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68 Comments

Describe your company in 50 characters or less.

Hey,

This is one of the first questions on the YC application - I would love to see what answers indie hackers give.

Feel free to also drop a link to your company/product.

EDIT: Take a look at https://fifty.weekendprojects.xyz to click through the answers one-by-one.

  1. 4

    Simple + privacy-friendly customer support tool: Letterbase

    1. 2

      as an outsider; privacy-friendly piked my interest :)

  2. 3

    Tool to build customer success stories
    https://froged.com

  3. 3

    The smart and easiest web scraping API ever.
    https://www.scrapingproject.com/

  4. 3

    A place to store and organize scripts - https://waterdeep.io

  5. 3

    "A complete data validation platform" - https://orgstack.io

  6. 3

    “We make Route optimization and planning simple”

    Https://PathRoute.io

    1. 3

      Your product seems like it would be useful to a lot of people if it was good. Curious how you came up with your pricing. $5 / month and $50 / year strikes me as insanely cheap for a product that would almost certainly be something you sell to businesses. Any reason you can't charge $25 / user / month for the base version and $50 / user / month for the second tier?

      1. 1

        The business (team plan) is $30/month, you think I should lead with that instead of the individual plan?

        1. 2

          I think you should decide whether you're a B2B or a B2C company and not try to do both. I struggle to imagine a major consumer user case for this app. That means you should be segmenting by business size -- usually people do this by either offering "premium" feature sets or segmenting based on volume (number of users, number of routes per month, whatever the best unit of measure is for how you deliver value to customers).

          I wouldn't recommend selling anything for $5 / month unless you're using it as a loss leader to upsell into a different product. At $5 a month, you're going to need an extraordinary amount of users to have a real business, and you're not going be able to spend almost anything to acquire those users. If you want say a 3 month payment period, you'd need a customer acquisition cost of $15 or less. That's not going to be enough to do paid acquisition or sales, so you're going to have to rely on SEO, PR or some other organic channel to acquire customers, and that's just a much harder route to go.

          1. 2

            Question you should ask yourself is who is your ideal target customer and what business problem are you solving for that customer? What's the cost to them of solving this problem badly? There are very few business problems worth solving that if solved well will only be worth $30 / month to a business, unless you're selling to sole proprietors, who more or less act like consumers.

            In a nutshell -- you should charge more.

            1. 1

              I think you’re onto something here... will think about it and how to proceed with the pricing and features

  7. 3

    Free financial planning in 5 minutes - https://savology.com

  8. 1

    Remove blockers for your developers using custom LLMs - https://collectivai.com

  9. 2

    Cool! Sent mine :)

    I believe you're an open startup? If so, join our friend's (@nscode) list on:
    https://openstartuplist.com 🎈

    ## EDIT
    Incident Management with Downtime Detection

  10. 2

    MyCaliforniaWater.com is a way for individual water consumers in the state of California to understand how state wide water policies will affect them. Its also a way to get data on specifically how individual consumers interact with water on their personal residences.

  11. 2

    Interactive Pro/Con List for Better Team Decision Making - https://www.decisiondonkey.com

  12. 2

    Query files straight from cloud object storages - https://www.storagequery.com/

  13. 2

    Embeddable community & forum software - https://www.peerboard.io

  14. 2

    AI-powered data tool that can give recommendations.
    tractific.com

  15. 2

    It's like grammarly for copywriting
    targetaudience.app 🔥

  16. 2

    Secure login for babies and their grannies: https://tassupassu.com/

      1. 2

        That's lovely, Thank you! :)

  17. 2

    Have/watch 1:1, 5-min conversations about the topics you love - https://talktomeabout.xyz

    1. 2

      Hey! I think this is the second time I am encountering your product. The idea seems cool. Would be lovely to see it as a youtube video (to see it in practice) before signing up :) all the best!

  18. 2

    "Account access securely without passwords" - https://plyian.com

  19. 2

    No Code Predictive Analytics powered by Machine Learning

    https://www.mymyriad.ai

    1. 4

      Are you targeting a particular vertical or use case? Even if your solution doesn't necessarily need to target a specific use case, it seems like your customer will have a lot easier time understanding what they could use your product for and why it would be valuable to them if you target one or more specific use cases.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the feedback! Agreed.

        We're working on it. We started out way too broad and now are starting to narrow down to more specific use-cases in finance and manufacturing.

        We've been consistently pushing out updates every week so stay tuned!

    2. 3

      I agree with @drudg3. I'd also suggest changing your copy to a slightly easier text. I don't know who your ideal customer is but I have the feeling that's it's not a very technical guy. The term "machine learning" will scare people cause it sounds very complicated.

      If you need some help with copywriting you might like targetaudience.app. It's a free copywriting editor.

      1. 2

        Thanks for the feedback! Agreed. We started out way too broad and are starting to narrow down into more specific use-cases in finance and manufacturing.

        I bookmarked targetaudience! We have a little more work to do before we're planning to rewrite our copy but this will definitely be helpful. Thank you!

        1. 2

          My suggestion for starting one: pick one use case. Approach potential users in that use case and see how excited people are about it. If you can't find 5-10 folks who are excited, move on to your second favorite use case and validate that. Keep going until you find a niche that really wants this and you'll be able to expand outward from there.

          1. 1

            Bingo! That's what we're doing without even really planning for it. We've caught a little traction with a few folks each in finance (fraud detection, lending approval decision making) and manufacturing (anomaly detection, predictive maintenance). We've been working with them and a UI/UX consultant to give the whole product a makeover before we start any real marketing/sales efforts.

  20. 2

    A weekly newsletter with marketing case studies

    Zero to Marketing

    1. 2

      Nice! What is your business model?

      1. 2

        For now I’m just growing an audience. Still thinking about that 🙂

  21. 2

    yen:

    a branded community platform, fast.

    1. 2

      I like the name. Is this going to be something like Tribe.so?

      1. 1

        i do too!

        tribe.so is amazing... but, we're not nearly as big or built-out. so, no.

  22. 2

    P.S. @hessel Good luck with YC! Exciting!

  23. 2

    Hand-coding CSS and HTML UI design changes is typically 50-70% of a React developer's workload.

    Cruu automates all this.

    Cruu is a Figma-like drag and drop design tool. But with one click of a button your designs can be automatically reflected in your React project library. Never hand code again! It's magic!

    https://cruu.io

    Sae
    Co-founder of CRUU, the best darned React development tool ever invented by humanity this week.

  24. 2

    Security and user data authorization for web applications

  25. 2

    "The Wall Decor That Changes When You Do"

    beauxframes.com

  26. 2

    "Send personalized emails right from Gmail" - https://mailmeteor.com

  27. 2

    "Teammate Appreciation on Live TV Dashboards"

    What is this product all about?
    Feedback on what you have in mind when you look at the description would be great.

    If you're curious, here's a link to melbado.

  28. 2

    Building Better Team Culture

    Describes us over at ChatFox.app !

    1. 2

      Seems like a very timely product. One thing I noticed on your site that I might change -- you only used your competitors icons for the comparison table. I have no idea who any of the players in your space are, and I'd guess unless this is a super niche that means a lot of your visitors don't know who they are either. You'd probably be better off using their names (and logos too if you want). You also don't necessarily need to put this comparison on the home page if the competitors aren't very famous. Might be more useful to make separate page comparing you to the competition if you wanted to run ads targeting their branded search terms or for SEO.

      1. 2

        Thanks for the feedback!

  29. 2

    First off, great questions Hessel. Keep opening up your posts to respond haha.

    "Apprentice matching service" would most accurately describe Prentus.co

    I need to edit it to make it more compelling but that's the tough part of the 50 characters limit.

  30. 2

    End-to-end encrypted Trello

    If people don't know what Trello is (which is a lot I'm finding) I'm going "End-to-end encrypted kanban board, issue tracking and file sharing". Take a look here https://portabella.io

    1. 2

      I'd say it depends on the audience you target, whether they know Trello or not. What's your target audience right now?

      1. 2

        I guess I haven't nailed down one audience yet.

        A long term goal is to focus on university students and startups. I believe the younger generation is much more focused on privacy. Over time they will require more and more tools, I hope that they default to falling back on privacy preserving ones.

        Immediately I'm happy to take anyone that already uses something like Trello, I've built an "Import from Trello" feature to try and target that market. I guess I should build a couple more integrations like that

        1. 3

          If I may... I don't think you should focus on university students. They are a totally different target market than startup founders. I think a lot of students have no clue what end-to-end encryption even means. Here's my advice:

          • Which target market do you like or maybe love? Do you like hanging around on entrepreneurial websites like this one? Or do you know where to find the university students online and do you like to hang out there?
          • Where can you add the most value and knowledge? To founders or to students?
          • Which target market has more money in their pocket? In the end, this is one of the biggest reasons to go for a target audience or not. When I was in university I'd never pay for a tool to use for projects related to university.

          Perhaps you can find a way to talk to @markosaric the founder of plausible.io. I think your idea and his, share some similarities. Take a look at who he targets and how he's growing his idea.

    2. 2

      Nice idea! Looks "safer" than Trello! Specially if you are planning to launch rocket into space! 🤔

      1. 2

        Kelyst is definitely onto something. What are the verticals / use cases where project managers would be most concerned about security? Instead of talking about the how, you might be better off talking about the benefit in your headline (depending on who you're selling to).

        For example: "Project management for the security conscious teams" or "Project management software you can trust with your secrets" or "A better way to manage top secret projects" or even just targeting a specific vertical.

        Your current page is not bad, it just left me wondering, why should I care about end to end encryption for my project management tool? Who is this for?

        1. 3

          Adding on to what I just wrote, I'm not sure I want to be promoting the aspect of secrecy. I want people to default to secure platforms, no matter what they are doing.

          But thanks your comment has given me a lot to think about.

        2. 3

          Thanks! This is great feedback, definitely going to steal one of those headlines and elaborate on it some more.

          I guess I do need to focus on a specific niche and go from there, my lofty goals of an end-to-end encrypted future need to start small.

  31. 1

    Unique, high-impact names for startups.
    https://zlipa.com

  32. 1

    Ease of use mobile app store intelligence https://appstorespy.com/

  33. 1

    A game to promote yourself and your work: kingdom.so

  34. 1

    Nanoparticle concentration and size measurement.

    (Not an indie hacker company, though, but my main occupation for the past year)

  35. 1

    A simple feedback collection tool. -- https://kritikos.app

  36. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  37. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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