Pivoted my idea! Would you pay for this?
Hello all! 👋
I've silently launched my v1 prototype last week for simply testing out my hypothesis in the market BUT the attention I've got was lower than expected.
That's totally expected and I've made some iteration on the product according to the feedback I've received. So I won't tell you what is changed to save you from any bias just now, but we can discuss it later on with the hackers who're interested.
I have one simple question in this moment: Subscribr is a personalized content aggregator based on social shares and "Would you pay for Subscribr?"
Here is the website you can check on the marketing site as well as the prototype.
👉 https://subscribr.app
Your honest feedback is greatly appreciated. 🤓
No, I would not pay. The content out there is already free, so there is no need to pay for that.
And simply narrowing down the selection isn't a big pain point for me. I can pretty quickly narrow things down down on my own.
Now, I may not be the right prospect for something like this, so you'll want to weigh all the input from others.
I think that you should revisit the landing page copy to fit with whatever value proposition you go with. Right now it speaks to the benefit of the content but based on your comments in this thread, it seems like the benefit of the product is more in cutting through the content clutter. If that's the case, you should lead with that.
Good luck!
Thank you for your insights. Appreciate it!
You're right about the copy; it will need to be shorter and thoroughly revised to chime in better with the value prop.
I think your landing page is great and also demo is well done, but to answer your question "Would you pay for Subscribr?" I have to understand "how it's related to my interests? ".
Right now I consume content by rss feeds by blogs I follow, so why Subscribr is different ?
Thank you!
We found that current RSS feeders in the market do not solve the main problem with respect to consuming concent: information overload. Quite the opposite, many users who try out RSS feeders complain about receiving too much content.
Although you customized it according to your interests, which you can, you'd still be bombarded with any content published on those blog pages regardless of their value.
What makes Subscribr unique at this point is that it offers you a refined list of content that are basically people's choices, the most-shared content in your chosen categories offered you as a weekly digests.
What we try to accomplish is to prevent decision-fatigue and help the user still receive the most engaging content.
Moreover, you decide on the amount of the articles and podcasts you'd like to consume, so all you need is visit Subscribr and start reading or listening without bothering to look over somewhere else.
Still figuring out the best way motivate users to complete their weekly digests, though. Might give weight on the gamification facet of the product.
Guys, you are not paying for the free content but for finding all you "need" in one place..
right Ertugrul ?
For example, you want to learn more about software development..
You can use internet to find knowledge spred in 1 to hundreds of places and puzzle it yourself to a meaningful content ( as long as you know how to do that yourself ) or go to a place like pluralsight ( btw Revenue - Q3 2019 revenue was $82.6 million = a model that works ) ..
With the ever growing content on internet it is going to be a bigger and bigger challenge to find the best content. By best content I mean cost/quality ratio based content that matters to YOU.
Most people know how to google words, but how do you know the links found are actually the best links for you. Knowing there is a think called SEO, which only bigger content creators can afford, you can be sure that you are not getting all the best content but highest marketed on those first 3 pages..
BR
Exactly.
Nothing on the web is "free" actually. :)
But in terms of money, yeah, you don't pay for the content you consume but you exchange your attention for the piece you read or listen. I believe that attention, in fact, worths more than money due to the high opportunity cost that you give up on something else that could add more value to your life.
Subscribr tries to ensure that your attention is spent on consuming valuable content rather than lower quality ones OR going through countless platforms to find what suits you best.
That is the service I plan to charge for, not the content.
If I could choose my own subject I might pay for it. (Pick a Subject: IndieHacking, Javascript etc..).
I get bombared with the ‘leadership self-help guru, market influencer’ type content. I am actively trying to avoid that stuff, but that is just me.
I appreciate your insight, thank you.
Currently working on adding some more subcategories to the ones I offer at the moment.
This looks really cool @Ertugrul! Loved the demo - simple and easy to understand. Love how the to-do interface could motivate me to read the curated content. Will def check this out later.
A few comments!
Overall an interesting app!
I really appreciate it @tyherox! Thank you.
With regards to your comments,
You're right about the text on the page. Seemingly, it is one of the main issues with the landing page, as others have also pointed out. I will look into asap to come up with a better-refined copy.
That must be the size of the gif. I will try to re-compress it.
Noted.
I think it's a decent idea, but I think the landing page is way too busy. The only thing I want to see is an example of the content I'd receive. If you could show me 1-2 examples and I liked them, then I might sign up
Great insight, thank you. I'll look into it.
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This is a tough one. Sooo many reader apps not sure I ever saw one that killed it.
Pricing is cheap at this level you may just want to make it free and have content providers pay for ads to show to people with certain interests.
In the state it is currently I would not. Maybe others would. Keep validating and iterating on it.
PS. It's your turn, can you validate my idea?
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-replacement-for-green-status-circles-04a10770a6
Thank you! Great insights as expected.
1- Working on it.
2- That's what I'm also trying to figure out in the moment. Working on highlight tool for reminding the user in certain intervals. Not a core feature though.
3- Great idea.
4- I thought of it as an incentive for users to complete their weekly doses. Still trying to figure out the best way to accomplish this even though I don't want to give too much focus on gamification part just now, since the idea hasn't been fully validated.
5- That's exactly what it is, need to optimize the copy on the page to best convey this.
I've checked your project. Statuses haven't been a problem I personally felt while remote working but I'll let you know what I think about it with more details today in due course.
Mrb Ertugrul,
Would I pay? "Depends" - I'd say.
The base is not bad at all.
Also , why silently launch? You want to get as many eyeballs as possible.. just a though..
I think you could make a better product if you shift from subscriptions to topics from anything and everything to specific tailor made topics like free education. For example a topic, with a bunch of links in structured manner to free source where people can in a context get what they are interested in, for example, education in certain topic, business, film, theatre, podcasts etc, just google trends for what people search for mostly ( could be different based on geography).
That is your B2C approach, where you provide a platform for individuals to find an easy shortcut/approach to content. This requires great content, ease of use and an growing audience that finds what they look for.
The B2B approach could be you have this subscribr skeleton as the starting point for a company portal where the employees log on and get easy access to whatever the company policy wants the employees to read/learn. Could also be integrated with offers with third party partners of your client (the company entity). This requires branding and marketing, and some good starting content to showcase why the company would subscribe for such a service.
Also you have to be patient.
Just because you put something online it doesn't mean the whole world will be aware and jump on the train. People have limited attention span and you don't get many seconds to make them invest time and money into your idea unless they feel that they really need it and get some benefit from using it.
Having an audience, being part of communities, and you need to partner up with key players. It's better to have a small piece of a big cake than having one tiny cake just for yourself.
Depends on what your end-goal is of course, but at least this is a good showcase for what you can build and having built such a thing you know how it is done, which is always a good thing.
BR
I appreciate your support/insights, thank you!
I definitely agree with implementing some more segmented sub-categories since it'd only consolidate personalization that is at the core of my value proposition.
I also agree with the community/audience part, which will be at the center of my marketing strategies through high-quality content that I plan to create asap. I am aware that the iteration process or building your audience will take time. Feedbacks I receive here have been the most helpful so far.
I chuckled.
Anyway, hate to disappoint, but this isn't something I'd pay for personally. It's just not a huge pain point; in fact, I'm not even sure it's a pain point. I'm pretty good at curation and aggregation myself. I'm sure if you find some ardent users you can eventually convert them into paying customers, however.
It's not that I've silently launched and waited dormant ofc. Talking to people that fit in with my user persona ever since. 🤓
I appreciate your insight btw, thank you!
I clicked on the demo, and the page is broken on mobile. It's not responsive. I'm using chrome mobile.
Sorry
The web app isn't mobile-friendly atm.
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It feels so generic worded to almost the point of saying nothing
I feel if you were to pick a content niche and make a landing page just for it, you might have better connection..
Subscribr is a personalized content aggregator based on social shares - should I know what you mean?
Isn't anything social free? 😈
Thank you for the chance to clarify.
Subscribr curates content based on their social shares. That means, if you'd like to be informed about Productivity, Entrepreneurship and Wellness that week, you'll receive the latest content that is most shared in those categories, 'people's choice' in other words.
Who is they in "their social shares"
"latest content that is most shared" most shared by who?
'people's choice' - who is that group of people you grub from?
Like what the difference between this and subscribing to topics on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook?...
The landing page looks pretty nice above the fold.
I am a bit confused by the tagline:
Is it a newsletter that I subscribe to? What is this content and where does it come from? The bold part for a better you doesn't mean anything to me, I assume there is no site whose direct purpose is advertised as to make a worse you.
Scrolling through the landing page there are too many animations for my taste, everything moves around, hard to foucs, there are also of sentences emphasized with bold, making it harder to skim through. There's way too much text in my opinion, especially considering that some of the GIFs shown also contain a lot of text. The spacing is also all over the place, I don't know what to expect when I scroll down as each time the text is in a different place (centered, left aligned, right aligned, on two columns, on three columns, big spacing between title and text sometimes, otherwise not).
TL;DR: I scrolled through the entire landing page and I can't say I understand what your app actually does, so when I got to the pricing I had no idea what I'm paying for. It feels like I'm just subscribing to another newsletter, only that I have to pay for it.
Hey, thanks for the roast @XCS, greatly appreciated!
With regards to the product, you can call it a newsletter that you create for yourself consisting of content gaining the most traction in your chosen category. You can check the prototype demo on the website to see what it looks like, how you create your feed and so on.
With regards to the adjustments on the site, I am currently using a Webflow template that is giving me a hard time atm (once you copy paste a div and you make a changes on it, all of the pasted divs are affected), I am aware of some of the spacing issues and working on it.
Noted that too much text can be refined a little, which I'm also working on it to optimize overall copy, as well as that the bold text can be disruptive a bit.
To be honest, I am very happy with my RSS reader. My only social network left in my life is Twitter. I do receive the inside newsletters, which I find great, curated, content.
I am very skeptical about content based on the number of people sharing. This leads very quickly to viral news, fake news, etc. I don't see how this would, in any way, be better than just checking twitter to see what people I follow and have vouched for, share.
If you, however, can build a platform of news discoveries with some sort of authoritative algorithm that filters, for example, the articles I never read, etc. that it would become a completely different league.
Great insights.
To clarify a bit, Subscribr isn't a news aggregator but rather a high-quality content aggregator, a simple example of content would be: "Secret to Turning an Idea into a Positive-Cash Flow Business" or "How to Do a Full Time Audit (To Take Back Your Free Time)", content that is likely to educate and inspire. Like different sections of a non-fiction book.
You can check out what sort of content is curated through the demo that you can find here: https://subscribr-1.bubbleapps.io
Yes, I checked your page, but didn't really get what you are doing. I mean, you just have some articles linked, but how are they selected?
This is hard for me to reply.
1- Anything in mind where i should re-arrange?
2- Trying to create as much value as i can with regard to your point. 🤓
@Ertugrul
I know that you have put a lot of effort in putting the landing page and your prototype.
However, I think if you keep the text without any animation then the user will be able to focus in your text.
For the prototype I would suggest to learn about other similar companies such as revue, goodbits and curated who aggregate articles and have created separate product niche around it.
:)
Now this one was pretty informative. Thank you!
It'll definitely help me reconsider the way I plan to monetize the app.
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Thank you! I appreciate your insights.
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