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Feedback: We reached $20K MRR, time for the next step. What do you think about this lead gen approach?

Hi folks!

I’m pretty new to this community. First came in contact with IH when someone posted our first landing page, Docpso, here. It got bashed quite hard, but the feedback was great and we have tried to implement this on our new landing page that will be released next week.

Short background: Docspo has been a side project that we started in Sweden 2 years ago. We have managed to build up a solid base of users here (reached $20K MRR a month ago) that supports our small team of 5 to now do this full time, which is really fun.

We are looking at how we can branch out to more markets and have created a free to use online editor, where you can create and preview interactive proposals and agreements without an account. Right now an account is needed to send the proposal but we want to do a free version where it is possible to also send the proposal without an account (via a shareable link).

Our goal is to use this as a way to generate leads where users that only send proposals occasionally can use the open and free editor, but users that has higher demands (like reusing templates, sending as text and working in teams etc.) are encouraged to open an account

We bought the domain proposal.new that we want to use for this project. The idea being as just as anyone can type docs.new to create a google doc or sheet.new to create a spreadsheet. You will be able to type proposal.new to create a proposal. Our site is not up on proposal.new yet but can be found here: https://app.docspo.com/createDocument. (As stated above: you can edit, and preview without an account, sending it will requires account)

My main concerns with this idea is:

  • Will users trust a minimal site such as proposal.new?
  • Is the editor easy enough to use, or do we need to add some sort of on boarding process?

Really really thankful for any feedback/critique or thoughts on both concept and editor 🙏

  1. 2

    I think proposal.new is totally fine. Although, I think it would be better to keep it under "docspo". Doesn't matter either way in my opinion.

    On the app, it looks great. Only thing is I added a sender name but it didn't show up in the preview. Was still seeing "{{companyUser.FullName}}."

    1. 1

      Super nice of you to share your thoughts. We have also discussed that the two brands could cause some confusion. I think it will be very important how the difference is communicated. We really want proposal.new to be an easy tool to use if you occasionally send a proposal or two, but for users that want to save templates, reuse previous sent documents etc. we want to direct them(or convert them over) to docspo.com.

      That sounds like a bug, thanks for highlighting that - gonna check it out asap!

  2. 1

    Hey. Completely unrelated to your post but there's a typo 75% of the way down your landing page. Ctrl + f search "using using"

    1. 1

      Thank you for pointing that out!

  3. 1

    Congrats on the success!

    This sounds like an idea worth testing. I don't think anyone knows if it will work but it seems like a good way to generate some interest because you're giving something away of value. I could see this doing well on producthunt.

    Will users trust a minimal site such as proposal.new? - Enough will, imo.

    Is the editor easy enough to use, or do we need to add some sort of on boarding process? - It seems easy enough but I didn't play around with it much. I usually have a templated proposal that I edit then use an esignature tool like docusign or pandadoc to send out. For me, and this is one person, a free esignature tool that makes it easy to add fields and get signatures done is what I really like. Pandadoc has a very solid free offering for this.

    1. 1

      Really appreciate that you took the time to check it out and share your inputs! Thank you!

      Regarding the templated proposal. We have this idea that we would like to give the option when you enter proposal.new to either use the editor above or upload a template of your own.

      Here are some mockups on how we are thinking that could look: https://imgur.com/a/LFBEhlL

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