Built MVP in 7 days and got 4 paying customers in a month.
Hello everyone,
I have built multiple products in past and I was feeling the urge to make something new again. And I wanted to productize the logo and website services that I was offering as a freelancer earlier.
I have developed logos, and websites, have done email setups, and all in past for a few startups. I wanted to bundle all these items into a single pricing plan and start a productized service.
I registered the domain growby.net last month and started work on it. My only expectation was to get 10 customers for this every month.
Step 1: Building the MVP
I literally opened my laptop, went on Themeforest, bought a theme with HTML and Figma, and "coded" the site in 2 days. Within the next 5 days, I set up the website, payment gateway, and pricing plans and went live with our new business. 😅
Step 2: Marketing
So I reached out to a few people via Linkedin and WhatsApp groups if anyone is starting up. Fortunately, from our own network, we found 4 different customers, and we are working towards completing their orders.
Step 3: Consistently bringing traffic
Now we need to figure out ways how we can get consistently a few thousand customers on the website and then keep on refining our offering and product to grow this business.
Takeaways
Always think about your value proposition. It is good to talk to users to get it right, but even better is to actually launch something and put it in front of them with a buy button.
Just ship!
Do share your thoughts or opinions or doubts. Happy to answer.
If you want to visit the startup website, here is the link: https://www.growby.net
The first customer is usually the hardest
Well I think the first few customers are the easiest if you are building a product in a large sized market. Even if you are in a niche market, you can definitely manually outreach few customers and convert.
The real challenge begins when you have exhausted all your immediate network contacts and now you have to rely on some other marketing channels for bringing new traffic.
Yeah, that first customer always seems impossible.
where did you find your first customer?
From my internal network. I had a friend working in the Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR) field. He told me that he is quitting his job and starting up a similar business in the CSR field. I asked him if he was interested in getting the logo, website, and email setup done and he was in fact more excited than me to offer me the order.
The second order was from my cousin who started a Pharma API trading firm. The 3rd one was from a friend who was doing Silk yarn export via Facebook groups for more than 10 years. I explained to him to start his own portal and he agreed.
Congrats! The first paying customer is the best feeling in the world. Good luck with growby!
That's an amazing shipping speed! Indie hackers should embrace it to grow faster.
The journey has just began. :-)
I have build multiple products in past and I know for sure that only those products survive where we as can consistently bring traffic.
I am yet to crack a marketing channel that bring traffic.
The website looks awesome, definitely couldn't tell it was made in 2 days, value proposition is also super clear, well done!
Thanks. The reason it looks awesome is because someone designed the theme nicely and put up for sale on themeforest. Now my task was to set up the content, Product, pricing and I am ready to go. :-)
Might end up doing the same next time I launch a product!
Big fan of the quick-to-validate stories. Nice work!
Wow, amazing results!
Your website looks good. Were you doing freelancing using online portals like fiverr ?
No - mostly getting from the offline world due to a friend who was great at fetching orders ( but at cheaper costs :-( ). Unfortunately, he has moved to some other roles now and so we will have to crack the marketing part.
Rough and ready success stories like these are really inspiring. I'm glad to hear you've had so much success :)
Nice work on getting paying customers!
Hi Mil,
Congrats on getting paying customers.
Your website says you've been in business for 2 years & have had thousands of customers? Yet you've just launched...
That's correct because we have been freelancing for over 2 years. In combined our team of 4 has served over 1000 customers.
We launched growby - the productized SaaS Version of our services last month.
Ah! Ok makes sense then :-)
Awesome stuff! Always nice to see when people don't hesitate and just take action.
In some parts you mentioned 'we' instead of 'I'. Do you have a team you're working with, or?
Yes, we are a team of 4 people working on 3 different products.
Whatso.net
Cartbox.net
Growby.net
Wow, that's cool! And how do you find working on different projects at the same time?
It's tough. Really tough. But we have different priorities with each product so we will continue working for next few months before we exit in 2 of them.
Ah, yeah that's understandable. Though I'm sure your hard work will pay off, best of luck !