How would you grow this?
This is an opportunity to get and give help in growing your indie hacker products.
Here's what you need to do:
- Post a link to a project and provide a few words of what you have been doing to grow your product. It would be helpful to include challenges you've had and what has or hasn't worked.
- Because this community is about giving back too, please comment on someone else's post with growth support and ideas.
Over to you!
Trending on Indie Hackers
I am building EatTheBlocks, a course to become a Blockchain developer.
My main customer acquisition channel is my youtube channel. I convert leads to customers with an email sequence.
Until very recently things were looking up great, and I really thought I was about to live off my business. However the conversion rate dropped violently from mid-february and sales decreased by 50pct in March. April is set to repeat that or even worse. That would be as many sales as a few month ago when I had 5 times less views on youtube. I have several potential explanations:
Anyway, before that disaster, here are the things that worked and didn't.
Things that have worked:
Things that haven't worked:
Going forward here are things I am trying:
I think March was a tough one for many people.
I wonder if it's worth offering a lower priced course? Or if it is possible to take a part of your overall course and offer it at a lower price?
Also, I would take questions and discussions from the Facebook group and turn them into content, or somehow include them in the YouTube videos you do.
Thanks those are great ideas :)
For my main course, I don't really want to make it cheaper because I already made a mental shift from a low price / lots of customers strategy to a high price / few customers strategy.
This came after I realized it would be more difficult to get lots of customers than to sell expensive products.
However yes I am considering other products that are cheaper.
For the Facebook group, so far it's been fantastic. Members need to answer some questions before joining and it gave me so many ideas for fb videos.
One of my side projects - Open Startup List is getting some love by people around the world 🧡
I'm doing interviews with the founders of those startups, but obviously it can't scale.
How would you grow this? What is the potential here?
Can you say more about the insights? what value that provides to me? I like the idea but can that get more specific right away?
Once you have those insights, can you send them to people who ask for that specifically ?
Thanks for pointing this out, so if I will figure what is the insights I can gain and share with people, then I will have something people want and possibly pay for.
What would be a good path to explore what insights except interviewing founders I can gain?
A friend is building this - https://www.tiro.app/
I don't know if you're looking for new projects to feature, but he is how I learned about the Open Startup thing.
Stay focused on building relationships with any company you can find that fits the inclusion criteria. I believe some European countries require private companies to release information on revenue, so I assume there's a big enough market. Following this COVID-19 furlough, I see a lot of job candidates wanting more transparency from their future employers. You could become the "Hired" platform of this niche - see if these companies will pay to post a job on your website to see if there's a market.
I love open startup list! Just recently I took a detailed look at the nomad list metrics to have some sort of reference. I think you could perfectly well start a community from that, the question is just what type of community. I'm not sure if you can monetize the actual data since that would be contradictory to the "open" startup
Hi, I'm glad to hear that you like it :) Also another point is that these open startups are quite small in numbers (compared to total indie hacker projects out there). I need to figure if there are insights to be extracted from the list (except the interviews I'm doing now).
I'm building Nodewood, a SaaS starter kit designed to save tons of time usually wasted writing boilerplate user/subscription/etc code.
Normally when I build something, I leave the marketing until well after it's complete, and regret it as traction is hard to find and kinda depressing to deal with when you're "done" and don't have the buzz of still working on the interesting starter problems. This time, I have a landing page & email list set up well in advance. I'm still a few months out, but I'm splitting my time between working on Nodewood and working on getting traffic/interest.
So far, I've been trying to promote and be helpful on IH and Hacker News, started working on a combination of business & technical blog posts on my personal site to lead back to Nodewood, and lightly researching keywords and competitor marketing to see what works for them and may work for me.
Nothing has really "stuck" quite yet, but I think a part of that is worrying that, because it's not ready, any interest I get is "early" and either not deserved or wasted. That's a mindset shift I have to make, as much as anything else, but I also need to experiment more broadly with marketing ideas.
I checked out your website and first of all, it looks awesome. However I think for most startups that 295 price is a little bit steep. Maybe keep that as a premium option and add in a medium tier. Also I would recommend that you switch to a monthly model, easier for both you and the customers. Secondly maybe add in like a $5 per month option with super easy boilerplate things but keep out some other important features like stripe integration. Thats just my two-cents though
Thanks for checking it out! At $295, I'm actually much cheaper than most of my competitors, so I'm already pricing downmarket (for now). The problem with running it as a monthly service is that you get a giant chunk of code that you build from - if you paid monthly, there would be no real incentive to stay beyond the first month, so a $5/month subscription would likely turn into a flat $5 - a sixtieth of the value otherwise!
From your comments and others I'm seeing, though, I may not be explaining what Nodewood is correctly, though. I was going to wait until I had more documentation available to see if that did the job of explaining how it worked, but maybe I'll go in and clean up the explanation of exactly what kind of product it is in the meantime. Thanks again!
I dont think 295 USD is a problem indeed.
A product save or make money to customers. Yours save them the 10's of developer hours needed to create boilerplate code.
You could highlight this cost saving in your landing page, and in comparison the price of your product would look cheap.
That's a solid idea - I'll definitely put some thought into that when I update the landing page, thanks!
I think you're taking the right approach. Build it and they will come doesn't always work. Keep doing what you're doing.
Thanks!
Okay question related to how to grow your business: is reaching out to business students a good idea? They always have business ideas and would need or could use a tool like this to build their own product (I myself also did business, even though I have an IT background)
Probably not a bad idea. They'd still need coding experience or to have a coding co-founder, but it would definitely save them time launching their ideas. Thanks!
That’s true
I checked your website, I don’t have a problem with your price or design (nice clean layout 👏)
I would love to see a video demo.
Maybe you are already on to this. 👊
How's your landing page and email list converting?
Pricing-wise I'd keep it the same or raise prices.
An idea is to create an email course that teaches people how to make a SaaS in node. Show them how to DIY some of what Nodewood does and then show them how Nodewood removes the friction to getting started.
The landing page doesn't get a lot of traffic, but I'm getting a few newsletter signups. The traffic isn't exactly well-targeted, though, as a lot of people visiting are fellow IH users or founders looking to provide advice or in solidarity. It's hard to know what percentage of the traffic that hits the page is actually people interested in the service.
I'm working on a blog post that shows the long list of things you need to code yourself when starting a SaaS. I'd hoped to have it out this week, but the more I work on it, the more I think it benefits from becoming one of those "ultimate guide to" posts that are ideally evergreen content. Compared to doing all that, Nodewood is a bargain, yeah.
I intend to raise prices as I add features, which means getting in at the start is a bargain, since you get a year of updates with the purchase and discounts on adding additional years. Thanks for the advice and confirmation there!
Also consider anchoring the pricing to what it would take to hire a freelancer to do it.
This is something very interesting to developers. But I think there should be a video on how to use it.
Is this for web development only? It's not clear on the website?
You're not wrong - I do want to have a video showing how to use it, I'm just still too early in the development for that video to be properly representative of how it works. I'll definitely add that as I go along.
Also, thanks, I do definitely have to clear up my positioning. Nodewood is web only, yes (though there's no reason you can't make mobile web apps).
Nice! Have you thought about selling pieces of this: React components/Themes built on your starter on marketplaces like Envato? This way you also get a word out about your product (have a made with nodewood footer etc) while potentially monetizing.
I haven't thought about that, no! It's entirely possible I could split out the Nodewood base Vue application and use that to direct traffic! It'd be a bit of a project, though, since it's not really built to be split out, but that's definitely something I'll save in my pocket for when it goes live and I have a little more free time to try to identify how to promote it better, thanks!
On the side I've been working on growing my community building newsletter.
Link: https://rosieland.substack.com/
@rosiesherry you are a BEAST with community building! I've been on IH for less than a week and am already addicted. Keep up the great work and I'll be sure to check out your new substack. 💪
Hah, never been referred to as a BEAST, I'll take it, thank you. 😍🤣
Just shared with my friends who work in the space (they made the community canvas https://community-canvas.org/)! Sounds right up their alley!
@rosiesherry ...your work is phenomenal.
You've done any PPC ?
Thanks...I've never been interested in advertising :)
I found Substack to be a similar thing. I shared posts about books I'd been reading here – It was generally fun but I found I ended up reading things purely because I knew my subscribers would respond positively.
Anyway:
I think I'd probably try to make an interview with a subscriber a staple of your mailing list. When someone signs up, send them an email with a simple survey (ahem) asking them to fill out a couple of questions about themselves if they'd like to be featured.
When their interview is published, encourage them to share the Substack post with their communities.
Nice idea, and, ahem, I'll give it some thought!
OK, I'll bite 😁 getscrapbook.com
Scrapbook is a growth tactics database for marketers and makers.
Haven't done much so far aside from introducing the product to relevant communities like IH, Slack groups, a couple subreddits, and engaging in twitter conversations. Also, reached out to my network of other growth marketers.
This is awesome.
In the long run, I'd focus on long-tail SEO. Separate pages for things like SaaS growth ideas, e-commerce growth ideas, agency growth ideas etc could be automatically generated and would bring in low-volume, but high intent traffic. You could get even more long-tail and have pages for things like "saas content marketing ideas."
Takes time to work though!
Cool, thanks ;)
Consider doing what Jared Codling did with http://topfuckingsecret.com/ (use 639429 to enter). He has split his growth hacks into "levels" and to get access to each level you can either refer friends or pay. This generates a nice viral loop and brings in more people.
So much so that I would actually consider setting reasonable limits on referrals, so that people could easily get access to everything instead of having to pay.
And on top of the audience that you will build this way you can launch a premium community with a monthly fee, where people can discuss these growth hacks, bounce ideas, etc.
Tim Soulo on IH 😮 Haha good to see you here!
The idea of creating a loop is brilliant. A bit more complex to build than my no-code solution but with definitely a big potential. Thanks for dropping this tip!
Not of a fan of the term 'hack' though ;)
I would go on podcasts specifically for founders and give away some of the ideas in detail, and plug your full product.
Cool, I like that ;)
Hey, this is nice! I've been putting together my own list for quite some time but see that you have way more things in yours so I just bought it...
One question: Can I make a copy of this file? I would prefer that just in case I ever lose access to yours. Not sure how to go about doing that.
Thank you. Sending you an email.
Perhaps add more Call To Actions on your landing page? I scrolled a lot and one saw one, which was at the top.
From session recordings and heatmaps that's not an issue at all. Thanks for the tip though ;)
Feature request tracking & public roadmap tool - www.noorahq.com
We launched a month or so back - but we're still struggling to get a foothold with initial users besides direct contacts we had before. We've had a fair number of visitors to our homepage but a low signup conversion rate. We recently launched Google sign-on to make it easier to create an account, but still need to move this across to our landing pages.
We've mainly focused on posting in communities like this, but I'm considering doing direct outreach on LinkedIn. Would love to hear people's thoughts - should we consider a free plan for example?
You should definitely do a "free for open source projects" plan. Then just write an email to the contributors of all the major open source project collaborators and see if the demand is there. If you can get one big open source project to use your service, even if its for free, you'll get a ton of users.
Great product!
I'd move the "See it in action" closer to your hero section. That's the first thing I looked for when I opened your landing page but it feels hidden at the bottom.
This is completely opinionated, but you could also move the use cases links to the header instead of the footer to highlight them.
A free plan here would be great. If I really like this app, but there is no free plan, I'd be hesitant to use it until I generate some revenue from my project. If I'm just starting out, chances are there won't be many (or any) feature requests anytime soon. I can't justify paying anything until I start to receive feature requests. You could have a very limited free plan to get people onboarded, and as their needs scale, they can upgrade to a paid plan. I know I would.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the reply!
I agree that a free plan would probably help initial adoption. It is a big ask for people to commit to a platform like this after just a 14 day trial. What I'm considering is offering a free plan that allows a limited number of admins, boards and users. So you are able to use it for smaller projects until they develop into something larger.
LOVE THIS! Bug tracking is a hot space, tons of opportunity $$$
What are your primary customer acquisition strategies? Have you only been posting in groups?
Based on what I can see, here's what I'd do first:
Step 1: I'd advise learning as much as you can from your current clients to find out how to get more of them i.e. find patterns in buyer personas, find out what they needed to do to buy, why did they sign up, what do they want more of, etc. Look at what you did to close them. Find patterns. Make a https://www.typeform.com/pricing/ survey with an incentive so you can start to gather customer feedback/learnings - 'Hey Software Engineers: I'll Pay You $100 For Your Feedback', something like that. Get as many folks to respond as you can afford. You could even offer free access to your platform for a year. This feedback will help answer a lot of your questions. Make a similar survey for folks that churn. Get their feedback.
Step 2: I'd advise making a 14-day trial that requires a credit card and 2-3 subscription types. Don't overthink the pricing and features. Write it out on paper - make sure it's lower in price than your competitors and makes sense from a bottom-line perspective. At this stage, time is too valuable to waste time with folks that just want free shit.
Step 3: Pay for google search advertising and target your competitor's names as keywords. This will help you find the bottom of the funnel leads i.e. leads that want to buy NOW. At this stage, that's who I would optimize for first.
Rinse and repeat.
You're a self-serve tool, so emulate what other GOOD self-serve tools are doing.
Hope this helps!
High-end CBD brand: www.rejuviamedical.com
We've been seeing growth as we lower the barrier to trial. our products are relatively expensive, so we've doing more free trials and things like that.
One of the challenges we've been faced with is advertising. We still cant advertise on social medias (unless we slip through the cracks) so we've had to rely on reviews, testimonials and unconventional ways of advertising
Yeah I agree...traditional advertising is probably not the way to go. Facebook Groups should be helpful for what you are trying to accomplish.
Agreed - thanks for the recommendation.
Probably the best way to grow this is to do the things that don't scale. Find the niche communities online that would use this product, then slowly build a reputation up with them. Recommend the products in correct situations.
Agreed - any recommendations for platforms or relevant online communities?
Well from what I know CBD is used to help calm people down? Based on that, maybe a community for people with anxiety. I'm sure there are communities for insomniac people, which this could help.
Reflection.app (https://www.reflection.app/) offers a better way to journal.
We help you start a meaningful reflection practice with an online journal that guides your personal growth each month.
We have spent the last 4 months in beta - validating our product and making updates. We now have about 2,500 users. We are excited to start marketing starting in the coming weeks!
I saw this thread and thought it's a great one to follow, and learn learn from those who have been there before :-)
I like your product - people have been keeping journals for centuries. The same issue remains though - privacy. I would love to offer you a 30 day free SEO as we are starting a growth hacking agency and need case studies - https://www.uperso.com/campaigns/seo
2.5k users is really impressive. How have you grown your user base?
Thanks Glenn! We are pretty lucky in that Holstee (www.holstee.com) my first company, has a pretty large and established community since we have been in business for about 10 years and one of our first products when viral in 2012 (www.holstee.com/manifesto). But Holstee focuses mostly on physical products, Reflection.app is our first digital-first project. We are pretty new to the B2C SaaS landscape so I wanna learn as much as possible on what it takes to launch a successful digital product. So much wisdom in this community!
hi Guys, I'm building an AI bot that makes it easier to find, curate and discover knowledge from conversation threads in Slack - https://launch.ariv.ai
We put up a pre-launch site, and started accepting sign ups for a wait list about a week ago, and after tapping up our collective personal networks, friends family and fools. we've got 25 sign ups. Honestly thought that we'd get much more.
Post the initial out reach to our 1st degree networks to see if we can get some sort of viral loop going we are now starting to talk about why we built Ariv in relevant communities and discussion threads. With a Product Hunt launch looming, I'm beginning to think about anything else that we could or should be doing. Any help from the Indie community will be highly appreciated.
The target market is Slack Communities and workspace admins, so far we are going on word of mouth, so any ideas on how to scale this outreach would really help.
I am working on Search Remotely which is an online platform for remote workers.
https://searchremotely.com
Currently focused on user experience, web development and social media marketing.
Awesome one!
I'm building www.probstack.io for makers who are looking for problems worth solving and some inpiration to start their next one.
The reception has been great and am working to onboard more users. One thing I'm doing additionally is bringing offline users to our online community to share their problems which is working quite well. Founders/CEO's are finding this helpful already and speaking to companies on how we can help inspire their product teams!
Challenge is reach! I know 90% of makers would def. love to find problems worth solving and many other would like to validate a problem they think has the potential on our platform. But being a bootstrapped startup, don't have big budgets for marketing.
So, SEO, word of mouth & social shares are the key focus and we are getting there.. Crossed 200 subscribers post 3 days of launch and will hit 1k soon. Daily traffic has been good too with 1k page views and around 400 new users daily with an active users of 150 in the first week.
Let me know your thoughts on this! and how would you grow this - I'm thinking of adding an inspiration corner to showcase what other startups are solving and how they did their initial validation etc. Thanks
Also, founded www.howsitlike.com
I'm building Wordcraft with a linguist / teacher. It is an educational game that teaches students vocabulary and reading comprehension using the latin and greek roots of language.
We spend most of our time on product development and very little time on growth. We have a small core group of users that love us, and recommend us to their friends, but word of mouth has only increased our growth so far.
We tried selling our webapp to schools and teachers but that was like trying to push a boulder up a hill and we gave up. Teachers don't have much money and we're happy giving away the product for free. Eventually we'll make a paid mobile app.
I'm writing Cracking the Coding Career, a self published ebook of career advice. I have a medium sized Twitter audience, but don't really have a landing page beyond Gumroad. I have a personal mailing list of about 500, but also don't know if I should set up a separate one. I've made a little over $3k in presales.
any tips leading up to launch and plans for postlaunch are appreciated! first product so am pretty nervous.
I'm currently building https://cuddy.app - Cuddy helps you find people doing the same online course so you can learn and grow together. About 3 weeks ago I created a landing page with a newsletter form and within a week or so about 180 people signed up. Then I launched an MVP on discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/3YJRR7T) to test if users actually want to find buddies and apparently they do. 2 hours ago I launched https://my.cuddy.app and sent an email to all the subscribers telling them about that the site is now fully launched. In my opinion this whole thing feels like it won't work but people (alas very few right now) seem like they want it. I'm not sure if this is worth pursuing and how I would attract more users or even what the business model could be, so how would I grow this?
I actually like the concept and the product, don't give up just yet. Free growth hack: find online learning groups and communities ( Facebook and Reddit to say the least) - there are hundreds of them with thousands of users; don't peach them the idea on front, ask if people would like to have a study partner who keeps accountable. Try IT certification groups as well...IM me if you need help finding them
I've built Sima, a service that manages loans between users. I made it because I wanted a tool to lend my friend a few thousand to refinance his student loans.
It gives you:
We have about 30 users and facilitated roughly $20,000 in loans... and we have no clue how to get more users.
Who are the 30 users? Speak to them if you can. What have they been doing loans for? How has it helped them?
You say you've done $20k in loans, but the screenshot on the website shows someone with a single and nearly $20k loan. As a user I'm not sure whether this applies to me. And then all of a sudden I feel like I'm such a loser because there are people with all this cash that can just go out and lend money.
How much can I loan/borrow? Who is doing this? What situations is it good for? What are some example stories/situations that people have borrowed/lent money?
Also, listen to this - https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/154-rob-fitzpatrick-of-the-mom-test
:)
Ah, that screenshot was a test user, and we show loans people have linked on their profiles. (So if you added a $20k student loan, it's on your profile, but we're not making money facilitating it for you.)
These are all great questions!! I'll work on the landing page to make that info clear.
Thanks so much for facilitating this thread! If you want to give it a spin post a link to your profile and I'll send you a loan.
We (a group of engineers) are working on https://www.horizontech.dev to mentor freshers who are trying to get into the software world. Mostly our skillset is on a specific topic. Eg. Infra, DevOps, but some of our students want mentorship in JS, Python. One of the biggest challenges is finding more mentors with those skill sets.
So, if you can advise me on ideas to attract more mentors that would be great.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
That’s a good idea.
http://designodom.com - UK focused marketplace matching clients with architects and interior designers as well as design products (furniture, accessories, lighting, etc).
So far we've been doing mostly content and this has brought rankings and leads but nothing spectacular.
Any ideas will be appreciated!
I am building https://grbusinessforum.com/ which is the first community for business in Greece.
These are my actions for attracting people to my site:
I invited some people that i know from other forums (i have been a member of other forums for more than 10 years) .
I built a twitter profile with my website name and i currently have ~1700 followers. I mainly share news and articles from other websites, and occasionally i make a post with a direct link to my website. In the future, i will only post links-news-articles to my website. Presently i am happy with the familiarity and brand awareness that i gain from my twitter followers. I also want to increase my followers as much as possible.
I continue to participate in other forums and i occassionally post some links to my forum, eg when someone asks for specific questions and there is a lot of stuff in my forum about this, etc
I try to increase my SEO and my content on a daily basis. My plan is long term and i know that forums need a lot of time to become big. However i am happy with what i am doing, because the second reason that i built this forum was to increase my development skills, so even if the forum fails, i will still be happy because of the experience i gained
In December i created a "competition" and gave some prices to top 3 posters of the month
My main problem is that there is some development stuff more to be done, so i invest a lot of time on this. If there was no such stuff (i hope it will happen in the future) i would invest a lot of time to write some articles, to interview people, and generally to increase the content of the forum.
I would be happy to hear any feedback from you
Regards
I'm building a site where people can get aggregated reviews of beauty routines. I'm starying with curly hair since there aren't many solutions in this space. https://fullreign.com/
Right now this is manual and I'm having people take a quiz. I search for reviews online and find people with similar hair as them and provide them with a recommendation of what could work. The biggest challenge is figuring out what the MVP should be.
My company:
I am in the email delivery space, similar to Mailgun, Sendgrid and Postmark.
How would you grow a business like this?
I have been working on my Google organic growth.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank you for your feedback. 👊
Wow! This is actually great :) I'm always trying to look for cheap ways to send email. Do you think it's possible to find people who follow mailchimp, mailgrid, etc and dm them about how you're a better alternative? You can also search on twitter "i hate mailchimp" or something like that and comment on their tweet
It's for email relay, not for sending newsletters ... I will check your advice. Thank you
https://transfer.midrive.io - Easily send large files to anyone.
When we launched a couple of months ago, I cold emailed a few tech bloggers about a possible press release, while we had some good leads, eventually no one wrote about us.
We had some few users from webwide, IH and Reddit. We basically decided to try out Google ads and so far, we have been able to get a steady number of active users daily when the ads are off. We are looking to partner with any forum with huge user base. This hasn't been possible so far. Any ideas as to how to grow MiDrive Transfer will be really appreciated
Love this.
Just tested it.
Going to be using this for now and at the same time support a fellow IH
😊 Thank you @ishtar for the support. This means alot brother
As far as I can tell you need to work a lot on your trustworthiness. Build some social proof on your site etc. and work on your positioning. Why would someone use this instead of wetransfer or send.firefox.com? That's what you need to work on
You are right and this is what we have been trying to achieve. Not to be arrogant..lol. we are far better than Firefox transfer and WeTransfer interns of our deliverables, flexibility and speed. I don not say this lightly.
These guys simply have a butload of users who will jump on the wagon to try out their new service because they have created a name for theirselves over the years. This is why one of our major focus has always been to provide a superior product. I am a big fan of both examples you gave but decided to build MiDrive Transfer because of my frustration in using them. They might be little but it means alot to me.
Thanks for the advice still. We keep moving
I'm working on my coaching business which is growing mainly through referrals. My main challenge is reaching people who I don't know. I have a bunch of ideas on this but not sure of the next steps.
Here's the page, thank you for your help! http://www.bencbernstein.com/coaching/
Maybe get yourself signed up on MentorCruise?
Also, apart from the 'startup' aspect, how would I know we are a good fit? Perhaps sharing examples of people/situations you have helped would help people connect the dots.
I'm building imprint.to, a Medium alternative with a few key focuses:
I've built out a lot of the platform, but I really need to convince writers to jump onboard to get the engine going. Any ideas on how to do so? Especially with larger platforms like Medium having so much pull? (Haven't publicly launched/posted on Reddit, HN, etc. yet. Maybe this is a good course of action now?)
I'm working on https://talktroop.com. It's designed to direct customers to a checkout page when they click on an advert.
Great marketing tips will help. Thank you.
As I was reading I was thinking "oh, this is really cool... I think I know someone who might like this." And then I saw it's currently "free during beta" and only $0.08 / transaction, and that kinda scared me. I'd feel more comfortable with it if you just charged $0.50 right away.
That's assuming it functions, obviously, but if it does there's no reason to scare people away with a free business product.
That's interesting. In terms of functionality, everything is in working order. I'm still thinking of a suitable price. What would you pay for this service?
Why $0.50? Is that per product charge?
I don't do ecommerce, so I'm honestly not sure what the market would tolerate, but 0.08 just seemed so little.
Pic.Hance: https://pichance.com/
Increase resolution if image by 4x.
Had some interest but have struggled to grow/monetize. Have considered a couple of ways to go about this:
Sounds interesting. I guess communities related photography is your target audience.
Also, I think a short clip on how to use it will help.
good idea!
Cool idea. I use compresspng.com and other sites like it all the time and when I don't want to open up Photoshop. SEO will be your friend for this site. Maybe have enlargephoto.com enlargepng.com enlargejpg.com, etc. Things that people search for.
Yeah I was thinking of adding those types of features like compressing, resizing etc. Yeah I suck at SEO so thats a good tip.
I love this. Perhaps instead of "Get the context you need to solve support issues effectively" for the tagline change to "Instant screen recording for customer support--without the plugin."
Also consider adding an animated gif of the 5-second process it takes for a user to click the link, run the record and save it. Add this above the fold on your homepage. This will help people visually grog it.
I have this problem with some of my customers so would be happy to help beta test.
Cartwheel.io: We're business automation software that help freelancers and payroll administrators get paid faster by optimizing their time tracking with automation.
I've been using peer to peer networking as a way of initially getting eyes on us, and some sign ups, but have had trouble getting paid conversions, and scaling sign ups
What about reaching out to local small businesses to see if they have a need? Could be in demand especially right now.
That's a good idea! I've been reaching out to staffing/contracting companies in my network, but my issue with that is it seems to be difficult to speak with a person who actually making purchasing decisions
Yeah thats always tough but thats awesome you are hustling and cold calling! Most tech guys (including me) are super shy about that but it def sets you apart.
So I get why staffing/contracting companies would be your focus but what about a different type of customer? Say small businesses who aren't tech savvy and need to hire contractors because they let go off full time staff etc, or who use to pay them by handing them a check and now being stuck at home need to get all the software setup. I don't know if this is an actual thing but throwing it out there.
As a pretty technical dude, it is SUUUUPER uncomfortable speaking to people, trying to get them sign up and getting rejected but the alternative is working a regular day job.
We don't (currently) have any integrations with payroll systems, which is the only reason I haven't considered that, yet, but this is an option. Systems like Gusto and ADP make it pretty difficult to integrate with them, so i was handling the invoicing side, first, until we get the traction to put pressure on larger integration candidates
uisources.com – launched a paid version this month, launched on ProductHunt this week! Have got my first handful of paying customers.
Have been free for nearly 2 years, surviving on Carbon Ads. Since launching the subscription, I've done 4x of my monthly revenue! Now thinking about ways to grow this, planning to start experimenting with direct sales & cold emails to design agencies. Would love to hear if you have any ideas!
I would remove the free tier for a week or two and see if you get signups. The free tier now makes it seem like I'm just paying for the "filter" button.
https://www.valist.dev Targeting product teams that need a solution to share early versions of a website/app within the company (or even customers) to elicit feedback by automating the setup of staging environments and sharing a public URL to the site with integrations to GitHub, Slack and Pivotal Tracker.
I have mentioned it in Reddit and Hackernews but not received much attention at all. I think that I really just need to book demos with customers and learn more about their problems but not sure how to find people interested in this.
Adam,
I don't mean to be discouraging but isn't there a lot of similarity between this and some of the key features of Netlify? We share deploy previews between us all the time.
That's not to say you shouldn't do this or that there's not room for more in this space, but if you agree with my comment, there's probably a lot you can learn by dissecting how Netlify grew over time.
I'd also highly encourage you to address this problem first:
Specifically, I think if you don't know where your customer is, you're going to really struggle to grow anything. Spend some time drilling into that. BTW – it could be that you've already found your community/customers (IH is full of product teams)
Thanks for your advice. It is highly appreciated.
To answer your question, it sure has some similarities to features of Netlify but can not be replaced by Netlify for some use cases. What it can do that Netlify can't, is to host web applications that require a custom backend so not just static websites. Also, the build process is enabled by custom Dockerfiles so it is not limited to the build environment provided by Netflify, making it easy to use the exact same environment for local development as when building for staging/production.
needremote.com
Place for a remote workers
Base of knowledge + workers resources
I'm concentrating on twitter conversations and IH community
Neat! How are you finding the twitter conversations?
And actually, I mean that in both senses - how do you find twitter conversations to join, and how well is that tactic working for you?
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Here you go -> https://remoteleaf.com
Doing cold twitter pitches to grow it and Reddit content marketing.
Any thought on using LinkedIn as a lead source? If you can make worthwhile connections, LinkedIn has been a great overall source for job leads in the past, and in this market, people would probably be more receptive
Let's give this a go :)
I'm working on https://www.octobook.io/, and nearing release time. I've made a post or two on Reddit and have just recently added the product on IH. This has gathered some interest and people have signed up to get notified when I launch which is great!
It's been challenging to post on Reddit nowadays because it seems posts get taken down instantly. I tried posting my app under r/books, but even though I've been part of the community for years, the post got taken down immediately.
What about buying ads on Reddit or sponsoring /r/books? I believe they're still much more cost effective than Facebook.
screenjar.com - request screen recordings from customers by sending them a link. No download/installs required
Currently aimed at people who do customer support for web/desktop software as they're showing the most interest. Other than a Product Hunt launch, I've just started cold emailing to try gauge interest and get first customers.
Speaking as a SaaS AE, this is an incredibly useful tool.
I'd write 1-3 'evergreen' content posts i.e. the use case scenarios end users would be searching for on Google. Think of this more of content for outreach, more so than SEO. The latter will come with time.
Make a 30 second - 2 minute demo that you can have on your landing page and send to clients. Think of this as your demo.
Buy Google Search keywords, specifically your competitor's names. This will help you gain learnings faster, so you can start to learn some patterns you can optimize.
There's other community building and content marketing tactics you can try, however, the above is what I've seen to be the most valuable at the very start.
This is very helpful advice. In all honesty, I built this targeting designers who want to do usability tests, so I had that kinda content in mind. Since launching, people in customer support showed more interest, hence the switch to that focus.
The problem I'm having is I have no idea what people would search for to find something like this with the customer support focus in mind. I also don't know who my competition is yet. So I guess before getting to these growth ideas, I need to speak to more potential customers and do some research around what people might search for, competition, etc.
Is an AE an Account Executive? Is that sales related? How would something like this be useful in that context?
customer support: makes total sense. SaaS, Customer Success folks would probably also benefit from this as well.
competitors: use G2 reviews, capterra, and Google to make a competitor list. From there, I'd advise making a competitor matrix so you can start to see the gaps that you can serve.
speaking with potential customers: before you try anything suggested before, I advise making a https://www.typeform.com/pricing/ survey with an incentive so you can start to gather customer feedback/learnings - 'Hey Customer Support Professionals: I'll Pay You $100 For Your Feedback', something like that. Send it to friends, post it on Linkedin, email it, etc. Get as many folks to respond as you can afford. You could even offer free access to your platform for a year. This feedback will help answer a lot of your questions.
Account Executive: SaaS AEs and business development representatives, or SDRs, could use a tool like this to make a recording of a high-value feature for prospect outreach or for someone they're trying to close.
Hope this helps!
Very helpful - thanks :-)
Cool! Could also be useful for customer reviews
As in asking customers for video reviews?
yes
Cool-looking app - I signed up!
I agree you need to remove most of the text.
Also, might be an idea to try to find startups using intercom and other such chat pop-ups. I know in my company how useful it'd be for chat apps to allow for your feature.
You can then pitch these apps directly in their intercom chat for example with a carefully-worded, short message.
Which startups to target? Spread it to begin with and narrow it down later when you see which segment responds better. This will work because your buyers pay attention to the live chat.
HTH
Have you ever been pitched via live chat? I feel like the context is a bit weird because you expect it to be a customer or prospect in live chat. With that being said, I'm open to trying it! Just in interested to know if you've ever experienced it
You're right it's somewhat off-topic because people on the other side expect something else. But if the service is interesting people will overcome the change of context necessary and see the value. I'd definitely pick up your service through this channel for example - but then again I also check my spam folder daily so be warned:)
OTOH it's important to note that larger companies which have dedicated support departments are less of a good target as the recipients' adoption powers will be limited. Again, your service doesn't need approval from up top so the support team might be a good idea of a 'backdoor' into the company.
Also, it's difficult to scale this unless you can relatively easily find which sites use intercom - builtwith.com perhaps?
It's quite useful. I would love to see more visual content and less text. When you mention no download/install, but you do need to register right? If so, then what makes this different to Hangouts? I use Hangouts for my communication (virtually).
It seems even with all that text, I didn't get the message across. It's async, not live. You send the customer a link, they record a video using it, then the video is saved for you to see. With Hangouts, you start a live video call and both have to be there at the same time.
Ramy,
Cool concept. I need to do this fairly frequently.
Here's what I'd do on a basic level:
Here's what I'd do for a slightly more out there thing:
Write a blog post about the results of doing this after a week/month and share that on social media/other places like IH.
When you say "I need to do this fairly frequently" - do you mean asking customers for screen recordings?
Switching to "get a demo" is a good shout.
Not specifically but solving a problem by seeing what’s on their computer. We usually just ask for screenshots on live chat.
Runnaroo.com - it's a search engine
I have been mostly working on the product, so haven't done any coordinated "launches" but I have shared it in a few online communities.
Hacker News was the first, and that generated a good conversation and an meaningful initial boost of users.
Product Hunt was next, I probably broke all the rules of how to post there, but that one completely fell flat, just crickets.
I have now just posted a thread here on Indie Hackers to let members of the community post free ads for their projects in the search results. Hopefully people who post ads will also check out the search engine and find value. We will see!
If you're planning to gain market share in such a monopolized market, you MUST have a strong value prop.
Why would someone change their habit and use your search engine? What's better about it? I can't tell that from your website.
Yeah, it's a great point. I put an about page (https://www.runnaroo.com/about), but it is not great at doing what you describe. I've had that conversation a lot with people in person but it is difficult to get it conveyed (with my design skills) through the website.
Even if it does provide more relevant results, that's probably not enough to get people to switch.
Right now, the early adopters are privacy focused people (think duckduckgo users), or people who want a less cluttered search experience, and my family. ;-)
The real long term differentiator I believe will be the inclusion of the "Deep Search" sources. It let's the search engine target niche data sources.
I appreciate the feedback, and am always open to suggestions.
Gotcha. Have you tried doing what DuckDuckGo does? A longer form homepage with more explanation about the benefits of switching to their product?
Google can show just a search bar cause everyone knows their brand, so they remove friction as much as possible. You're not in such a position, so I think your homepage could do with some more convincing.
That's good feedback. Thank you.
Also, here is the link to other IH thread mentioned above:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/post-a-free-search-engine-ad-for-your-product-or-startup-a165a853f1
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
I get this is new and you are probably figuring things out, but it's not quite clear how it works.
People submit their details and then you manually match? If things were simplified, maybe companies just need a list of 'contractors' and contractors just need a list of 'companies' or 'jobs'.
There's a huge list of companies in the IH product directory, no shortage of leads. I would start making connections with them as an individual. Follow the founders, start conversations with them, don't cold email them at this stage (I've seen that happen poorly too many times).
There's also the 'Jobs' and 'Looking to Partner Up' groups here on IH that are worth keeping an eye on.
Also, maybe start a monthly thread on IH, if done right they can get lots of responses and raise awareness of who you are and what you are working on.
For example:
'Who is looking for freelance gigs right now?' or 'What indie hacker companies are looking for part time help right now?'
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.
A working prototype would work well on your site, I could then report the typo bug on your homepage (every time is two words and it should be "you need to capture email). :D
Rather than say 'backend' maybe address the people you want to target: 'developers'.
As a no coder I was going through it, seeing the integrations and thinking that I would be able to use it. I think it needs some clarity around this.
Is it in a usable state? Has anyone been trying it out yet?
It does look nice!
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Cool, really like the idea!
Creating landing pages for every set of tools is definitely the way to go in the long run. You should take a look at what Zapier, Hull.io, Automate.io are doing.
Re: catching the right moment in time - assuming the perfect time users might need your service is when they're unhappy with their current tool, you should monitor ALL mentions of the tools you support with negative sentiment. Then either engage in conversations or reach out to these people.