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I made 5 apps in 2020. 4 failed, 1 made >$3k in 10 days. One thread to summarize my 2020.
by
Damon Chen
https://twitter.com/damengchen/status/1344525420813697024
Legit work @damonchen - what’s your biggest success in the latest project? What special growth techniques did you apply?
Tbh, I never had any special ones, but once I got a few user, and collected a few feedback, I made it on time. Then I use it in my promotion email/twitter to attract more users. Then collect more feedback, make it, promote it. So it's like an infinitely loop for me. But it really helps drive the product development and build the relationship with my users. Some kind users would even like to give a shoutout on social medias or refer it to their friends.
Thank you for sharing and good luck!
Awesome work @damon!
Glad to see you here Simon 😉
Got the deal last minute! Cool product, man! I'm glad you stuck with it!
You will be happy with it, and your customers will be happy too :)
Really love the testimonial product. When I get customers, I'm signing up for sure.
You can sign up now Avery. It's free and you get free credits. I will announce new features every now and then 😉
Your persistence is inspiring! Thank you for sharing the failures with your success, it really gives perspective to what indie hackers needs to expect in the journey for success!
Happy for your success! (:
Thank you ❤️
I'm glad one finally stuck! I'm surprised the others didn't, they all look great!
Thank you Jasmine. Others have their own potential, I just need more time to discover and find the right group to serve. Maybe I am not hustling enough on those 😅
I like the idea of testimonials but I also think that ratings are still very important. Both are important - I use text reviews to highlight things that are broken that we need to fix, things people might want, and validation that we've built something people want. For downloads, installs, or people buying your product, ratings are probably more important than reviews.
For me, the reason is that I believe people like to take a quick glance and look at the total number of ratings and compare that to the average rating they're seeing. Pre-Covid19, I used to do that all the time for restaurants.
I think you should talk to your existing customer base and find out if they value ratings and you could consider adding that to your system. Honestly, I'm not sure if I believe video ratings would make a difference in our app business since most people are likely making their decision as they look at our Google Play Listing.
On a side note, I know this is Indie Hackers but both accelerator programs I participated in advocated focusing on one problem and trying to turn your solution to that problem into a viable business. I'm not saying you should do that but I throw that out there for you to think about. The rationale that I've been told is that gives you the ability to really drill down and focus on what is causing barriers to your success.
Yes, I would totally agree with you! Different testimonials work in different cases. We may not need a video testimonial for buying a t-shirt. But we may prefer to see other people's video testimonial if the product/service is more personal, and you need someone to tell you why they think it's good. Say for real estate agent, I think video easily beats text. For marketing (many other) agencies, video beats text. Of course, a lot other use cases.
I won't deny text rating plays a big role. Not every customer is comfortable leaving a video testimonial. But if we can combine these two, that would be super great. I will work on it 💪 Thank you Steve!
I think it's a good idea. You just need to focus on finding your target market and presenting the right combination of features. You might also consider making it into a WordPress plugin.
Of course Steve. WP plugin is on my plate now😜
Awesome! Maybe you could get Jordan O'Connor to use your service for Closet Tools.
Testimonial.to could be a next big thing :D
As always, thank you ❤️
I love seeing the traction you are getting with Testimonial.to 🥳
Thank you Rosie again and again! I mean from all the way when I started to build lonely.dev to Testimonial ❤️
That's great Damon :D Congratulations ! 🎉 what was the development time for each one of those sites ? and for testimonial.to how did you land those paying customers ? It looks very cool BTW, nice design and presentation 🙌
Thank you! Some takes much longer, IndieLog took me severals month, and I still got some todos in my backlog. The PH launch really helped on getting first few paying customers. Also, dedicated chat support to answer questions for serious buyers, this helps a lot on converting them into a final paying customer.
That's interesting, especially the dedicated chat support for converting users into paying customers, do you use something like Intercom or perhaps just a WhatsApp number is doing the job ? or email ?
P.S. 👀 I made a howdy.so account too :)
I use Crisp, it's a lot cheaper.
Wow that is a great idea!! Loved it
Thank you 🙏