I will review and test your project for free!
Hi Everyone. Yesterday I watched the movie The Founder. It’s about Ray Kroc (McDonalds) and his long road to success. I will not spoil anything..! the movie just kept me thinking all day today. Ray was portrayed as many things, however one thing that stood out to me was him as a salesman who initially did not talk to his customers (or better said: with his customers). This made me remember both my biggest challenge and probably most important thing in starting a company was talking with customers. Supposedly it is for many entrepreneurs.
So I decided to do something different this weekend. I will offer my time and experience to act as your very talkative customer for free. I have come up with 5 questions that I personally would want to hear from my customers, though might be a bit uncomfortable to ask them straight up:
- What problem am I solving? - is my value proposition clear
- Who are my customers and customer segments?
- How is the onboarding/installment process?
- Am I using the right tech stack? (I will try to guess you tech stack/tell what I would use)
- How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
Why am I doing this? Simply because I have gotten a lot of value from reading and interacting in this community, so this may be a good way to give something back.
Why would I be qualified to test and review? 1) I have founded and am currently managing a SaaS company (AI-driven monitoring of civil infrastructure) 2) Successfully participated and graduated from a renown startup accelerator program. 3) Technically skilled having worked several years as software engineer, developing a myriad of applications, knowing my way around. 4) I’m Dutch, who are known to be straight forward, which is nice if you want a honest review =P 5) Probably some more points, but this post is not about me, check out my LinkedIn fyi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bram-bloks-a6816aab/
Feel free to post your project below, without any description if possible. No matter if it is a fully operational business, bootstrapped project or just an idea.
And let me know if you may have an additional question.
I will start testing and reviewing tomorrow morning at around 08:00 CET.
[EDIT] Many thanks everybody for posting your projects. I will be reviewing and testing every single one. It will take me a bit longer than I had expected and planned for, and since I want to give everybody a quality review, you may have to wait a bit longer got get my reply. Keep up the good work in the meantime!
[EDIT 2] New send-ins after now (Sunday 20:00 CET+1) I may check in a later round, if there will be one ;)
https://slidestovideo.com/
Hi @franzen,
You were the last to sign up before the deadline, but not the least.
Took me a bit longer to find a moment to review Slides To Video, hereby my findings:
1. What problem are you solving?
The message is presented really clear on the landing page. Also the name itself already implies what it does, so that is very nice.
Your landing looks well designed and provides a lot of information. A how-to video as you have is very good to show and build trust with new users.
Only I found that the how-to just explains stuff, that you can also read below. It does not show me how the tool works. This gives me the impression that either the tool is not there, or unstable. Therefore I would not subscribe (convert) easily. It would be good to show how the tool works or have that in a separate video. References and/or showcases of how others have used STV would also be good to show and build trust.
2. Who are my customers and customer segments?
People that want to build videos but have no video editing skills. Also they must be familiar with google sheets, which isn’t too hard, and (supposedly) do not require their video to be of the highest quality.
I think this is a very clear niche and there must be a number of online places like forums, facebook groups etc. where you can find those users, interact with them and get them to use your product.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
The onboarding process is very clear. It does not require any installation and can be done with a few clicks, so no further manual is required.
However to be honest I was a bit reluctant to sign up with my google account. Especially when it started to ask me to share all my data, contacts and personal details. So I did not fully sign up for the tool to test it. Maybe this is the way Google plugins work and I’m not the right customer, however this thing was a bottleneck for me. Assuming that people are more aware of their privacy and online data sharing, others may perceive this as a barrier too. If you can already show what is after the sign up, and have references op people/companies that have successfully used your tool, probably the sign up barrier would be lower. At least for me it would be.
4. What is your tech stack?
My guess would be that you have created the landing and the tool in NodeJS, and making use of a framework like React or NodeJS.
Inspecting the code on your landing I noticed a
firebasefolder andnode_modules.5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
With regard to the product itself there is not much documentation, however I don’t think there is much required either.
Something I’m missing is for example a newsletter, where to subscribe for news and updates. I suppose Slides To Video is still in an early phase and continuously updating. For current and future customers it will be interesting to know what new options are available or which ones will become available in the future.
Also you may add a chatbot to the website. I’m sure it would be very helpful for a product like yours to interact and bind with potential customers.
Another small thing: I found the links to spread the word a bit of a overkill. There are so many. To me it made me seem like you are desperate to get the message out, which is not a good thing. Maybe stick with a few of the most popular ones and not mention others, or mention them somewhere else.
My apologies for the late reply, I had to find a moment and make time to do this on the side :)
Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
Best,
Bram
Thank you Bram for taking the time to write down your thoughts in such detail. It is helpful to get detailed feedback from someone with fresh eyes. Thanks again for your efforts!
https://togetherdb.com 🙏🙏
Hi @Badestrand,
I checked out TogetherDB, cool tool! Here are my thoughts:
1. What problem are you solving?
I like the idea. I’m curious to learn till what point will you simplify the process, because at some point it would basically be the same as excel on steroids or Airtable. Maybe define some of these USPs on the landing, or give references to people and their stories why they use TogetherDB over other tools. Links to project made using TogetherDB will also do well to gain trust and more insight in the benefits I suppose.
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
Thinking out loud a few questions come to mind?
Backend devs and database admins probably are already working together in their shared repos, so they are probably not the target group. Besides that there is already some tooling out there that makes working with databases easier, such as the JetBrains extensions.
For people that want to use a database but have zero experience in this field there are tools like Airtable, which make it more like an excel on steroids. Given on what I see, you aim to be different than Airtable and a tool for the more tech savvy people. Also given that in the instructions some specific SQL queries are mentioned to be used.
So therefore I am not entirely sure where TogetherDB exactly fits in.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
When I try to sign in with Google, my firefox gives a security error: Firefox prevented this site from opening a pup-up window. Maybe adjust that button to link to another page instead of a popup window.
Since the product is rather extensive, you already have a huge past and future tech pipeline, it could be good to setup a mailing list. This helps you to both keep people updated on new features, enthusiastic and build a reliable customer base. Which you in turn can use to figure out which features the users desire most and build them.
I thought I saw a link to a mailing list, but lost it and cannot find it anymore. Make sure to put a button to subscribe to the mailing list on your landing page if you have one.
4. What is your tech stack?
I would guess that the tool and the intelligence behind it is written in Python and ofc SQL. Maybe you have used Go to do the backend or a lower level language like C++ or Java which I doubt since it would take much more time to come to a similar product.
As I understand now TogetherDB only offers a hosted service, it’s like DbaaS. Me as a developer would have loved to see a self-hosted/on premise version. For example a docker container, so I can host the tool on my own servers or setup a collaboration environment with my colleagues. Maybe I am not the right customer since I’m mostly a backed programmer and set up databases myself, therefore would prefer to keep data (especially sensitive) to myself and not trust it to be hosted by a third party externally.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
The interactive demo is really awesome!! Well done
There is already an extensive documentation present, which is good. I really like the videos that you have put in, that display the process and give me a clear idea of what to expect.
At some occasions I found ‘TODO’ and notes in the documentation. I’m not sure whether that was put there on purpose or not, but it was a bit confusing. Maybe it is better to leave notes out until you have the parts finished. You can always write a styled section that documentation on a certain topic will arrive soon.
Some more thoughts:
I really like the idea and your progress so far. I have also been playing around and writing some tools to simplify and automate my relational database management a while ago. So I think there is a potential market for this.
What I do think may be the biggest challenge for tools like this, is that there is an endless amount of development. It is good that you are already in beta, but make sure that you find out asap if there are people that are willing to pay to use the product. I learned the hard way, that you should launch far before you feel confident. Because if you don’t, you will find out that you have been spending lots of hours of features that nobody wants or needs. (worst case a product that nobody needs). Ofcourse it is cool to build nice stuff, but if you pursue it to be a business, your time and speed over potential competitors is very valuable.
p.s. have you thought about the option of writing custom SQL queries?
Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Thank you so much for this invaluable feedback. Incredible. You have no idea how helpful this is! I appreciate so much the time you put into this.
I am happy you could extract the correct WHY/HOW/WHAT from the landing page!
Yes, the goal is to be as easy to use as AirTable - so, usable even by laymen. An AirTable with REST API and SQL interface, on top of my own database.
That would be developers who work with MySQL/Postgres databases. So basically you fall right into the target group haha.
Good point, maybe it's time now to finally set it up!
Yes, 100% agree! I am sure that people will not pay for a simple database management tool. But my hypothesis is that they will for the additional features, like sharing access, automatic APIs etc. I am currently trying to evaluate that but I am not doing it super well.
All very good points, thank you so much!
Just implemented it a few days ago, but it's disabled in the demo. Good point, should probably half-enable it to show it's there.
.
If you have the time, would you mind attending to this followup question?
What do you mean by shared repos? I would love exactly those people to use TogetherDB instead of MySQLAdmin/pgAdmin or whatever tools they use internally.
edit: ahh I think it is something Oracle-specific..? will try to understand that.
Hi @Badestrand,
You are most welcome. Happy to hear the review was helpful to you!
I think it is great to target the people with more dev knowledge, as you mention, and provide them with some more advanced tools like an API and SQL interface. I mostly use Postgres databases and pgAdmin4 to have some nicer display. It works for queries and basics, but with a nice interface the process could be easier for a lot of small tasks. As I mentioned in the review, I like the idea and what you have got so far.
I suppose you can already find users that are willing to pay for it, you maybe have to tweek your message and workflow a bit in the beginning. This will help you validate your idea and market, it will also provide you with valuable feedback. I think you already reached that phase. Check out his blog post Paul Graham (Y Combinator) wrote about it: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Sounds reasonable. Would be good to have these assumptions validated asap. I’m sure you need way less features to have a valuable product and launch than you are having in mind right now ;) See also my previous comment.
Let me try to explain it in more detail with an example. It is not something Oracle specific, I have never worked with Oracle on databases and stuff ;)
I meant to say that they most use Postgres and PgAdmin and then share their settings. There obviously are a lot of approaches and ways, but to give you an outline of how we do things:
We have a webapplication that is built with Python Flask framework. It runs some algorithms and has a user interface where people can login and do stuff. It runs on the cloud all dockerized. The database is a Postgres, and we check out details using pgAdmin. In the application itself we use SQLAlchemy as an ORM and Flask-Migrate to upgrade the database. The database has different schema’s and tables for storing user/authn data, logs from the algorithms etc. For a project like that everybody can setup a replica of the system locally or on a server, since all the details are stored using the ORM, yaml files and other code.
In this case I f.e. do not see direct reasons why to tweak individual cells in the db (besides that some tables have thousands of rows). However I do see the value of replacing the SQL-Alchemy ORM, (or better said: all the code you have to write for each class and attributes) with a convenient UI to create your tables and then have an API to connect your app to the DB.
As said, I’m just one guy in the developer universe, so don’t take the process I just described as the absolute truth how everybody works ;) although I know quite a lot of people who work that way :)
And one additional note:
I'm wrapping up the results of all the reviews. I have to say I also really enjoyed doing this whole reviewing myself and got very positive and appreciative feedback from you and others. I also learned new things myself in the process. So many thanks to you for that too!
While reviewing and reading all the replies I found out almost all mostly struggle with finding their first (paying) customers and right marketing/sales channels. Technical aspects were covered pretty well.
So I’m thinking about doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach. Like f.e. a quick start review with tips and tricks. Still l have to figure out what would be best topics though, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a videocall or over email? Let me know!
Best,
Bram
Cool, thank you so much again! Especially for the explanation of how you handle your databases. Good to know, users who manage their database via their ORM would not be a target for me.
Please subscribe to my newly setup mailing list ;) https://emailoctopus.com/lists/57f50ffd-e4fd-11ea-a3d0-06b4694bee2a/forms/subscribe
In general, absolutely! I am actually not looking for users yet as I am still evaluating the value proposition - but of course I have rough plans already on marketing/aquisition. Up for both call or email, whatever you prefer. You can reach me at michelhelms at Google's email service.
https://santrikoding.com
Hi @maulayyacyber,
Do you also have an English version of you website? I cannot find a link or anything to change the language. Unfortunately I do not understand the language it is written in, which makes reviewing it hard. Let me know!
Best,
Bram
thepentool.co -thanks!
Hi @arsenkolyba,
I checked out thePentool, here are my thoughts:
1. What problem are you solving?
To be honest, it took me a moment to figure out what thePentool is about. I directly got the impression that is has to do something with design and styling, however the whole website seems very chaotic to me with all the different colors, images and fonts. Maybe that is the trend in your specific niche or circle. I’m personally a big advocate of keeping it simple.
As a consequence it took me a long time to figure things out. I just could not read stuff and was distracted by all the colors and moving objects.
You mention that you are trusted by 5000+ designers from various well know organizations. Assuming that is true, you make some people tick with this style.
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
Frontend developers and UI/UX designers.
I notice that you offer different thingsm such as a ‘mobile interface kit’, ‘startup illustration set’, ‘email templates’ and ‘data packs’ and some more freebies. Those things are all related somehow, however also very different as a niche. By having these different things I would not know why I would specifically go to you over any competitor.
If you were for example the best place to get RAD email templates, than your market would be the to go store. Generally the interesting thing is that when you narrow down your niche the most, you can grow the fastest. Since it is easier to define your perfect customer profile, know their problems, find them and market to them.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
There is a rather limited manual called ‘how to use’, this however seems more like a summary of legal terms. Maybe extensive documentation is not necessary with templates, still I am missing some example pages or reference projects. This would give me a good idea of how things look like and what to expect.
What you could also add is a step by step guide (it is probably just a few) form download to implementation of the templates. For example with an explanatory image at each step.
I did not purchase any paid templates since that would be a bit to much for this review.
4. What is your tech stack?
I guess it is made using NodeJS with using a React or Angular framework. That is probably how I would have done it myself.
On a architectural level it is kept to the basics, which is good. There is no login and user system, which I don’t think you need either. Maybe in a later phase it may be interesting to add, to let users for example get back to their previous purchases and have all their templates organized and available at one place.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
The actions of displaying templates and method to purchase do not need a lot of customer interaction, given they would come to your website and already know or directly pick what they need.
If you are new on the website, like I was, all the stuff going on is overwhelming. The navigation menu was closed displaying only the hamburger. A top or side navigation bar, with a link to help or support would be useful.
Another thing I was missing is a mailing list or newsf eed, where I can get updates of new templates, features etc. This could both help you engage more with the customers and also get the message out and build an reliable audience that buy your templates.
As mentioned before, the ‘how to’ manual, more seemed like a legal overview instead of a manual. Adding showcases of what the designers and companies you mention have made using your templates would be helpful to.
Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
Cheers,
wow, thanks a lot for such an in depth review!
Hi @arsenkolyba,
You are welcome. Hope it was helpful to you.
I really enjoyed doing all the reviews. It also gave me new insights. I'm planning to do a follow up round, with a focus more on getting first customers and sales/marketing channels. I noticed that is the thing that most are struggling with and can add best value. Similar format, but a slightly different focus.
Would you be interested in a second round like that? If so, let me know if you have a minute for a short video call or conversation over email.
Best,
Bram
https://writing9.com/
Hi @SerhiiBaraniuk,
I checked out Writing9. Here is are my thoughts:
1. What problem are you solving?
Writing9 looks very pretty. I really like the small and specific niche you have picked. This seems to have worked out well, given the total number of people using the tool according to the counter. Also the number of great reviews give confidence. Well done!
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
People that need to write IELTS essays, but do not have English as their native language.
I’m curious why there is a focus on essays, is that such a big market? I would think that when I pass an IELTS exam (which I admittedly have never done, so don’t know the process) I would never care about those essays again. Then it would be useful to me to use the tool to for example scanning and improve my articles on i.e. Medium or another blog before I post them.
It seems like a thought out (and smart) idea to not make a generic text helper but even niche down on that to IELTS essays. There was a period I used to receive a lot of adds from Grammarly. Are they competitors or different?
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
Unfortunately I cannot say much about that. I did not onboard since there was not free trail and it was a bit to much to spending money while providing a review.
What I can say is that the landing page and the examples look very clear. Based on that I have a good impression of what to expect, assuming it is the same after registration of course.
Something that strikes me as very good is the simplicity of the texts on the landing. Very few words, with some icons and images that bring the message across very well. A very hard thing to do, to write your message in such a concise way, however when you figured it it definitely pays of, so very well done!
4. What is your tech stack?
Checking a bit around on the landing I got the idea there is a full frontend team behind it. JS all uglified and minified. I would guess that the tool is made in NodeJS with some framework like React or Angular. For the algortihms however I expect them to be written in Python using some NLP libraries like NLTK and probably some own stuff. Given the size of the company there will be one or more backend devs I suppose. So maybe the backend is Flask or Django. Furthermore obviously some databases, like postgres or mongo to store all data, and other tools to keep things smooth.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
As metioned it looks all clear and neat to me. I was missing a trial period or some examples.
I initially thought that I may had missed them on the landing, however clearly saw the alert that I had to login before I could check an essay. This made me think that I could do a Google and DuckDuckGo search on
writing9to maybe find some examples or reviews from people that are using your product, besides the ones you mention yourself. To my surprise I found very little, and on DuckDuckGo nothing at all.. this makes me wonder what is happening. How is there 23.000+ people using the tool and multiple 5 star reviews, however very little third party reference. Are things already fine as they are now? Never marketed it big? Or something else.Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
Cheers
Hi @SerhiiBaraniuk,
Maybe you had not time to go over the review yer, but just a quick check/reminder here.
Did you get anything from the review?
Best,
Bram
https://howuku.com
Hi @donaldng,
I checked out Howuku, looks very impressive!
Hereby my thoughts and findings.
1. What problem are you solving?
Howuku seems like a fully grown application to me. The message is clear and there is a lot of content and documentation. Also the registration process is smooth and the Dashboard looks nice. I wonder what is your current team size and how many free plan and paying users you have?
Still there are some things that make me wonder. For example, given the advanced state of your product I can barely find any reviews or stories from users? Does this mean you do not have users yet, or did I miss something, or something else..
I have to admit not having worked a lot with these type of page analytics tools, however it does not become entirely clear to me why I should go with Howuku over for example HotJar. I noticed there is a blogpost written on it, however that boils down to a few points and most notably a big difference in pricing. HotJar is the big name in the game (afaik) so what do I get with them that I would not get with Howuku. Is it other tools, better service, or is HotJar highly overpriced? Which I doubt given its success.
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
People that run online business and would like to get better insights in what their users are doing on their website, perform analytics and with that data improve customer conversion rates.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
The onboarding process if very clear and as expected. I singed up for the free trial period and got a validation email. After that I was forwarded to the dashboard which looked nice and clear. It was directly clear how to embed Howuku on my website using the JS snippet.
I also got a welcome email after my user validation. Here I was invited to have a 1 on 1 chat with you to customize my needs. This is very nice and personal. Though it gives me the impression that you are the only person behind the company.
I did not take the step to embed the snippet, since I do not have a website for which that would be useful. However maybe for a future website I am planning to create I would be interested.
4. What is your tech stack?
I already saw a link to madewithvuejs.com so I assume it is made with Vue.js ;)
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
Howuku is documented very clearly. There are abundant examples and pictures, plus I really like the demonstration video.
There is good customer interaction with the Chatbot that contains both a AA option and a FAQ for quick answers. Also there are some windows pupping up asking whether I found everything I was searching for. Personally I am not the person who uses all these tools, however I image there are people that find these things very helpful. So this topic is very well covered.
As a final note:
Somehow I cannot comprehend the state of your product and how advance it looks, and the fact that you are seemingly running the business just by yourself. Also given that the email for an intro came from you yourself and not a team. Questions pop up like: Am I missing something? Did you duplicate a competitor? Are you launching to late or already have a bunch of users? Or just more has to be put on marketing and getting reviews/the message out. Curious to know!
Hope this helps!
Cheers
Thank you for the very detailed reviews and your personal take on Howuku's situation, and I thought most of them are very spot on!
This is my very first SaaS, started as a side hobby, and now trying to make it my full-time business.
I would say the state of my current product is still very early, although it may seem advanced, we only have a handful of customers and about around 60 monthly active website running our script. I think it is due to my developer mindset of "Keep building & providing value and they will come" which apparently doesn't work out too well for me.
Launching too late, yes. More has to be put on marketing and getting reviews, also yes. For the past months, I've been slowing down on the development part and shifting my focus to bringing in an early batch of customers, working on deals with potential partners, sales outreach, marketing, and making connections.
More precisely, digital marketing agency, CRO consultant, or SaaS founders who are looking to optimize conversion rates for their own/client website.
True that given the success of Hotjar, the price has seemed to have justified for itself.
I don't deny that HotJar is the gold standard for the industry, and Howuku were definitely inspired by HotJar. But, I like to think that we are addressing another set of targeted audience, at least we started out with that.
Why choosing Howuku over Hotjar?
Really appreciate the feedback and review from you, Bram!
Hi @donaldng,
You are most welcome. Happy to hear that my review was useful to you!
Hereby some of my thoughts on your replies:
It is already great that you have your first batch of customers that are using Howuku! In general most projects never make it to that stage at all. Are they all free tier, or are some paying customers?
Good that you are shifting efforts. As I mentioned in the review, I think Howuku is technically already in a very advanced stage. It would be easily ready to be marketed now. It already offers a lot and all the additional tools you plan to create can be added later on. If you find the right channel and message it shouldn’t be to hard to get there customers. Those new customers can also provide you feedback on the exact tools the would like to see added. May save you a lot of dev time ;)
Nice, very well defined niche. You already figured out where they hang around/can be found?
All those points make it much clearer for me now. As far as I remember you did not mention it in the blog I read. They all sound like good reasons to choose for Howuku over Hotjar.
I did not know HeadwayApp, how is your experience with it? don’t you get better SEO ranking when you write your news updates on your own blog page. It generates content and links for your landing. Or for example articles on Substack of Medium for example? Maybe Headway is the way to go, idk.
Anyway, you have such a wealth of content already, make use of it wherever you can! ;)
Some additional notes:
I'm wrapping up the results of all the reviews. First I have to say I really enjoyed doing this whole reviewing and got very positive and appreciative feedback from you and others. I also learned new things myself in the process. So thanks a bunch to you too for that!
While reviewing and reading all the replies I noticed that almost all struggle mostly with finding their first customers and right marketing/sales channels. Technical aspects were covered pretty well. Something you mention as well.
So I’m thinking about doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach. Like f.e. a quick start review with tips and tricks. Still l have to figure out what would be best topics though, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a videocall or over email? Let me know!
p.s. I’m also doing these reviews on the side, hence my sometimes late replies ;)
Cheers
https://metametrics.io
Hi @mroll,
I checked out MetaMetrics, hereby my findings:
1. What problem are you solving?
I’m not sure whether I understand what your product does. I like the idea of getting a complete overview of your spent resources through github for multiple repos or various contributers of a team. However I cannot figure out what I will get right now. It would be good provide some showcases or a demo dashboard. The charts on the landing look nice but a bit meaningless to me, given that they are filled with ramdom/sample data.
The ‘is this tool section for you?’ section is a nice idea, but to be honest it only confuses me. Personally I would prefer a few sentences (3) or 3 bullet points what the tool does, so I can make up my mind with that explanation if the tool is right for me. Right now I can answer those questions, that process just not answers the question for me if the tool will solve a problem I have.
With regards to the landing and explanation I really think less is more. Keep it concise or as often said by others stick to KISS principle.
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
It seems you focus on dev teams, that use github. For which we can assume 99% does these days.
Maybe you already did it, but I think a distinction has to be made if this is a B2B or a B2C product, I think it is the former. Each comes with a very distinct sales and marketing strategy.
With B2B you can just approach teams and companies and do not even need a option to sign up, you could just approach them 1 on 1 in a more sales like style. With B2C you will have to put in much more marketing efforts to get your message out.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
There is a lot of
free trialbuttons on the landing. 5 in total. I do not think that people will be easier to persuade to do a free trial if there are more buttons, I for sure wouldn’t. I would just stick to one one the topnav and maybe one more below the pricing form. Or replace the navbar one with login and have the free button in your top banner as it is now.I signed up for the free trial. I scanned through the Terms, which I know most people don’t. However when you are new your Terms will be checked because people may not fully trust you or your product yet. Let me be clear: I do not think there are any mall intentions. What I found a bit suspicious though is that I would not be able to delete my account, but have to contact you personally by email in order to do that. I’m not sure about the exact reason for that, I just know that a big barrier to get out will also prevent people to decide to get in in the first place. It would give me more trust.
After signing up I was headed to the dashboard. However have not received a confirmation or validation/onboarding email. It would be good to include that. You can use it both to be more personal as well as a security check for yourself, so actual people with valid email addresses sign up and not bots.
On the homescreen I could sync my Github account, which as you may have noticed I haven’t done. I just have no idea what will be happening when I confirm, so decided not to take the risk. As mentioned above, by giving more insight on the tool and its workings it may bring enough trust to make me do that last step.
4. What is your tech stack?
My wild guess would be that you made the webapp using a Python Flask (or Django) backend. Possibly with a postgres database. I noticed you use stripe for a payment system. That is how I would have created it, since I like to make apps with Flask a lot, however maybe you have a NodeJS backend, or even Golang or Elixir (which I doubt).
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
I think it is really great that you have already included the chatbot. I asked a question there. Unfortunately it seems I have to wait for an undetermined period of time. It would be good to give an indication; for example that you usually respond within 12 or 24 hours. Even better would be to respond inmediately, but I get that is hard when you are only with the two of you. Maybe you can link the chat with your whatsapp? So you will be able to respond more quickly.
As mentioned earlier I was missing documentation, referrals to projects or examples. Or even a walk through video would be good. Right now it remains rather vague to me what I am signing up for and what to do, to expect and what I will get.
You may have something there, however the product is not entirely clear to me yet and will need some finetuning imo.
Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
p.s. very nice logo!
cheers
@BramBloks Thanks so much for the review!! We really appreciate that you took the time to do this.
We talked about your comments and suggestions and have planned some changes along those lines. We're going to put up a live demo dashboard to showcase what the product offers, and we're going to make the onboarding process much more clear.
In case you did not get Meghna's chat message, we have deleted your account.
Best,
Matt
Hi Matt @mroll,
You are very welcome. Happy to hear the review was useful to you!
Sounds like great improvements that you are suggesting. Good luck with further building and growing the tool!
I suppose I missed Meghna’s message. Anyway thanks for deleting the account and letting me know.
On a side note:
I’m wrapping up my findings of all the reviews the past days and have to say I really enjoyed checking all the different companies and the positive responses. I also learned new things myself, so thanks for that to you too!
I notice that almost all struggle mostly with finding their first (i.e. 100) customers) and the right marketing/sales channels. Tech sides were covered pretty well.
So I’m thinking about doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach, or maybe a competitor analysis. Still have to figure out what would be best topics, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a video call or over email? Let me know!
p.s. I’m also doing this on the side, hence my sometimes late replies ;)
Best,
Bram
@BramBloks Those topics are less interesting to us at this stage in our company (very early), because we feel we haven't yet found a real problem. And so it's not clear that we should invest a lot more time into sales and marketing.
The topic that we are extremely interested in knowing more about right now is finding and testing problems. If you would like to hear our story and why this has been hard for us, I'm more than happy to do a short (30 mins?) chat with you sometime next week.
Thanks,
Matt
Hi Matt @mroll,
I fully get that and that you are putting focus on those aspects first. I'm definitely interested in hearing your story and challenges, so it would be great to have a 30 min chat.
My timezone is CEST (CET+1), not sure what yours is? How about Tuesday or Thursday somewhere after 15:00?
Feel free to reply via email on: [email protected]
Best,
Bram
https://getbiew.com/
Hi @lash,
Here is my review of Biew:
1. What problem are you solving?
WHY: creating websites can be hard and time consuming, getbiew simplifies it
WHAT: create a website using google sheets
HOW: Build complete websites and web applications using google sheets
The idea is interesting, just when I look at the landing page you offer almost anything. Ranging from codeless creation of webapps, painless integration with payment systems, custom domains and creation of any website you can think of.
Given the examples link to other websites that provide tools that can be used and no pages are shown of websites that are created by Biew itself, this makes me wonder if Biew provides me with a tool to create a website myself with using just google sheets, or that I actually will be just outsourcing my development to you and you will create it for me.
Besides that I have my questions on the viability of building complete websites base on google sheets. I have to admit to have barely worked with Google Sheets, however have build many websites and web applications. Creating a frontend via Google Sheets I can imagine, however a full website from just sheet I don’t see that happen imho.
It seems like you are building something similar to Sheet2Site or Table2Site. Maybe get in touch with @AndreyAzimov who is founder of Sheet2Sites, he has also been posting on IndieHackers, for inspiration and exchange of ideas.
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
People that like to build a website, that do not have any coding experience but know how to work with google sheets.
I wonder how many people that are not actual developers are looking to build websites. And the ones that do not know how to code will learn how to code in order to be able to create their own website or become a frontend or backend developer. Did you have any idea about the market size?
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
Based from the landing it is clear what Biew is for. It does not become clear to me what will be my input and output. A link to the design resources page gives me an overview to all kinds of (mostly free) resources, which is very nice, but I could use them just separately from Biew.
The what can I build section seems rather random examples to me, and tries to give me the impression that I can build anything with it, which I know by experience cannot be true. Either it must be a very advanced product, but then you would have many references. Or Biew can do a lot but has not been put in action, what would mean you are launching to late. Or things will be custom made behind the scenes. Those are the first three thoughts that pop up in my mind. This all may sound a bit harsh, but it’s meant to help you improve your message :)
I headed over to the page to request access, to try to get a better view of the tool. However at that page I received a form that gave me the impression that I would leave my details to start a conversation, not to get direct access. It makes sense to request some details before giving people access, so that is good! Just when not knowing what to sign up for I am personally very hesitant to do so, so make sure you give clear examples and/or references in advance.
4. What is your tech stack?
Is seems your landing was made using NodeJS/Javascript with additional tools like Webpack and bootstrap. I also suppose Biew sheet to site converter users Node/JS to do the job.
Check your javascript error logs in the console for Feature Policy errors, there is a lot ;)
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
The engagement is limited to subscribing to a newsletter, however it is not clear what I then would be updated of (since landing and access did not provide me sufficient insights in what Biew does).
The chatbot would have been a way to interact with the customer, however it only asks me if I agree with the privacy policy, storing my personal data and contacting me for promotions. I would do that a bit different. Maybe separate the cookie aspects from the upcoming services, or even better a direct way to contact you and ask questions.
As mentioned earlier, it would be great to showcase some websites that are built using Biew. If you don’t have any references yet, maybe create some websites yourself. Also an outline of the workflow how to go from sheet to website, in for example a written tutorial or a video would be very helpful. You could even use the tutorial to get attention and see how potential customers will react even before spending a lot of time on building the product. In addition it will also build more understanding and trust.
Hope this helps, good luck!
Cheers
Hi @lash,
Maybe you had no time to read through it yet, just a quick check.
Did you get anything out of my review?
Best,
Bram
https://mochi.ink/journals
Hi @YouSuckAtViolin,
Hope you had some violin lessons lately to improve it that is the mission ;)
Hereby my thoughts after testing your webapp:
1. What problem are you solving?
The webapp looks very well designed and stylish. However at opening I am directly forwarded to the agenda tool. I don’t know why I would want to use your tool, nor did I find an explanation of its purpose or benefits over other similar products.
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
I suppose you aim at just anybody that cannot keep track of their activities, has a bussy life or having a hard time planning their days.
Potentially people that need to have their days and weeks (or maybe life) structured.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
When opening the link I am directly forwarded to the application, into what it seems a demo environment. I tried to play with the URL to get to the landing page, but was not able to, so I assume there is no landing page. Personally I feel a landing page would add value to provide answers to above questions to customers.
My first impression is that it looks very well styled, especially with the different art pieces. However using the tool was not directly intuitive to me. Probably because I did not know why I was there suddenly. It is clear that it is a scheduling tool though.
I initially thought it was an agenda and started to play around. After adding some logs I figured out is more like a todo list tool. It took me a moment to realize but when I figured out what it was I got a bit more enthusiastic about the product. Still there are some buttons that I’m not sure what to do with or their purpose, like the “future log” button.
There is a a getting started button, although when clicking it it just gives me a checklist of things to do, instead of (a link to) the explanation of how to do them. The app is kept simplistic and rather intuitive, which is a good thing, still either a textual explanation, walkthrough or video would be very helpful.
4. What is your tech stack?
I guess you made the tool using NodeJS. I noticed you are using typescript and thought I some some code that appears to be React.
It seems like you make use of cookies to remember the data I fill in on the demo page. Because when I open it on another link the data persists. Even when I check again after shutting my pc down. Or you are tracking my IP address and storing data on that, which I hope you are not ;)
I checked the rendering on different devices using the console and that all looks fantastic. I did not find you also made an Mobile App for it, which I would think is the way to go (as far as I know the market). Probably note taking and todo apps are already abundantly available and hard to compete with, so finding a good niche would be essential to get your market share.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
Then two buttons on the top left allow me to sign up and sign in. My wild guess would be that those function to create an account so I can store and sync my todos. However I right now I am not sure what I would be signing up to, so I just didn’t.
As mentioned earlier I’m missing information on why I would use the tool, and how it works. I do think the webapp looks beautiful, but nice looks would not be the reason for me personally to use a todo list planner.
Thinking out loud you could maybe style this to serve a specific niche and market it to them, like for example children, or more specifically young girls or boys. I can image they would more fall in love with cool art, style and images as compared older generations. I’m just fine writing my todos still on paper, or all listed on a sheet in my phone. As when I was young liked to put stickers and drawings in my agenda.
Hope this helps!
Cheers
Hey @BramBloks, thanks a lot for taking the time and writing such a detailed summary!
Here is a more detailed explanation of why I build the product and what problems it solves for me: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/bullet-journal-inspired-personal-todo-app-a52457f058
To address some of your points:
It's not a demo but the actual app your looking at, the data is stored locally inside of indexddb and when you signup you can access your data from other devices as well.
I have recently just deployed the app and I still need to build a landing page, it's already in my future log ;)
As for the "Getting Started" button, initially I wanted to add an interactive tour for every item on the checklist, but that turned out to be a bit more complicated than expected 😅
The techstack is React, Node and Postgres. The frontend is hosted on Vercel and the the backend on Vultr
Mobile: It currently works fine on mobile, even though it's not optimized yet, I wanna get the desktop experience right first since this is where I am primarily using the App at the moment
http://gph.is/1NDh89s
Hi @YouSuckAtViolin,
Apologies for the late reply. I’m doing this on the side and had to find time ;)
I read your IH post explaining why you created the app. Interesting to hear your story and I agree the reason to create the app makes sense given your explanation.
Also I watched the bullet journal youtube video that inspired you. No I have a much better understanding of the exact goals of you app. Neither did I know that there is such a big community around that. I saw that video only had 11M+ views and channel with 238K subscribers. Furthermore saw a bunch of recommended videos on the side with equal large amount of views. If those channels can promote your app, you should be able to easily get a fairly large amount of subscribers.
Allright. I think it was the Sign In/sign Up buttons that had me confused.
Nice ;) I would personally have done it the other way around and first build the landing to showcase and validate the demand, but since you already built the app it does not matter now :)
Yes I can imagine. Thinking out loud: maybe you could make a page and display those steps with images and some text. I think that should be more than enough
Would that also be the way most of your customers will be using it?
Haha, I like the way of expressing by using a gif! Thanks, glad to hear my review was useful.
In addition:
I really enjoyed the past days and reviewing all the different project. I also learned new things myself and the positive and appreciative replies from you and others were really great, so also thanks to you for that.
One thing I noticed is that almost all struggle most with finding their first customers or the right sales/marketing channels. Technical parts were covered well.
So I’m thinking of doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach, or maybe a competitor analysis. Still have to figure out what would be best topics, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a video call or over email? Let me know!
Best,
Bram
Thank you for doing this Bram, really much appreciated.
This is our project.
Have a great day,
/Mike
Hi @Michael_Andreuzza,
I checked out Wicked Templates and here are my thoughts:
1. What problem are you solving?
WHY: Building beautiful webpages takes a lot of time, WT provides complete stylish templates
WHAT: Template collection and marketplace
HOW: Get templates from the collection
The value proposition and product description is very clear.
A quick websearch shows me that there are a lot of other companies and websites providing templates. What differentiates your templates from all other templates? Why would I go with WickedTemplates instead of any other?
2. Who are your customers and customer segments?
Website builders, mostly smaller companies/startups and individuals. I think the niche speaks for it’s own.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
The website looks clear and well organized. To test the product I downloaded the free templates to check them out. However each template gave me different results. For one template I had to provide my full details, which I ended up not doing. Another gave me a Rar file after download, which I am not able to unpack/use out of the box, since I work on Ubuntu Linux. The last one “Moliniki” gave me a zip folder that included the Html file as described. This one I was able to preview in my browser and open in a code editor to improve.
After downloading each template I got a confirmation email that also contains a link to the content to download, which is nice. There is also a unsubscribe option to not receive any future messages, which seems to work. A bit confusing to me is that after unsubscribing from the template emails, it is written that I will not receive any future emails on products that I have purchased. I know this is a Gumroad message, however does it mean that when I order a new template I will not get the email with a link? Since I do not have a Gumroad account.
There is no login option on WT, which I do not think is necessary either for now. It may come in handy later, when users would have a lot of templates and can browse through there collection. However first goal would be to get a lot of active users ;)
I like the chatbot on the bottom right of the screen! Although I did not feel the need to use it, it gives me the feeling of interaction and service.
4. What is your tech stack?
As it seems you are running a static website with a few pages. Given your frontend skills I would guess it is served using NodeJS server, which I would personally use for the landing, or make use of a static website tool.
The templates themselves are obviously written in html, with their respective styling/CSS frameworks.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
The simplicity of your product does not require much explanation or documentation.
You briefly mention what is up in your pipeline, which I think is good.
My main question would be? Why would I use your templates and pay for them, when there is so much available around? I could just grab a similar template somewhere and modify it. If the answer is that your templates are more beautiful or better in some way, then I guess it would be very important to pop up on the top of search results and become an established name.
What you could do to increase engagement is ask potential customers what type of templates they would like to see next. For example login and registration pages, or account pages. In that way you can both get more interaction, feedback on the templates and insights in what specific type of templates people are looking for/missing in the online available stocks.
I’m probably not a right customer myself, since I tend to usually create templates myself from scratch, using bootstrap and examples from Codepen.
Hope this helps!
Best
Hey @BramBloks,
This was such an unexpected length, I am incredibly thankful for this.
Let me see if I can answer you...
The value of these templates is on the markdown itself. Why? because I have for example many Bulma websites that look completely the same. So we provide a quick way to get to that markdown architecture
I guess we should come to point 1, we have not expressed our self better, hence the thought of being like the rest.
I completely forgot about this detail. I have to go back and fix it. This happens when Gumroad asks about selling physical goods, so then you actually have to provide your name and so on... But I will correct that, my apologies.
This was a mistake, it should have been a .zip
Good point. If you actually buy again, providing an email, Gumroad will automatically add you as subscribed...
We have some plans regarding this, but we try to be as privacy friendly as we can.
I like this too, in fact, I haven't missed a conversation since we implemented it...
The site is built with Bulma and very little JS, only for the tabs on the details page.
When I started the site, I wrote everything myself, and still doing it. After a while, I took a co-funder on board and he is working on the backend, so we can make it easier to build the site,...he is making a CMS
We are not selling a bloated HTML template with custom CSS, we show you it actually looks, we do not mask the layout with images and so on, so we actually show you what it is.
In the future, we will make complete websites.
We have reacted to this. And I am already working on them.
you can see here:
The login
and some more on the way.
This is a great idea, but you might end up with a "technical debt" regarding the html/css/js.
why? because is not just you building, but many with a different way to write code.
Thank you for such an increible
Hi @Michael_Andreuzza
Glad to hear my review was valuable to you. You are very welcome ofc.
Here my replies.
Alright, I did not get that when checking out. It makes your project much more interesting and compelling though. So if I understand correctly you take away the pain of CSS styling? Or at least most of it.
Don’t worry, that’s why I was testing it ;)
True, but so far they are mostly just basic landing and login pages for our applications. Our services are mostly backend systems and it is nice to provide users with at least some form of interaction with the system.
Furthermore:
I do like the idea, especially if it would be the solution to CSS stress. Looking forward to stay up to date on your progress!
I tried to sign up, but seems that did not work yet. Small tip: add a field ‘confirm password’ to your registration form. My password did overwrite my username now and if users handwrite their passwords it is a good check. The registration form did not forward me to the homepage/dashboard page, so I guess it is not working yet.
Let me know how/where I can keep track of you guys.
p.s. have you thought about creating a marketplace where people can upload these templates and get a royalty? May be good way to fill up the amount of templates and get the word out.
Keep up the good work!
Hey Bram,
We do not have a registration or a log in....
Do you mean Gumroad's maybe?
We have an Indiehackers group, but we haven't post much still...
If you want to follow up you can do it on my Twitter or my co-funder's Twitter
Yes we did, and we are working on it. But not talking much about it....
At the moment we are working on a CMS just for us.
Thank you again.
Btw, did you get the .zip I had sent? I updated the .rar file
Hi @Michael_Andreuzza,
I tried to login via the links that you posted in your reply. Apparently those were only the pages themselves, not with a login at the backend yet I guess ;)
Allright, I will check it out! I saw you also have a newsletter on substack, I think it was through another post recently, great job!
Yea, well I guess that is also a thing for later, since it will be time consuming to build such a platform and get a critical mass of people in.
I did not receive a .zip. Did you send it by email, or did you update the link?
And some general note:
I really enjoyed the reviewing and got very positive and appreciative feedback from you and others. I also learned new things myself in the process. So thanks a lot for that!
While reviewing and reading all the replies I noticed that almost all struggle mostly with finding their first customers and right marketing/sales channels, and not so much on the tech side.
So I’m thinking about doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach, or maybe a competitor analysis. Still have to figure out what would be best topics, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a videocall or over email? Let me know!
p.s. I’m doing this on the side, hence my sometimes late replies ;)
Cheers
http://seamlesscloud.io/
@BramBloks, it is very detailed and super useful feedback. Some of your ideas resonate with us. Thank you for spending your time to review our product. Let me know if we can be useful to you.
Cheers,
Hi @SeamlessNinja,
I’m wrapping up my findings of all the reviews the past days and have to say I really enjoyed checking all the different companies and the positive responses. I also learned new things myself, so thanks for that to you too!
I notice that almost all struggle mostly with finding their first (i.e. 100) customers and the right marketing/sales channels. Tech sides were covered pretty well.
So I’m thinking about doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach, or maybe a competitor analysis. Still have to figure out what would be best topics, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a videocall or over email? Let me know!
p.s. I’m also doing this on the side, hence my sometimes late replies ;)
Cheers
@SeamlessNinja you are most welcome! Happy to hear the review was useful.
Good luck building and promoting the project in the future, would love to stay up to date on your progress. Let me know when you have a newsfeed I can subscribe to.
Thanks for your offer. Besides that the testing of Seamless and the other projects (I'm not even halfway) was really fun and I'm thinking to write another post/article on it later. I may get in touch with you for that later.
Keep up the good work!
Hi @SeamlessNinja,
Hereby my review after testing SeamlessCloud.
** 1. What problem are you solving?**
I like the idea and also the fact that the tool is very clear and to the point. It is immediately clear what it does and most Python programmers will directly understand the functionality.
2. Who are my customers and customer segments?
Customers are developers working in Python. I would be a potential user as well. I think different niches can even be defined within, since Python is a diverse language and used for almost any type of application. There are for example data scientists who just run scripts, your target is more the infrastructure and ops, as also mentioned on the landing.
With these specific segments of potential users and their personas in mind you can find the right channels to promote Seamless. You could for example reach out to influencers creating coding tutorials and ask them to review the tool, or post on specific forums/discussions.
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
Installing was as expected for a python package. I created a virtual environment using
virtualenvwith Python 3.6 on it. Then simply ranpip install smlsto get the dependency.4. What is your tech stack?
Obviously you make use of Python to write and publish the package.
Besides that you make use of cron as a syntax, however I could not found any reference to cron syntax or how to use it. Right now I know how to schedule things with cron, however I remember a time when I knew how to code in Python at a sufficient level, but had never heard of cron or how to use the syntax.
I’m personally not a fan of an external system managing my infrastructure tasks as you offer with the API key synchronization. We at our company have a number of servers running python applications, for which scheduling some repetitive python scripts in an easy fashion like yours would be helpful. I would prefer to run the system locally on my server and for example open the UI on a localhost address. (e.g. port 5000 which is the flask default). This would give me the option to access the UI on the server itself and do the scheduling and management, by e.g. proxying my port via NGINX (which we mostly use). Maybe wrap the whole thing in a Docker container?
If you are running a ton of different servers it could be helpful to have a remote manager, however maybe that should not be the default but optional. And how many of your early adopters will have a lot of servers or just a few droplets running a Flask/Django app or some other code on a Digital Ocean Droplet? I guess most of them will fall into the latter category. Besides that administrators of large systems probably know how to use crontab and other languages or write bash scripts. Don’t take my word for it without validating the assumptions I’m making here, I’m trying to think out loud what is your perfect customer and use case.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?
Everything was very straight forward up to here. However there were multiple things that kept me guessing, that I will address here.
With regards to the documentation I checked out the templates, however came on a Github repo that was not that helpful to be honest. There were folders with code, however not a written explanation with code examples. Just one example with extended explanation would be fine.
Since I could not find more documentation on the landing I decided to search for it myself (I’m using DuckDuckGo). I searched on
seamless cloud pythonand the first hit I got was “how to deploy a Python Flask app to AWS Elastic Beanstack”. Second was your blog page. So apparently you are writing some blogs and documentation. But reading the blog posts I did not see how they related to the job scheduler in any way? One was about searching, scraping and another one about your personal visions on writing code and preferred workflows. Those are sure cool things to discuss, should that be done in relation to Seamless though? Documentation and blog seems a bit unrelated and not so relevant.I would have expected the code to be open-source. I did not find the source code on github, or did I miss something?
Going open source or not is always a hard decision imo. Although I do think that open-sourcing this may be beneficial to you and the project. For example, I was very hesitant to synchronize the API keys with your system, which you can probably see in your logs I haven’t done. I’m sure there is no mall intentions, however you do not have a established name and track record with Seamless yet.
What I did was first scroll through the python files of the package to see what was happening and where I was syncing to. That of course should not be the normal procedure when you want to use a package. Open-sourcing it may directly build trust and attract other bright programmers to give the project momentum.
Probably the question then remains how you could eventually monetize the tool if it is open source? I do not have the answer, to be clear, however I do think there are always ways to monetize a tool if it offers a lot of value and has traction with a large group of users.
Interestingly enough I have been working recently on a job scheduling tool based on Golang, which also had a UI to cope with the often complicated cron syntax and job management. Thats also how I came across your post yesterday. I have been pondering about open sourcing it as well, however have not found a good project manager yet. My idea was that it could still be monetized in a later phase by for example sending and receiving notifications or custom jobs and managing all servers from remote. I’m happy to have a chat in more detail and show you the tool to see if it may be beneficial.
Besides that I got the impression that Github sponsors may become a real game changer for (paid) open source development. I’ve come across some promising stories from developers.
Last but not least: I have created an account and logged in on the profile page. Where can I delete it?
I know you are still in the early stages, yet do think the tool may offer great value and can be very useful to a lot of people. Maybe I will run it on one of our servers one day, or contribute to the code.
Hope to have helped you with some of my insights so far. Looking forward to see the progress and next versions!
Cheers
https://remoteletter.com/
Hi @sagunsh,
I checked out remoteletter and subscribed to the maillist. See below my experience and aswers to the questions:
1. What problem are you solving?
If your assumption is correct, that people lose focus when working from home, the why isn’t the activity of reading this letter another thing that distracts them from doing their work? Or keeping them behind their desk when they shouldn’t?
I have read some of the past issues. As I read the content it is mostly articles that are about remote work and things happening in that space, not so much on overcoming the struggles like lack of attention.
So my question would be: is your WHY about providing information and insights on remote working, development and tools, or is the WHY about tips and tricks to overcome personal challenges when working from home/remote.
I suppose each customer segment would have their own reasons to read you newsletter and desire an unique type of content. For example, I would personally be interested in getting news and opportunities to work remotely, however with working from home I’m barely having any issues.
2. Who are my customers and customer segments?
I notice a mix of (at least) two types of customers:
As already partially mentioned above, I suppose there is a substantial difference between working remotely and working from home, especially when it is a sudden change due to the corona pandemic. There are many people, like e.g. digital nomads who love to work remotely. Their story is very different compared to people who are working from home because their offices have closed down because of the pandemic.
If you target one of either niches it may be easier to become the go-to newsletter for that group. Many famous entrepreneurs have stated that you should pick the smallest possible niche, which is part of a large total market, in order to get the fastest and largest audience. Once you conquer that niche, you can duplicate your success strategy to another niche, and another ;)
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
The process was as expected. I signed up for the newsletter on the landing, received an email to confirm in my inbox within a minute. After confirming I received a welcome email with some more explanations and a few interesting links. Smooth process, good job!
4. What tech stack do you use?
I would guess you have created the site using NodeJS and bootstrap and tools like jquery and some vanilla javascript, which I think is a good choice. So far your site does not have a user management system nor does it seem to need a large backend to sustain the data.
It would be good to check your error logs on the console. I’m receiving a lot of Content Security Policy messages, running your landing on Mozilla Firefox 79.0. Same for Chromium 84.0 running on Ubuntu 18.04.
Also minifiy/uglify some of the javascript files that have not been yet.
What I really like is that you have been using some newer tools, like Mail Octopus (I have seen them posting on IH too) and GetTerms.
** 5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation?**
You provide links to external articles about remote work. The idea of a central place is interesting, however you may engage more with the users and build a community by adding your own content. For example writing about your personal experiences of WFH, how you dealt with it, or how friends or colleagues are overcoming their struggles. Maybe interviewing big names in the field, or just regular everyday people
To finalize: the fact that you already have 200+ subscribers shows there is an audience and you are on the right track. I also found a lot of interesting new links and websites, while strolling though your letters. My guess would be that you could grow your number of users faster by putting more focus on a specific niche both in readers and desired content.
Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
Cheers
Thanks for the suggestions, specially the niche one. Obviously my audience is the one who are working remotely in a regular full time job for companies not the digital nomads. I will think of that more.
You are welcome. Looking to hear from you soon when you reach 1000+ subs!
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Hi @StudioCinematic,
You were first to respond, so I checked out your project first. See my finding below:
1. What problem are you solving?
It seemed like you aimed to create a generic video editor. There are already a lot of video editors, that are in a further stage which makes it very hard to compete or require a lot of resources to get at that same level. I’m not saying creating a video editor shouldn’t be your (final) goal, however I am curious to know:
On a software/technical level I think it is impressive what you have made! On a business and marketing level I am not sure why I should choose SudioCinematic one over any other video editor?
p.s. I have to admit I’m not a video editing expert, so don’t know on which metrics to compare for that regard. Nevertheless I think the benefits of your editor over any other should be clear straight ahead.
2. Who are my customers and customer segments?
On the landing I noticed the word “youtubers”, however as mentioned above to me it seems it could be anyone that wants to edit a video. Have you thought about any specific niches and their needs?
3. How is the onboarding/installment process?
I have tested the app on a Virtual Machine using VirtualBox with Windows 10 Home installed, RAM: 4096 MB. This because my main workstation OS is Ubuntu 18.04.
I downloaded the installer from the landing page. Download was finished in a matter of seconds as well as the installment of the software itself. After installment I auto launched the app and got a beautiful loading image. There was a summary of the release history, which I really liked, however the rendering of the different elements was not done correctly. The link to the EULA was only partly visible and Create New Project button was not responsive and had a slider halfway through it.
The main project UI seemed a bit unfinished, some test were falling off their respective boxes or did not seem to align well. Needless to say, I know designing and building a beautiful UI can be really hard, unfortunately most of todays customers are spoiled with regard to interfaces so for software like these it is kind of a need. Maybe this was because I was running it in a VM. I noticed it looked way better on your youtube videos.
The link to “Tailor it just for you” was a bit confusing to me. I initially thought it would bring me to a settings page, however seemed to send me to my email application to send you an email with my wishes. Maybe just stick to the “Tell us” or “Contact/Support”.
4. What is your tech stack
I suppose the software is written in C/C++. I also got a message that Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 UWP Runtime Package was being installed while installing the app ;) This seems like a logical choice to me for writing windows softwares.
5. How is the customer engagement/support/documentation
Overall the User Interface was kept rather simplistic, which I think is a good thing, so I kind of got a grasp of how to edit pretty fast. I dowloaded some images form the internet and dragged them into the editor. Immediately a audio was attached to them and they were converted into a 1 image video.
Still I would have found it useful to have some tutorial videos, which I rather coincidentally found while clicking on the youtube icon on the landing navbar. Those video’s were very informative, so make sure your users can easily find them!
Maybe you could also use these videos to promote the product and get feedback on it.
Hope this helps!
Cheers
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Hi John. You are welcome! Happy to hear I can be of help.
Some points and some specific answers to your questions:
I think you should try to find some test and/or beta users asap. There will probably be a bunch of people that like your efforts and willing to try and use the tool, or at least give feedback.
Maybe think of a different payment scenario, there is plenty of ways to get payed at the beginning besides the conventional SaaS models.
2 years is already a lot and if you spend another year building it, you are just building it for yourself not knowing what the public/future user wants or if they exist at all. Be careful with that, because it really hurts if you spend a lot of blood, sweat and tears into something that ends up on the shelve…
If that is true, then it would be a great selling point and there must be already a group of people out there that would like to use StudioCinematic, no matter if some things are still broken or missing.
That is exactly what I meant. It is easier to launch and find a niche when your product is small and simplistic. Especially when you don’t feel confident with the total product yet. Then you can gradually grow. Now you are competing with the other video editers.. good luck with that :(
I can make them for you, I can send you them by email. Check my email in my profile and hit me up :)
Haha, yes I can imagine! Very good for your French vocabulary lol
I try to stay as far away from anything Windows when it comes to coding. Given your software and what OS your users will be most likely on, you had no other choice I guess..
Maybe get word around by using influencers or other youtubers that make tutorials on video editing. I’ve heard it is time consuming to grow a youtube channel and hard to get visible through the noise with so many people posting content there. Or check out some sales and marketing startups or people that could help you with that. My impression that the technical aspects are covered very well, but the project lacks on the sales/marketing side. Probably you can even find yourself another indie hacker who is good with that and would like to give it a shot? Check out https://www.indiehackers.com/group/looking-to-partner-up
Good luck!
Best,
Bram
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Hi John @StudioCinematic,
I didn’t know that you have StudioCinematic as a side project besides your daily job. That makes me extra impressed with what you have build in your spare hours!
Hereby some follow up on what you mentioned in your last reply:
Sounds like a good start. Though I think you may be able to get more initial users by approaching people directly. Probably there are forums and online places where videomakers gather? Over there are more of your ideal customers and they will probably also be able to provide you with more detailed feedback. Things like betalist and producthunt etc. are very generic places imo.
Sure, there will be many ways. Maybe a one-time payment to access a beta (you could secure it with a key that expires for example). So you can validate if people are willing to pay for it. I'm sure you'll figure out a way :)
I think that is a great idea!! Don’t forget to address the “why” ;) makes people emotionally feel/remember the pain of editing while watching your video, they will be extra convinced then. Happy to hear when it's on youtube.
Haha, I’m sure it will be well worth it in the end! =P
And some general things:
I really enjoyed doing this whole reviewing and got very positive and appreciative feedback from you and others. I also learned new things myself in the process. So thanks a bunch for that!
While reviewing and reading all the replies I noticed that almost all struggle mostly with finding their first customers and right marketing/sales channels. Not so much the tech side. Something you mention as well.
So I’m thinking about doing a second round. Similar format, but then more focused on those aspects. Like for example where to look for first 100 customers, channels and influencers to approach, or maybe a competitor analysis. Still have to figure out what would be best topics, first checking if there is interest in it.
Would you be interested in such a review/analysis? And maybe have a minute for a short chat to talk about this via a videocall or over email? Let me know!
p.s. I’m also doing this on the side, hence my sometimes late replies ;)
Cheers
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.