Please help me validate this idea
Hi all!
I have built an MVP and launched a landing page for a product that you can check here: https://bluright.com.
It's an online tool that makes it easy to blur/highlight/spotlight any area of an image easily and download/save it for later use.
Now I need your help to validate this idea and, if I should continue developing it, how to improve the copy of the landing page to get people subscribe.
Thanks :)
Love the idea! For validation, I’d focus on getting a clean landing page up with some real-world use cases. One thing that helped me when I was showing off early user feedback was making sure I blurred out faces in the screenshots to keep things professional and private. I used- https://thetoolapp.com/image-tools/blur-face-in-image/ which is super quick for that. Definitely curious to see how your MVP evolves
Love the simplicity of the landing page. Crystal clear what it does and how to sign up to hear about updates.
I'm not terribly sure of repeatable use cases, where this would become part of someone's daily routine. So either a) I'm not your target demo, and someone who has that itch to scratch will see the value of your product, or b) you can explicitly lay out who your target market is on your landing page, with examples of use cases.
My few cents:
Combining this with image recognition and AI could be super useful potentially.
For the use case of this tool, I think that it will help people who publish pictures on social media and have to blur faces in the background (for any raison) while keeping the picture still nice to share, or maybe someone who wants to highlight relevant text in a scanned document for example... I think there are many use cases out there but I hesitate whether to target a specific market or let it open.
What do you think?
I worry about targeting too broad an audience from what I've learned in countless interviews, books etc. I'm struggling with something similar for my project, and trying to make the value prop and framing narrower, to cater to a more passionate but smaller subset of potential users, vs. having a clear niche in mind. Still not sure if that's a good move, but yeah without having a clear specific target market, tempting to cast a wide net.
Yes, I agree. And that's the importance of a pre-launch/coming soon page; I will try to figure this out if I can run a survey with collected emails ;)
Thank you.
That's actually really cool!
Have you looked at sites like https://tinypng.com/ to see how they monetise their product?
Thanks for pointing me to that service.
Their business model is interesting; beside ads and the free (limited) offer, they have a yearly subscription. And what's more interesting is that they have built an ecosystem around their solution like plugins for photoshop (50$), wordpress and magento (donation).
Does the tool work offline? If I'd have something super confidential to blur, I wouldn't upload it anywhere to be blurred.
If I'd have a recurring use for the tool I'd want it to automatically detect faces from pictures to blur.
Yes, for sure, the work is done locally in the browser and nothing is shared/uploaded to the server unless if you would like to save it for later use.
For the face detection, yeah, that would be good to have as advanced feature. Will see if I can build it for the first version. :)
what's the business model
tbh i prefer the one with ads.
i'm sure you can buy an empire with a lotte of little website like this instead of just one with a lot of paid features that i can do on photoshop, but dont mind my opinion i'm just a random guy from the internet
lol, kudos to the humbleness :)
No worries, it's constructive.
Thanks :)
Nice tool. Beautiful LP. How are you going to monetize it? I think it's nice to have such a tool in bookmarks, but I'm not sure if many people will be ready to pay for it on a monthly basis. It's possible to charge per image download, but it such an annoying thing to input the credit card every time I want to blur any text somewhere. Same effort as to do it in on my laptop with a more complicated graphics tool.
Yes, you are right. But an other solution maybe is "a balancing account", so when costumer reach his limits, he is asked to add credit to his account's balance :)
What do you think?
Yeah, this "Pay as you go" plan is a great idea 👍. I think it will work best in this case
:)
I think this is a great idea, specially for people that are not good with design software, I mean in my case I use Photoshop and many people aswell but I'm sure you will have a big market outside. Let me ask you what would be your business model? this will be free or you need to pay for every time you need ?
thanks and congratulations great idea and very simple to use.
Thank you :)
To answer your question, as I said in an other reply, for the pricing, it depends if it is for the mass or a niche, but in all cases there will be:
sounds good!
:)
Hey Farid,
The simplicity is good, people will get it right away visually. I guess the broader question of "who is your target market?" strikes me at the moment. I am not one to nay-say a new product off the bat but I am struggling to think of who would use this and pay for it.
For me the market for people who might want to display sensitive documents and blur parts of it are probably a large portion of the people who already have Photoshop or another graphics tool that will do this for them.
Have you thought about your potential customers and who they are? What they do for a living? Why they would pay for this?
As I say I'm not trying to nay-say your product from the get-go, just trying to be helpful and hopefully help you identify your targets which will in turn help to direct you in updating the copy / sales pitch.
Those are really good questions. I think that you're right for that large portion of people who have Photoshop, but I think that even for them an online solution that accomplish a specific task well and easily is always welcome :)
That said, I think, in the other hand, that there is still an other portion of people who want to hide or highlight some infos in their screenshots, like marketers and influencers for example, and the tool may be a good help for them.
What do you think?
It's possible that there is a market for this but my gut instinct is that it is very niche. My experience so far in the indie hacking space has lead me to my own realisation that if you create a niche product it has to sell high in order for it to bring in cash since you will do very few transactions overall. Mass market products sells lots so can sell for less to maintain the income. My initial problem with this proposition is that I can't see people spending much to blur an image...
I guess while we are on the potential issues front, I wonder how long it will take for the facebooks and twitters of the world to add the ability to blur a section of an uploaded photo when posting to social media? It is fairly easy to add that functionality since they already have 90% of it in place (upload image, manipulate image, save image).
So I suppose my points are:
Do you see this as mass market or niche market and how do you intend to price the product?
Do you think you are at risk of existing tools easily adding this functionality?
To be honest, I still hesitate for the choice of the market. So to answer your questions:
1/ For the pricing, it depends if it is for the mass or a niche, but in all cases there will be:
2/ For the second question, yes the risk is always there, for every product, not just mine. But I believe that the market is always big and anyone has its part of it :)
I've been thinking more about this today. There is definitely some opportunity to make this work based on advertising revenue alone. If you can make this really easy and fast, it might be the go-to tool for very quick image bluring etc. Then you can probably flesh out the tool over time to add more functionality.
Yes, that's an option to consider, especially if I decide to go for broad audience.
Thank you :)
The landing page is clear and I understood what you were offering right away.
That being said, I wouldn’t use it because I have a tool that does all those things and more.
I’m always taking screenshots and need to blur and highlight places all the time.
I’d be your target market but the problem is that I also need to outline or take screenshots (major one), circle certain content, draw arrows, add annotations, and other things.
It would either be use multiple tools or get one tool that does it all. I choose the latter option.
That means if this tool implements the major of this features beside being online (so no download/install required) may convince you to make the switch? ;)
Haha, well no, I wouldn’t switch because there’s no point. They’re both the same thing.
The only reason I’d switch was because you’re a fellow Indie Hacker :)
Lol
Thanks for being honest :)
May I ask you what's the name of the tool do you use? And, if you don't mind, what are your use cases? And who are the potential users for tools like this?
I would like to know the target market/niche better.
I well appreciate :)
It’s called awesome screenshot: screen video recorder.
I use it for screenshots that I’m using in blog posts or tutorials.
I’ll grab the screen, blue sensitive info, point arrows at things I want to make prominent or draw red boxes around them.
Potential users - bloggers. Or anyone who creates written tutorials that have a visual element.
Thank you very much.
That will help a lot :)
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Well, the intent is not to offer an editing tool like photoshop. The goal of Bluright.com is to help people blur/highlight/spotlight any part of the image online, easily and fast, without the hassle of downloading/installing/running a big software as photoshop.
Otherwise, you're right for facial/number recognition. That will be great feature to have. Things like this require to integer AI and more work... Will see if it can be part of the v2.0? :)
That's actually a good idea. Receive a photo, blur all text/faces and return blurred image. Of course, it probably requires some ML knowledge, so OP might not have the necessary skillset (although there's so many tutorials nowadays that its not that hard to learn)
Technically no Ml is required. There are countless face recognition/tracking algorithms including from the library OpenCV that do not rely on ML at all.