I'm Pivoting My Failed (-£3,249) SaaS Content tool.
Yo Indiehackers wanna hear a cute lil story that involves a mental breakdown? Yes? OK! Keep reading kiddies :)
INTRO
It was fall, 2020...
I semi-launched my new saas content tool: Spread which is a content repurposing tool. I.e enter one piece of content, come out with 1-2 more pieces of content from the original. A key example was Youtube video transformed into a podcast/blog.
With over 470 pre-signups. I was expecting every one of them to take to it like fish to water...
REALITY
Didn't happen. Users found it hard enough to sign up (even if they wanted to). With our sticky tape and rubberbanded together platform/signup flow it squeezed out every 'maybe' customer into a hard no.
The users who did sign up never entered their credit card info. And the select few who made it all the way spent $2... Hurts so much typing that number hahahha. I think $0 would have been nicer!
The initial users gave some great (harsh) feedback though! I realised the tool we had put together just wasn't cutting it. It didn't finish the job it was intended to do. Only one feature was truly 'perfected' (worked).
Over the weekend I knew this wasn't gonna work with the limited tech and manpower we had right now. This is where the slight mental breakdown happened. At 21 years old with $3000+ and endless hours poured into this, I felt lost. I felt defeated.
SAVED?
I looked into GPT-3. A glimpse of hope spun my mind.
I signed up for the waitlist without hesitation and almost pleaded within the message. (If anyone can help me out here then It would be TRULY appreciated!!!)
Whilst I wait to be accepted, I'm pivoting. To be more exact, I'm 'downscaling to perfection'.
THE PIVOT
Earlier I mentioned that we 'perfected' one feature. This simple feature was turning blog posts into Twitter threads.
I know that this works perfectly and saw an opportunity. I made this completely free for every user who sign-ups (unlimited use), and then made a new landingpage dedicated to this one feature.
I kept the other features on the platform, as it's too much work to remove and place back in later. But I made the blog to tweet feature the main one to advertise and push out to new users.
TAKEAWAYS
It's better to have one working full feature than 50 that work half-arsed.
You all probably knew this already, but to me, it was only obvious after making the mistake itself.
When big tech founders refer to a finished and perfected MVP, they mean one single feature. I didn't understand that before, now I do more than ever.
When you are creating, whatever you are creating, make sure that the 'users output' is a number equal to 1. Nothing more and nothing less. That is YOUR MVP. One single feature that does one single thing, perfectly.
I hope this has helped you guys as much as possible.
I'm now going to use my blog repurposing tool to turn this into a twitter thread
BYEEEEE!!!!
Some hard but good lessons learned. I've seen Reid Hoffman say "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product you've waited too long to launch or something similar"- https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/847142924240379904 - so it's worth noting that perfect is not required for an MVP and I think niching down to one use case is a good plan. I also saw Toby Howell of morningbrew post on twitter today that tweets are ephemeral but twitter threads are EVERGREEN. If true that is a huge benefit of your tool. The only two evergreen social platforms I know of are Pinterest and Quora so if we can add Twitter to the mix that would be great.
Thank you for your comment bro. I see twitter threads and twitter voice as the two next big things in the content realm. Spread will be at the front of that journey.
Thank you for your comment :)
Thanks for sharing @LouTromans
And I really liked the concept of Spread.I was thinking of creating something similar which makes my twitter account synced with my blog.But your tool is awesome - and that too free.Signing up for early access :)
Btw did you get your gpt3 access yet? And if you could, do share some of the implementation details.
Hey bro, thank you so much for your comments man!
I haven't seen your signup name yet tho ;)
I can help you repurpose some of your blog content into tweets if you want me to show you how?? Let me know asap as I'm fulllllyyyy booked up right now hahaha
I haven't got access to gpt-3 yet, but as soon as I do I will be talking about it on IH
Love this advice, and optimism!
For me, my ego doesn't like me releasing something without a 'complete' list of features, at the same time, it doesn't like me releasing something unless it's incredibly polished. It's a hard instinct to fight, but reading posts like this helps!
Honestly bro I am the same. I cringe at my past self for thinking this. It only hurts yourself.
"Did you hear what the perfectionist created? No. Nobody ever did."
Thank you for sharing. I think a lot of startups underestimate how hard it is to create an mvp or one core feature. They just add all the extra stuff and cool features. But it takes a lot of building. And the more you build, the more you understand how much it is.
Agreed. Coming from a non tech POV I really underestimated things and had no clue about all the shit that goes around a feature, such as storage, functionality, scaling etc
Hehehe, same non-techy here. It happened so often that I ran into a problem that I couldn't even google because I wasn't aware of the right definitions. 🤪
Literally bro me too!
I recently decided I'm learning to code, so I can at least understand the tech behind my own product and do some bare mnimum fixes!