I need validation for my startup.
Hi guys,
You read that right. It's a startup and not an idea. I feel like I should have asked this question ages ago. But then, I thought somebody would steal the idea. And I hadn't known of IH back then.
I recently soft-launched my startup - been 2 days. It's an AI based browser bookmarking tool solving 2 main problems.
- Organising bookmarks by automatically categorising them.
- Resurfacing of bookmarks by showing bookmark recommendations.
You can visit it here - https://getmarkie.com
I am not sure now whether these are actual problems. I faced this problem for years, until I went ahead with this idea last year. I spent time on this project (on and off) for about 1 year to come up with an MVP.
I went ahead and soft launched it. I gave it to my family and friends. Some just signed up out of friendship. ~25% of them are actually using it.
My question to you guys is - is it a good idea? is it a good product?
I am clouded with self doubt and my morale is way lower than it was before the launch.
I'd love to hear what you guys think.
Cheers,
Akhil
The problem do really exist, i always book mark but after a month or year i may just never see where it had gone due to huge number of sites.
Thanks Sreekanth. I would like to invite you to try Markie and see if it works for you.
Hi Akhil,
I suspect your idea is going to fail. Maybe it will. I hope it does: you've got a nice polished site, a neat idea, clever pricing.
You mentioned that you faced this problem for years. @derk used the term 'pain point'.
Be on the lookout for product ideas that are the answer to more like a "struggle". Something that won't go away. Something that happens all of a sudden. Something where people are saying "enough is enough" to the old way of doing things. Because, in the end, your product is competing with "I'll just".
This sort of lens is great at getting to product confidence. Knowing when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em. Knowing when something is worth sticking with until it works, and knowing when something won't, no matter how much you try.
Anyway, hope this helped.
Hello Pascal,
I understand the point you were trying to make. Although I am not sure why you said "I hope it does fail". Even if it fails, it'll just be a great learning experience for me. Besides, if we were to just be okay with "I'll just do this instead" - we wouldn't have innovations, we wouldn't have airplanes, bullet trains, or anything that we see around. The world would just be stagnant, right? Innovation and revolution go hand in hand right? Correct me if I am wrong.
There are tons of bookmark managers and none of them actually solves the problems. From the validation and feedback I received, I understood two things mainly - a) The problem exists. b) I might just not be able to solve the problem completely just yet. I can probably make things a little bit easier for everyone. That itself should hold on its own right?
But yes, if it just won't work - I will gladly accept it and move on. The last thing I'd want to be is delusional - this is the main reason I asked for validation here.
Cheers,
Akhil
Whoops! I just re-read my thing, and it does read like "I hope it fails". I meant to say: I hope it works!
Akhil, I apologize! That's rough.
Thanks for the retort about innovation. Wanting to prevent being delusional, wanting to see things clearly, that's the right posture for sure.
Hahaha 😄. No worries and no need to apologize. I hope I didn't come off as arrogant either. As @derk said, "Definitely continue asking questions". This is one of the best advices I got.
Cheers!
I think it's a nice idea, and I can relate to the two issues you mentioned.
Provided I've understood the terminology and a 'Smart Bookmark' is a bookmarked URL itself, and not say a category....
I think the 25 bookmark limit on the free account is too low for someone to let it into their life and try it out.
If the free plan is going to be ad-supported, why not have a much higher limit?
Or, if it's to try and force people to tip quickly into a paid plan, why not go ad-free?
You may well have researched this and tell me I'm wrong, but it seems like more of a nice-to-have service.
My gut says you're better off pushing a much less limited, ad-supported free plan and offering the relative handful of users who want to disable ads the paid plan to do so.
Hi Joe,
Thank you for taking the time to check my app out. Knowingly or unknowingly, you actually gave me one important feedback:
Okay, so after the user depletes his smart bookmarks quota, he can do regular bookmarks with manual categorization and manual tagging. He can still view the bookmarks in article mode and add highlights too. I wasn't clear with this. I should add this somewhere to the landing page.
About the ads, I am just not aware of the kind of revenue, ads can bring in. And I am still figuring out the business model and the user experience. I am not sure whether this should be web-app centric experience or an extension centric experience for the user. I don't even have ads set up yet. It's pointless to add ad clutter with only a few users. I am waiting until I hit at least 1000 users.
I am happy to know that you liked the product and saw it as relevant.
I will surely take your thoughts into consideration.
Cheers,
Akhil
I like your UI, I think it's a really nice app!
Quick thoughts while signing up: link "Go ahead and use [the extension] to add pages to this list." to the appropriate extension download page.
I can't see any link to the extension within your web app. I had to Google it myself.
Also, now I've downloaded it, I can't see the extension icon to use it. I've done a few things like logging out/in and restarting Chrome to (hopefully) remove the possibility that I'm being an idiot.
What am I missing?
I installed it from here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markie/ehhkpofebhdiffegjnahjofmdjaphlmf and the extension is definitely enabled.
When I check the extension settings it says "Logged in as:" and provides a logout link but doesn't show my email address.
Let me know as I'm keen to try it out now I've started looking :) I'm someone who bought Pinboard.in about 10 years ago when it was something like $7 for a lifetime plan but ended up not using at forgot about it.
You are right, I have no links from the web app to the extension pages. I was aware that the onboarding process could be more intuitive.
Can you please check this page out - https://getmarkie.com/installation - and see if you've followed everything correctly? There are extra instructions for Chrome users for pinning the extension. Google introduced pinning feature recently.
I am not sure why the extension is not logging you in. Web app and extension share a common login session. So if you logout of the web app (like you mentioned you did) it will log you out of the extension as well. I can see your registration in the database - so that went fine.
Let me know if you need more assistance. You can even reach me by email at [email protected]
Yep, it was just the pinning issue. I'd have been fine had I seen the installation instructions.
I guess Chrome had updated recently and I hadn't noticed.
I think I was probably logged in all along. I went digging in the extension settings due to the pinning issue and the "Logged in as [blank]" thing was just a red herring. It still shows blank btw, but no one is going to dig into that settings page once they are already using the extension successfully.
Unknowingly for sure :)
You're absolutely right, I scanned the pricing page and thought "Only 25 bookmarks?!"
Maybe a line on your pricing table saying "Standard bookmarks" saying unlimited in both columns would clear it up?
Now I understand the proposition better, I'd agree that it would be best to avoid ads where possible. In fact, your free plan offers everything https://pinboard.in/ offers for their paid plan, so it's still very valuable and definitely a worthwhile plan to grow free users and then hopefully convert some to the paid AI plan.
Now I'll actually try the free account for myself :-P
😦 I was actually thinking of adding a tooltip beside. But adding "Standard Bookmarks" is a MUCH MUCH better idea; it creates a much better value proposition.
Thank you for trying it out :). Now, let's see if it solves the problems for you.
Given that bookmark management is also built into my bookmarking/note taking product, I think it is a great idea! It is a serious problem that lots of people have, but finding the solution is hard.
We have similar problems in that the we're going for consumers rather than B2B. The issue with the consumer market is that in general, they need to see value in the product almost immediately. With bookmarking, the user has to use your product for a while only to see value days if not weeks later. In fact I noticed with my own app that I didn't see its full potential until 3 months of consistent use. The average consumer is not going to give you that much time before giving up.
My advice (which I am working on following myself):
1 - Think about what you can do to provide users immediate value. I don't do auto-sorting so it would be challenging for me to effectively do a browser bookmark import. You could do that easily though.
2 - I think you need to reconsider your pricing tiers. 25 bookmarks is not enough for someone to build a habit on. I get you may be bootstrapping and need the revenue, but you need people to have your app built in as a habit before you throw a paywall in front. Example: Slack allows 10,000 messages in the free archive. I suspect you will need something closer to 300 bookmarks or more in the free tier or a different model altogether.
3 - Do you allow manual re-categorization? I think early adopters are going to be very forgiving of the algorithm getting some categorizations "wrong". The general market is going to have much higher standards and the algorithm will have to be tweaked so that it is rock solid. Manual re-categorization will let you know if you are getting things right or wrong without having to ask your users.
Thank you for taking the time to write this valuable reply. I agree with all your points. Finding the solution is indeed hard and I need to be able to provide a seamless user experience.
So I thought if my free version does what Pocket/Instapaper does for a monthly fee (even after the quota is depleted), then throwing in 25 smart-bookmarks should give them a taste of what they could have in the pro version.
But yes, you are absolutely right and I get your point. In fact, I hadn't given it this much thought.
Now I am also thinking whether I should just give users a monthly quota of say 10 bookmarks?
Options I have -
a. Increase the quota to 100 or 200 or 300 smart bookmarks.
b. Change it to a monthly quota of say 5 or 10 or 15 smart-bookmarks.
Did you write the algorithm to auto sort or are you using a service? If you wrote it, then the processing should be cheap and you can have a more generous quota. Or maybe even just a higher quota of 100-200/mo for 6 months before lowering it. Or no quota at all and change your paid tier to better process sites with videos or PDFs.
Out of curiosity, what Discord channel did you submit this to for feedback?
I am using both - my own algorithm and also an auto-service for additional help. This is why I might just be able to pull off the import feature.
Also, I submitted it to the discord channel of a popular reddit community (r/webdev).
Congrats on building something for a pain point you couldn't find anything for yourself. I'm on mobile so haven't been able to test it out yet but definitely will. Good idea asking for feedback. Definitely continue asking questions.
Thanks! I will keep asking questions and I plan to talk to most of my initial users. Do check it out and let me know what you think.
Good landing page (I’ve only checked it out on mobile); interesting idea and you are scratching your own itch. Don’t let self-doubt get the best of you. If you’re solving a problem, grinding it out is the hardest part. Keep on keeping on! 👍
Thank you for the reassurance. I am sure this solution can be more refined and I hope to achieve it.
Thanks everyone for the invaluable feedback. I am overwhelmed by the response. I am already thinking of new ideas to improve the product within one day of asking for help on IH. I love you guys!
-- UPDATE --
I submitted it to a discord channel. One person reviewed it and said it's flawed. Like ProfessorBeekums said, the general public is not very forgiving. Upon inspection I noticed that he tried to bookmark websites, that don't have textual data in it. So youtube, netflix etc won't work very well with my app yet. Non english pages will also not work with Markie. But you can save the bookmark anyway. Smart bookmarking just won't work.
Should I state on the website that it won't work with non english websites or doesn't detect videos?
Cheers,
Akhil