How We Got Our First Paying Users
TL;DR We launched with minimal features. Our landing page encouraged users to try our tool straight away. We marketed to many different platforms. We listened to our early users and built a Pro plan accordingly. We began a content marketing strategy and then listed on Product Hunt. Last week we hit our biggest milestone to date. We earned our first dollars. It’s a milestone which many products go without. A milestone which many start-ups go without. I encourage every product to reach it as soon as possible because it’s a pivotal point in every product’s lifetime. It’s a significant point of idea validation and in all honesty, there were times we thought we’d never get there. But we did, and for all of you on your own journey out there, here are some lessons we learned: Allow visitors to play with your product as soon as possible From the get-go, we built tiiny.host to be as simple and straightforward to use as possible. We had no “landing page” per se, and rather than building a market
tiiny.host
congrats! love your breakdown of the different communities you invested in to initially validate your customer base... "slack communities are like speakeasies". have you seen a couple of the communities stand out above the rest?
Check out the Indie London community, very helpful
I absolutely love the minimal approach. Saw it on PH the other day and have been raving about it since.
In fact, I thought about going a similar approach with a product I have in mind for the future, but now as I read your post I'm thinking about changing the landing page that I'm currently building for our most recent product. I will try for sure if this can work for us as well...
Also, the blog post was a great read. Well written and some interesting insights. Thanks for that.
Oh, and congrats on the milestone!
Oh wow thank you for your kind words! I'm really really glad you liked the post. It's actually my first proper post. Glad its helped at least one fellow IH :)
May I ask how you could see yourself using the tool? Trying to gather as much feedback as possible right now.
Thanks again!
Congrats on the milestone :)
Thank you!
Cool idea, congrats! It is a real issue to host static web pages. When I need a static page, usually, I upload it to AWS S3, but tiiny.host is a much better/quicker option.
I love the apps where you can try them quickly without dealing with boring stuff like register, verifications, etc.
Feedback:
Amazing feedback, thank you! Curious - what kind of static pages do you generally work on?
This seems like a nice replacement for people who are used to managing their sites through FTP and don't really know about git.
Feedback:
Awesome feedback!! Thank you, will improve that. I was actually trying to highlight plus monthly as the recommended plan but will rethink that.
Yup that's exactly what I wanted to build. The simplest web hosting solution out there. Glad its come across :)
The font size change is too subtle to be highlight and just large enough to be mistaken as a css error.
Love the minimal approach of the product. Thanks for sharing the insights, very helpful!
You're welcome! Thanks for the compliments. Definitely still figuring out the whole growth thing. I'm really bad at it but I've realised that a few key things and perseverance gets you a long way.
Helpful! Thanks & All the very best
You're welcome, thank you!
Very cool. Thanks for sharing man
Thanks man, no worries. Hope it helps a few :)
Absolutely love this. Huge developer oriented feature would be a simple CLI tool for uploading + updating.
This kind of project is awesome for easily showing internal teams incremental builds of a product.
Congrats! I remember your site from quite some time ago and am happy to see you kept going.
Thank you! Hasn't been easy but chugging along.
Awesome
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Thanks for the kind words! En-route!