How COVID-19 killed our company and side-project resurrected

🦠 We've been working on marketing automation for event promotion. A few dozens of $k MRR. In February 2020 all customers stopped projects and payments.

💡 The craziest (the only) idea we had was to try to launch our internal tool for Jira Issues prioritization—Ducalis. It was a simple yet powerful and essential tool for planning our development, marketing, and strategy.

📊 We used that tool for more than a year internally. We had no plans for public release due to focusing on the event industry. Also, we thought there was no need for a prioritization tool as everybody has no problem, and we are the last team in the world struggling with issue prioritization.

🎯 The landing page for Ducalis and announcement article about the product and how we benefited from it were prepared in four hours. The goal was to get 5 form submissions. The announcement was on March 16th on my Facebook page, Medium, and a few startup websites.

🚀 In the first week, we got 160 demo requests!!!

🎉 The feedback from customer interviews was overwhelmingly positive. Product managers and scrum-masters started recommending Ducalis.io to each other. Even several Agile communities shared the link for free and without us requesting.

😅 The team spent tens of hours talking to the first clients from banks, famous startups, one of the largest car manufacturers in the world, and even a product manager from Atlassian itself (the developers of Jira).

🤩 One of Atlassian communities reached us out to run a webinar about our Dicalis and our story about prioritization struggles. There were 92 attendees.

🥳 In one week, our company moved from a near-death experience to a super active growth phase with a product around a vast pressure point—issue prioritizations and team synchronization.

Previous product: Tendee.io — digital marketing automation for the event industry.

The new product: Ducalis.io — Jira Issue prioritization and team sync on company goals.

The full story: In the blog at GoPractice.io, with lessons, corporations of different products and industries.

P.s. sorry I don't have enough reputation at Indie Hackers to post links.