen from many years working freelance, agency, and in-house, that creative briefs are generally very poor as far as clients go. Poor briefs of course result in rework, stretched relationships, and ultimately less profit for the creative. For the client, whether they’re an in-house product team or a one-man-band business owner looking for a logo, it’s equally frustrating to not be ‘understood’ by your initial brief and to not get good concepts in the first reveal. I’ve been burned by this so many times on all sides, so it’s a problem that I believe in and will do anything to fix :-) It's more pronounced for remote creatives, where communication is generally less effective.
My vision is for this service to improve any type of creative brief. For instance, changes to a specific part of a web page, entire new websites, marketing materials, AB tests, micro-sites for marketing campaigns, UI projects, and so on. For the time being it will only modestly focus on logo questionnaires, so that I can fine-tune the platform and learn from and corner a small market first.
Right now it's more suited to perhaps the lower end designer market (e.g. more UpWork than London agency). I acknowledge that it's not for all designers and amd trying to stay pretty focussed on not building one thing to keep 100% of people happy (I've made that mistake before).
My process so far has been:
- Document the problem for myself - what is the problem, what am I actually trying to achieve, who else do I think has this problem, is this solveable as a one man founder/developer?
1.1) Ask my close network if this is remotely worth pursuing or not (a couple of people who could be my targt market)
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Write down functionality, then strip it back to a very basic MVP. Put the list of MVP features into my PM tool (I use Teamwork.com free tier) ready to start developing.
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Visualise the MVP - create some clickable prototypes (Sketch + InVision) to get the idea out of my head and onto the screen; spot any glaring problems with the solution; make this good enough to share with my target users, but not so polished that it'll take ages.
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Market research part 1 - pay 2 UpWork researches to do lead generation for me. Created a Google Sheet with a template ready to be filled in, then posted a job. Fill out a few rows of the sheet first so that the UpWorkers know what to strive for. Ended up interviewing a few people and choosing 2. Brief was essentially basic info (email, name, company, etc.) of English speaking graphic designers who design logos. End result was 200 leads costing me $20. 10c per lead = bargain!
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Market research part 2 - Insert the 200 prospects into an outbounding tool (I used reply.io 14 day free trial) to ask people for help.
I split test 2 emails. This is one of them:
Hey [first name],
Hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I’m not looking to sell anything, just for some advice… but I know time is money so no hard feelings if I don’t get a reply!
Your career highlights and sheer amount of experience are absolutely class. I found the Creative Lead at Creative Market role particularly cool, as it's a product that I use a fair bit myself.
I think I’ve spotted a gap in the market relating to creative projects and how they’re kicked off. I’ve built an MVP and have had some great feedback so far.
I was wondering if you’d mind hearing me out on what the problem is that I’m looking to solve, and if you think it’s worth me spending the next year of my life trying to build?
Thanks,
Joe
If I didn't have a reply within 3 days, then this email would automatically go out:
Hey Davide,
Just a quick follow-up on a message I sent the other day: I would really love to pick your expert-designer-brain on the startup idea I mentioned :)
Thanks,
Joe
The response rate for the 2nd email was really good. Really great feeling waking up one day and without any effort at all, having 10+ more people reply to me because of my auto follow up.
I had at least 20 1-on-1 email dialogues with these prospects - all of whom were ridiculously helpful in defining what would make this a good or bad product, who my market is and isn't, and so on.
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Start building - built the MVP on my standard stack (DigitalOcean VPS, Laravel, Gulp, Foundation SCSS, etc.).
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Go live, get early adopters on-board - I'm trying to focus 100% of my time here on getting new users in the door, and speaking to them to get feedback (via email so far, but trying to get up some calls). Also networking locally with designers too for a coffee etc.
Currently at around 50 registered users (all free users, not charging yet). Actual product usage is pretty low though - only a handful are actually using the questionnaires. I'm striving for 100 registered users before I make any substantial product decisions or code changes.
At 100 users I'll likely make the decision to spend a few hours iterating the product based on feedback (maybe 6 hours worth of dev), and then the plan is to start charging for it.
It's not too surprising that this is now the hard part. Building the product was the easy bit, but actually getting users to register and start using it is proving to be the real challenge!
Hope this is interesting for someone! :-)
Thanks,
Joe
