How I got Domus to its first 25 beta users!

The Idea
Hi All, I'm Steven the creator of godomus.com a lean property management system. Working in proptech I used some of the biggest property management systems in the industry such as Yardi, Real Page, RentManager, and others. These PMS are a great fit for big commercial real estate but not so much for people with small portfolios. These PMS are bloated with features, build on top of old technology, and not necessarily a good fit for someone that owns a property and rents a couple of floors. I decided to find out if there was a need for something leaner and the feedback I received guided me.

Testing the hypothesis

I started searching for online communities related to property management. The most active online communities were on Reddit and Slack. I would then go and share with the community what I had in mind and if they thought there would be a market for it. This is an example of a Reddit post where I tried to see if there was an interest. I noticed there was a niche market and decided to take action!

Taking Action

After noticing some interest in the discussions on property management online communities. I came up with an idea to create this Airtable form with a couple of questions. I wanted to hear about people's problems. what was it that they were struggling with when managing their properties? I also requested their email and personal information, this was a great piece of information because if someone was willing to take the time to share their email and info with me, this meant that they really were interested and they would make great first users. I share the Airtable form everywhere I could.

Problems

With anti-spam filters, online many of the posts I created inviting people to join the private beta for Domus were taken down. This created a problem for me since it was a roadblock to getting to users and inviting them to test out the private beta. However, I noticed questions on the subreddits and decided to engage with the community. Whenever I noticed a post or comment asking for software for managing their properties I would reply and invite them to chat. This led to 30+ people signing up to test godomus.com

Building Domus
I was so inspired after the signups that I started working on Domus right away. For the MVP I used Ruby on Rails, Tailwind, Stimulus JS, and Hotwire. This is a perfect stack in my opinion for building something fast and powerful. For the infrastructure, I have two docker containers running on an EC2 instance. One container is for the Rails application and the other one is for the NGINX proxy. I also used Cloudflare for the SSL and it has been great so far.

Inviting People from the List
Once I had godomus.com live I decided to invite users who seemed like a good fit for the private beta. Out of the 34 people who signed up and submitted the form I decided to only invite 25. I think that the perfect fit for the private beta was people who were not using software and fixing these problems being resourceful. Users that used pen and paper, google sheets, excel sheets, or that hated the UX of the big commercial software. I then send each user login credentials over email. I thanked them and asked them to keep a line of communication open with me.

Help Me Make Domus Better
If you are interested in using a lean property management system or would like to give me some feedback on the UX/UI, please fill out this form https://airtable.com/shrFggf3GdqotqC8x. I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions you might have.

Ship It!
I want to thank everyone who has helped me! It's amazing to see how the community has been able to guide me and support me on Slack, Twitter, Indiehackers, Reddit, and so on! Thank you also if you took the time to read this. If you are working on something ship it, it doesn't matter if is a crappy web app, ship it and iterate until you are unstoppable. Drop me a comment if you would like to connect!