Minimum viable feature as a growth strategy with Sam King of Flick

It’s easy to get excited by a grand vision then feel it crash and burn when you become overwhelmed.

There are many indie hackers who do the opposite. They focus on a single tiny problem and make the solution. Some are making it rain dollars from this minimum viable feature strategy.

One of these indie hackers is Sam King who you might know as Sam King FTW. He got famous on YouTube for videos of him eating exotic snacks. They’re hilarious and a throwback to when the internet was innocent but that’s not why we’re talking about him today.

He’s now the founder of Flick who last year hit 3 million dollars in annual recurring revenue! It all began with a simple hashtag tool but now his dreams are much bigger. I sat down with him and got all his best strategies for you:

Scratch your own itch

The best way to find a small problem to target is to look at the ones you need fixing. Though Sam had built a large following, he enjoyed the analytical side of content creation the most. Part of this was choosing hashtags. Yet this process was a mess. No one had created a tool which allowed people to choose effective hashtags quickly.

So he and his co-founders built one.

Underneath the surface, there’s an imbalance where some hashtags are searched for far more often than people create posts about them. The most popular hashtags were dominated by giant accounts that realistically most users have no chance of competing with.

The key decision was to make this a product not a manual service. Can you imagine how boring a life would be where Sam had to search for good hashtags for clients every day? By creating a SaaS tool, the service was scalable and meant Sam could focus on all the other aspects of dominating this tiny niche.

Become the Ace

The tech side of the tool is clever but it’s not rocket science. Once Flick started gaining traction, it was inevitable copycats would start to spring up. Yet these copycats were trying to add too many features whereas Flick put all their effort into being the best at one thing.

With high margins, the team chose to reinvest all their profits into the product. This came in the form of a fantastic user experience and through listening to their customers. They invested in making sure their messaging was on point and easy to understand.

Flick also had enough cash to keep their options open when it came to hiring. If Sam met someone who he thought would help the company grow, they could bring them on board before there was necessarily a specific role. This decision kept fresh ideas flowing into the company.

Sam and his team’s efforts were rewarded when Facebook wrote a success story on them. It was a big milestone but not unexpected when you consider Flick was one of the top users of the hashtag API of any business in the world.

Keep tinkering your pricing

Sam’s secret to rapid user growth is customer segmentation.

At the start there was only one pricing option and they kept tinkering with the amount to see what effect it had on the number of subscriptions. Through this experimentation, they realized users were using their product for different reasons and had different expectations.

Rather than do a one-size-fits-all model where most people aren’t satisfied, they chose to offer a variety of bands to users who could choose what worked for them. On the tech side, this was easy but it had a huge impact on both their revenues and customer retention.

Power users were now paying much more but valued the hard work Flick had done on the UX to make their lives easier. Hobbyists could use the product with a low monthly fee, mainly many who were unsure thought there was no real harm in paying for a month to see how it turned out.

This is something many online businesses can put into place once they start thinking about the user demands rather than their own costs. People don’t care how much it costs you to provide your service if they are getting what they want.

Expand your questions

This is all great so far but there’s a limit. If you’re fixing a small problem, it’s natural there’s only so many people willing to pay to have a solution.

Yet these people now trust you and like the way you do things. Here’s where you can start interacting in a more holistic way rather than focusing on just what your original niche is. What are other problems many of your users experience? What other adjacent pain points do they have?

For Flick, people thought they had the best hashtag tool but they didn’t like needing to go to 8 different products to manage their social media workflow. Of course, they didn’t like paying 8 subscriptions either.

The mistake many businesses make is to look too broadly for potential new areas to launch products in. Don’t build what the market needs, build what your audience wants. These loyal customers will then spend more with you and recommend your products to their friends.

Flick is placed well for this strategy. Their niche means most of their users are influencers and creators. These people love posting about the tools they use because their audience loves hearing about it. The happier Flick makes these customers, the more likely they are to share organically and the more new subscribers they pick up!

Make the best of each product

While you can use your existing audience as inspiration for your new products, you shouldn’t use your existing codebase!

You can take what will work but you need to be brutal in discarding what won’t. Even better, you should start from scratch with strong UX principles. Sam says many founders just make their products look like each other even when the user experience suffers. Apply the same vigor to your 2nd, 3rd and 5th products as your first product.

The beauty of following the minimum viable product strategy is you can repeat it in a micro-sense with all of your other products. You have even more pricing options to look at and playing with bundling can increase your revenue significantly.

Flick has moved into the realm of Instagram scheduling and analytics at an accessible price point. The benefits of avoiding shiny object syndrome until you’ve proved one product can be enormous. Can you stay focused?