I'm building every product feature as a separate micro-saas. Here's why (and how).
Hey!
I'm building Momentum — a tool to build in public. Momentum helps to create and distribute your startup content.
I'm also CTO in startup studio and worked with dozens early-stage founders during my ~ 10 years here. I learned that the more shots you take and the quicker you move — the more chances you have to succeed.
Every feature that you add to the product is a legacy that you'll need to support. It will slow you down and break the app sometimes. So less features you have in your product — the better. Focus 1 thing and do it well.
I've decided to go this route all in with Momentum. Instead of building-in every shiny idea as a feature... I'm building it as a separate micro-product.
I still have one core product — startup+investor social network. But growing social network is damn hard. So I'll use each individual micro-product as a source of leads to the core product.
I'll launch each product individually and if something doesn't stick — just abandon it.
So, here's the products:
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Momentum Feed — content feed that you can embed to your page. Curate any social media posts, articles, documents and all the other stuff you already created.
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Momentum Page — stupid-simple landing page builder. Launch your landing page with email capturing and analytics in seconds. No auth needed.
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Momentum Wave — stupid-simple web analytics. Add the core web analytics to your product in a minute.
We're using all products with our internal projects + few projects with outside founders as beta users. We polish functionality based on their feedback before launching.
Next products likely to build:
• stupid-simple branding builder for social banners, opengraph, other images (think brandbird)
• engagement builder for twitter/linkedin (think taplio+tweethunter)
• stupid-simple blog platform (think feather)
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I would love to hear your feedback and questions!
If you want to try momentum for your product:
• Embed your content feed here
• Launch your landing page here
• Add web analytics here
Thank you!
Thank you for sharing. It makes sense to de-couple specific features from the overall project.
From what I understand, you still have one single label (Momentum) covering all distinct features.
Do you plan to add further features? Will it then grow to four and five and six services? Is there a maximum number that one single brand like Momentum could handle?
Similarly, when would a micro-service merit its own brand, own design, own label, own domain that would be completely different from that of Momentum?
Thanks for the question! 🙌
Here's what products we'll likely build next:
• Engagement builder — schedule SM posts in Twitter/LinkedIn and engage with peers
• Brand app — create branded social media banners, opengraph images etc
• Stupid-simple blog — launch your blog in seconds
• Email automation — outreach your leads and users
...
• Investor dashboard
Once we gain more data about startups, we can build a dashboard for investors to see the progress and invest into best performing startups. It'll give the reason startups to be there
we yet to learn!
for now there will be lot's of overhead to separate the brand
but I can imagine some product goes viral and we decide to raise separately for it. that's the point of micro-products — see which performs better than other. but let's see how it goes..
thx!
How would you spend time for promoting different products and team? will it not be distraction?
That's a good question but answer is kinda counter-intuitive.
So far I feel that framing feature is micro-product actually helps to keep focus. Because you need to think about value, onboarding, first action for every "feature" you'll probably build and overcomplicate silently otherwise.
Every product is a separate page with it's own value proposition, onboarding and pricing.
That's the core of Momentum philosophy — everyone can become a founder. We want to have cases done by early adopters.
Also as we have a large team I really want people to own their piece of product. That's the best scalability IMO. Check how our designer Lera ideated her new product on branding — https://youcan.mmntm.page
Here's another example, copywriting playbook led by our copywriter Lena:
https://copycoffee.paralect.com
That’s an awesome way to build a product, I was thinking about doing something similar with a suite of twitter tools.
Thank you so much!
I new to it but I've made a lot of mistakes (and seen lots of other's mistakes) with dozens of other products I've been a part of.
So far I love it
Great idea! Micro SaaS is the way of thee future.
Yeeeah, hope that's the right bet!
I actually think this is a massively good idea.
Thank you!
I also love the process so far, give it a try ;)
Love the simplicity of the landing page creation!
Thank you Maya! That's our goal — to keep tools stupid-simple
We'll try to keep this bar going forward!
You should also create the following
Stupid Simple Change log
Stupid Simple Contact Us
Stupid Simple Docs Site
Stupid Simple Feedback Widget
Stupid Simple NPS
Stupid Simple Roadmap
Stupid Simple Wall of fame
haha
that's the tough part — how to keep focus on tools that matter
but you got it right — I"ll take your ideas into consideration, they all make sense
out of your suggestions I think the docs site will be the closest one, but in form of a blog
PS for wall of fame you can already use Momentum Feed. We'll need to create case study and add it to landing page
I really like all of these ideas, but I find that the first one is fairly different than the next two. I almost feel like Wave and Page could be their own product combined, and then feed is an extra bonus for those doing social media content.
Either way though, they all look great and I think it's an interesting idea to have them all separate. I'd be interested to see the download rate between them all vs if it was just one product.
Nice, thank you a lot for your feedback!
Right, Wave and Page for now seems like too small, but we have a different goals for them.
eg. for page it'll be likely automations to sync emails with 3rd party and customising UI
for Wave — user session recording (we already built that before) and API analytics events. Check out Splitbee — I modelled Wave after it because I loved the product and now it's acquired by Vercel and shutting down. It also means for the future that Wave can be potentially acquired too.
I also found that integration is power: if we can able to integrate Wave to Page, anyone can do it for their platform
tl;dr; I think both Page and Wave will grow to feature-rich yet simple to use products
Awesome line up of feature-focused products!
I really like Momentum Feed as I could see that as being really helpful for building social proof into a web page.
Momentum Page looks great as a quick landing page builder (can you add lottie files to the landing page? If not this could maybe help set your builder apart from other quick builders while also helping market your product on trend)
Momentum Analytics seems useful to me however I'm wary to trust my analytics on a newer startup so I'd probably end up adding this alongside plausible if I were to use the Momentum stack of products.
Overall really love your core website and value prop! Went ahead and signed up for the waiting list :)
My team at DVNC has been doing the same for the tools we use to manage our creative community.
Our core customers are startup/business brands, however, to manage the work we run a creative community filled with 100+ artists, writers, musicians, etc
2 years ago we tried to build a big app and it failed horribly (our community still laughs at the attempt)
But last year we started seperating the features of: Applying, Onboarding, Work Assignment, etc into different micro-apps and this has really helped to keep our community more engaged as we've added features.
Plus as we add features we don't have to worry about breaking the other features because they're 99% isolated from each other.
Thank you so much for your detailed comment!
Noted about Lottie! And agree about privacy, but I think we'll get the trust once we onboard few smaller sites.
Nice story about DVNC, happy to hear that it worked for you! So it seems that it the right way to go.
One of our partners in VC space also operates this way basically as indie-hacker. Love this approach
Looks good and great idea Igor.
Thank you Lindie, I appreciate it a lot 🙏
Two ideas:
1st for Wave: Since experimentation is everything, I'd love to see rolling time-box analytics for each post (not sure how easy this is to pull from Twitter or Linkedin API).
Put simply: Show 1-3 key metrics for first 2-10 days since post.
Outcome: You see what resonates better with your audience.
2nd for the feed: This can also be used as a 'wall of love' right? I can pull anyone's tweet or social post onto my page, not just my own?
Looks cool!
Thank you John for being early adopter and your suggestions 🤝
Cool, we'll add that to a new SM tool. You'll have scheduling, analytics for profile + posts, and hopefully engagement if LinkedIn approves API.
Right! I also though that one of the use-cases could be wall of love or something similar that testimonial.to does. Will need to play and test it for some product and then add to the landing page.
If things go well the feed will turn to something like Patreon, so people can promote with free content and charge for premium content.
I really like what your are doing here. Essentially taking one big idea, smashing it into small pieces with a hammer and then understanding if any other the smaller ideas will gain any traction.
My understanding is that you will learn a lot about what works and what doesn't? therefore you know where to spend your time?
That's correct! Also scalability — if some product performs extraordinary well, I think we'll make the way to make it a separate company and give that part to a smaller independent team.
The goal with Momentum is to drive as much startups and their content as we can to Momentum Feed.
Each product is affiliate tool that can be rather free or paid.
So would you assign a landing page, hosting fee and create social promotion for each one of these.
I can imagine that could be quite difficult to manage time wise?
You right!
I can see that it can potentially happen. But I don't think it will happen during the next 12 months. But I would love it to happen some day :)
If it works well as independent product we can separate functionality and the team and raise for the sub-product.
I've did something similar with some tools that I've developed for JoyForm, and I thought could be useful as a standalone.
Couple of them already published and couple of other are in the pipeline.
But what I was mostly struggling with is the overhead of releasing a separate product.
I've made the decision to use a page in the main product's domain, and to brand it as a tool from JoyForm.
so at least I don't have to deal with domain, logo, website, etc.
But still haven't figured how to deal with signup, subscription, etc .
For one of the tools I've built a simple email-confirmation flow, and the other I kept as no-signup. Both don't require any payment.
I'm curious to hear how did you deal with it?
Do you keep one userbase for all products?
Do you require payment or plan to?
Does one subscription covers all products?
Good luck, and thanks!
Core product (feed) will likely be free or paid just to remove watermark in the feed. Later once we can close few actual deals will probably introduce paid plans for "private" feeds.
Similar like github is free for open-source projects and paid for private repos. I love this analogy for marketing/ startup data / content
We'll likely need a discount pricing for the bundle, but I'd like to keep billing separate for start.
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It's pretty simple now for us to add new projects, I can do it in hours. For landing pages we have also a simple workflow. I build a mockup in Momentum Page and our. designer creates a similar website in Webflow.
Thank you for your feedback, I appreciate it a lot! 🙏
Wow, that's an awesome approach you're taking with Momentum! It sounds like you have a lot of great features planned and it's great to hear you're getting feedback from your beta users. It seems like you have a really solid plan in place and I wish you all the best with it. Good luck!
The master plan is to create a social network for wannabe startup founders and give them all the tools to build their startup, get the first signups, first paid customers, first investments..
A long way forward, but I believe these small will help us get some cool startups in
Thank you!
This is interesting. Awesome!
Thank you, appreciate your comment!