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Got my first paying customer!

After working for few months on the side for https://btfy.io. I got my first paying customer on a lifetime deal. This is my first try on creating a product. I love that someone is trusting it beside me :).

I also love that he suggested some features that he wanted. Looking forward for more paying customers in the future.

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    Depending on the product you make, you should comply with its security regulations. Otherwise, you might be charged with lawsuits or subpoenas. You can read more about this risk here https://www.natlawreview.com/article/what-to-do-when-you-receive-congressional-subpoena. It also tells you what you should do in this kind of situation. My dad used to have a car dealership but didn't complete all the security measurements, and this was the cause that got him sued. Since then, we have been all super careful with our businesses.

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    This is a fantastic news @ajvillalobos - would love to hear your stories :)

    1. 1

      Thank you Felix. Slow progress but still progress!

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    @ajvillalobos Good luck! One very important thing I'd say is : Add a canary statement

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      Hey Alik, what do you mean by canary statement?

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        Your product focuses on privacy (and indirectly security, as you can't have privacy without security). As a user, how would I know whether your company been served with a government subpoena? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

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    Congrats & All the best forward!

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    Congrats! That's what we are working on with our Nara app. Hope we will get there one day.

    1. 1

      Best of luck to you too!

  6. 1

    congrats! your app looks great. Did you do all the designs?

    1. 1

      Not currently, I used a theme here to bootstrap pun intended my app :)

  7. 1

    boom boom pow! great job

  8. 1

    Kudos @ajvillalobos! I just saw the btfy website, great work on the design!

    *Sharing this from my experience of building ruttl.com - Keep listening to the feedback your users give you, it might just include the next feature that might skyrocket your product.

    Keep updating the community!
    Cheers!

    1. 1

      Thank you Harsh! That is a good advice. When I started working on Btfy, it was really simple use-case for me and I can't really thought of the other features I added recently by myself :)

    1. 2

      Hey marko! Thank you!

      I owe it big time to Plausible when I shifted to a privacy-focused link shortener. Your articles convinced me that this is the way :)

      1. 1

        thanks for the kind words! i appreciate it and wish you all the best in getting many more customers!

  9. 1

    Hey congrats! I know the feeling and it's awesome!

    Do you notice any fraudulent activity with credit cards (fake cards, mass verifications, etc.)? I ask because one of my first customers was a fraud using a stolen card and my payment processor asked me to refund the money. I was totally bummed out.

    1. 1

      Oh man! My first customer has already a business also so I’m not thinking about that, but will monitor for any new paying customers. Thanks for the notice!

  10. 1

    Congrats, keep up the great work, it all started with one paying customer!

  11. 1

    Congrats, that first paying customer is such a great feeling!

    1. 1

      Thank you! Yes for real @jmclarke :)

  12. 1

    This is a cool concept. Glad to see more products in the privacy-first space.

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    Congratulations!

    How do you provide so much tracking and analytics without cookies?

    1. 1

      Hey Jay, we use a combination of daily salt + user ip + user user-agent, we encrypt it and associate the visit to that encrypted hash. We delete the old salt every day so that we cannot associate a user of a previous day to the current day. We don't store the user IP or user user-agent on our database.

      You can check out our privacy page https://btfy.io/privacy on how we use your data.

  14. 1

    Wow, that is amazing news.

    When was the first date that you started your project? And what date did you get your first paying customer?

    I'd love to know the time it took to get that first customer.

    1. 1

      Hey @youngchingjui, I've been working on this for a 2 months now. I did a soft launch on a facebook group. I gave a 1 year free plan to the group and got lots of feedback. That's when I got this customer to try out the product. He actually suggested some features he wanted to see in the app and that got me excited so I implemented those features in few days, let him know and he was happy.

      What's funny actually is that he message me because he's getting redirected to the billing page. Few weeks ago I rework my billing code and that means the old plans are not working anymore (1 year free plan I gave them) and I told him I will cancel your old plan and move you to the new plan with the free 1 year plan still. But he told me he wanted to get the lifetime deal I have since he loves the app and like how I am talking to him and responding.

      So yeah, that was it! I'm pretty stoked right now :)

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        I appreciate the lifetime plan option. Seems you set it at about 3x the annual rate, which seems reasonable to me.

        I have a theory that people are getting tired of the monthly billing thing-a-ma-bob, and they just want to pay once and use the product.

        Great inspiration!

        1. 1

          Thanks! I was actually not sure how to price the lifetime plan. I checked out other makers and I figured if a customer stayed with me for 3 years I should reward them :)

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