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81 Comments

Post your product, answer a few questions, and I'll give you in-depth feedback

As part of my role at Saasify, I've met with literally hundreds of indie hackers, startup founders, and aspiring makers over the past few months to talk about their ideas, understand where they're at in their journey, and try to help them out along the way.

Quite a few Indie Hackers are included in this list. 👋

This is a bit of a lead-gen sales funnel but it really has nothing to do with Saasify itself -- it's more of a traditional advisor style thought process where my goal is to understand what diff makers are working on and try to add value where I can in terms of feedback, advice, intros, resources, etc.

And today I'd like to offer a mini version of this in-line on Indie Hackers.

So just respond to this post by answering the following 4 questions as succinctly as possible and I promise that I will respond to every single response with direct feedback and suggestions.

  1. What? Problem / Need – What problem do you want to solve? 🤔
  2. How? Product / Features – How are you solving it? ⭐️
  3. Who? Target Customers – Who are you solving it for? 👨
  4. Why? Benefits / Powers – What concrete benefits does your target audience ____ gain from solving their problem ____ with your solution ____? 💪

PS. if you want to read more in-depth about why I'm using these four questions specifically, check out my blog post here.

  1. 5

    Hey Travis,

    Thanks for putting the time and effort into this,

    Our Platform: StockAlarm.io 🚀

    What? Casual traders around the world have to decide between setting blind limit orders or stalking charts.

    How? Stock Alarm provides reliable and realtime alerts to traders through the use of phone calls/texts/push-notifications.

    Who? Individual traders (usually trading options on Robinhood)

    Why? Our platform provides reliable alerts that grow with you as you progress throughout the trading world. We provide news/technical-analysis/key-stats and much more.

    Cheers,
    Yahia

    1. 1

      Hey Yahia 👋

      • Very clear value prop.
      • Your site & apps look great. Lots of polish 💯
      • "Wake up when it matters most." is an excellent tagline.
      • Your social share metadata could use a lot of work. Twitter's preview needs polish (test it out here https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator)
      • Blog content looks awesome
      • Slack link is broken in footer
      • Features page is pretty redundant right now but I'm guessing it's a WIP.
      • It's really not clear to me after thoroughly checking out your landing page which forms of notifications you support? Just phone calls? That seems pretty annoying. I'd expect calls, texts, slack, etc, but for MVP at least make it clear that you support calls + texts.
      • If you're using twilio for texts / calls, you can add their logo to your homepage for some social proof.
      • Your "how it works" steps 1, 2, 3 are currently a lot of text. Spend a bit of time and make this visual. It'll do wonders.
      • The biggest thing missing from your landing page is actual people. Landing pages convert more when target users see people that they identify with. In your case, well dressed, polished, business folks. The easiest place to add this right now is under your social proof section "what our users think". Maybe this isn't possible with your current app store reviews, but you have these people's accounts. Reach out to a small % of your top users and ask them for feedback. Incentivize them to give feedback and to allow them to use their quotes on your page. Only choose to use the people who "fit" your ideal target personas. E.g., if I send you a picture of my cat for my profile pic, that's probably not a great person to choose. You ideally want a range of seemingly successful people from all walks of life where someone reading your site will identify with one of them. Right now, it's all just anonymous and cold.

      Why? Our platform provides reliable alerts that grow with you as you progress throughout the trading world. We provide news/technical-analysis/key-stats and much more.

      This is the single most important question when it comes to selling & marketing your product, and your answer is answering what again instead of why. This may seem like a simple distinction, but trust me it's incredibly important. Read my more in-depth blog post if you're not sure on the difference.

      In your case, I would say your why is: so you don't have to worry about financials. You're "selling" your product / solution on a literal level. But what people want to "buy" in a more psychological sense is the promise of being a better investor and ultimately getting rich. Luckily for you, this is a great selling point 💪and there are lots of examples you can pull from to give connotations of wealth / success / etc -- you just have to walk the line between evoking that premium image and having some successful people that your potential buyers will identify with -- and on the flip side you don't want to go too far and be cheasy / get rich quick / etc.

      When talking about branding especially for cases like this, I always like to look at what other really well funded & successful companies in this space do in terms of color scheme, typography, copy text, and visuals. You want StockAlarm to "feel" like it belongs in the same world as these other products, and in this respect I think your branding & design could use a lot of improvement.

      I'm not an expert in the stock / investing space, so I'd ask you: who are the 3-5 products that are absolutely rock solid here that you could use as inspiration to model your branding & design around? I'm not saying to copy anyone explicitly -- just create a collage for different elements (hero, CTAs, color schemes, etc etc) and pick & choose from diff existing solutions in places that where it won't take much work on your end. With the end goal being to evoke an identity that "fits" more in this refined world.

      Like when I interact with your brand, I want to feel like I'm interacting with a high end hotel or investment firm because that's the lifestyle that your target demographic wants to live (rich, successful, business, elegance, etc). And I don't feel that way right now.

      With all that being said about design, I realize everything's a process and this is a really, really solid MVP. I love the use of undraw haha 👀

      Overall, I love what you're doing & congrats on having real users! 💯You're well ahead of the curve for indie hackers 😄

      If you found this feedback helpful, please consider showing saasify some love on the socials.

      Cheers 😄

  2. 3

    Hi Travis, thanks in advance! I'm Herman, the founder of justsketch.me.

    1 - Traditional wood mannequins for artists are limited in range, hard to pose, and don't really look like people.
    2 - JustSketchMe is a set of posable 3D characters for artists, designers and illustrators for use when creating their work.
    3 - It is used currently by artists, illustrators, designers, and interestingly enough physiotherapists for illustrating correct posture and movement.
    4 - Artists spend less time planning out their piece by using our tool, and can spend more time on their art.

    1. 1

      Hey Herman 👋

      My first thought is that this is so interesting & unique! I really love the core value prop and your basic but polished design so far.

      I actually did an internship at Pixar back in the day and have a lot of experience with 3D graphics on the dev side of things (linkedin). One of the areas that was always a challenge for me with tools like Blender & Maya was that they're so powerful but I suck at the actual creative side of things 😂 and so having character models and assets to start with was super useful.

      • The webapp looks solid. Are you using threejs or webgl directly?
      • I really like the lil fluffy cloud design elements.
      • Gumroad is a great choice to save you from having to deal with billing complexity and allow you to focus on your core value prop. Kudos
      • Add more to your "what will you create" section or better yet make this into its own self-updating page. 💯
      • Being able to export in multiple formats is great. I'd also explicitly mention specific programs like Houdini, Maya, etc because less experienced users probably want to know as quickly as possible that this solution will work with their normal tool(s) of choice. This is also great for SEO and you should try to mention each of these programs / tools / use cases on your home page. Possibly in a consistent nav with individual sub-pages for each of the popular 3D modeling tools. These pages will be extremely redundant but that's okay -- it's gold for SEO and it's important for users to funnel themselves naturally into the one or two tools they care about.
      • Making pricing clear on your marketing site is important. You don't want to hide the fact that it's a freemium product and people take paid products more seriously.
      • In the future, offering the ability to transfer movements & animations across different skeletons and quickly taking an existing animation from a library and transferring it onto a new model would be a killer feature that would take this from a static pose library to supporting more dynamic use cases. But one thing at a time and this type of transfer is pretty non-trivial to do well. I remember implementing a basic version of this in college but I'm sure there are some OSS libs that would be really useful for this these days.

      Overall, I love what you're doing. The cloud design elements and how the models fade into them on the https://justsketch.me/features/ page was my favorite part 😄

      Keep up the great work!

      PS if you found this feedback useful, please consider checking out saasify's socials 😄

      1. 1

        Thanks for the awesome and comprehensive feedback! It is built in threejs (although it was originally built in Unity). I'm glad you like the web aesthetic we're going for, and I certainly will add more to the "What will you create" section.

        You've given me a lot to think about, so again, my thanks.

  3. 2

    Thanks for the kick needed to provide some more clarity to myself and my marketing team.

    1. Raising capital and reporting to investors in private offerings is complex and difficult. Each sponsor has a different process and different metrics they want to share with investors.

    2. Our Investment Workflow Builder allows sponsors to create a totally customized and automated capital raise experience. Our investor dashboards show what matters most to your investors without adding unnecessary complexity.

    3. Commercial Real Estate Sponsors and Broker Dealers

    4. We help sponsors provide their investors a great experience through automation so they can spend more time focusing on the big picture and less on repetitive tasks.

    https://investordealroom.com

    1. 1

      Hey Josiah 👋

      • Overall, I like what you're doing - products focused on raising & investors often do very well.
      • When i got to your initial video, i was like awesome i can quickly see what this is all about. then i saw it's 33 minutes and immediately got turned off. Show your visitors that you value their time. This is the single most important piece of your marketing -- keep it extremely concise & to the point. You don't have to throw away your current video -- put it somewhere else sure on a blog post or case study page or something, but your main intro video should be ~60 seconds max.
      • I'm pretty confused at what type of investments and sponsors you're talking about. Are you focused on tech VC? Real estate? Everything? Would I use it for raising a seed round for Saasify? None of this is clear to me, and I would encourage you to focus all of your efforts on one very focused use case until you gain some traction.
      • Your footer typography seems unprofessional and inconsistent with the rest of the site.

      Great work so far & best of luck!

      You don't need to answer these questions for me btw -- you need to make sure that your visitors can answer them for themselves.

      Cheers 😄

  4. 2

    Absolutely love your work. You're doing big things, bro. I would love some cold hard constructive criticism.

    👇 Landing page
    https://storycreatorapp.com/

    👇 Just added a free demo no login required
    https://storycreatorapp.com/demo

    1. 2

      I tried to use it for 30 seconds and gave up. I'm not a serious video/visual content creator. I may not be your target.

      What about an in-app tutorial on first visit?

      1. 1

        Fair enough. What did you find challenging? I would love to learn what made you give up?

    2. 1

      Hey dude, let's schedule a catch-up call on slack sometime -- will be easier to give feedback. Love all the progress!

  5. 2

    Hi Travis, thank you for your initiative.

    1. What?
      Trying to solve the issue with the lack of early feedback when working on a new app. This feedback is critical to validate any idea.

    2. How?
      https://github.com/moufette-tools/moufette
      An open source tool that helps devs embed a widget into their website/landing page to collect feedbacks + screenshot from their early users. The tool comes with a dashboard to monitor and review feedbacks

    3. Who?
      mostly devs and indie makers

    4.Why?
    Not wasting time on building features users don't care about, and focus on what your customers need/want.

    1. 2

      Hey @jamalx31 👋

      • I love OSS 💯
      • Also love your lil skunk 😂
      • Your core value prop is really solid.
      • You may have to educate your target audience as to how important this is, because many devs & indie hackers unfortunately don't focus on user feedback as much as they should.
      • Your screenshots in the readme are difficult to make out. I should be able to understand what the main widget looks like right away when I visit the repo instead of having to read through some stuff and then click on a small preview to finally get a glimpse of the only thing I care about which is what this widget actually looks like.
      • While I love the skunk, put him / her down at the bottom and put a bigger version of your main widget example screenshot front & center on your readme. A picture is worth 1000 words and if I see that widget and some example feedback in the screenshot, that's way way way better than anything you could write about your product. Since 98% of people who land here won't actually read through your prose that you spent a lot of time putting together. Trim out all the fat in the text, move it into a blog post where it belongs, and focus on the hero screenshot.
      • As an OSS tool and project I think this is awesome. As a product, I think you're going to have a tough time monetizing this. Mainly because your current target market is indie devs and we're a hard group to sell to. Build vs buy mentality is tough.
      • Your "community edition" makes me think you'll be adding additional features on top of this for an "open core" business model. Awesome. My favorite resource for open core reading is https://coss.media/ and I'd start by reading these articles:
      • I gave a talk last year about open core and diff ways to monetize OSS that you may find interesting. https://slides.com/transitive-bullshit/the-wonderful-world-of-open-source#/
      • I know there are a lot of other feedback tools, but I've never used any of them. You'll probably also run into comparisons with tools like drift & intercom & the 20+ other clones that exist these days.
      • I'm not saying any of this to discourage you. Rather, if you want to be successful with this it's important to understand the competitive landscape and what the potential market opportunity looks like.
      • The actual code looks solid btw 💯Apollo, TS, and React all the way

      I hope you find this feedback helpful. I think you have a great core to build off of, so keep up the great work!

      1. 1

        btw, if you want to release the widget as a standalone OSS lib, I'm the author behind https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/create-react-library which you may find useful in the future.

        1. 1

          Really appreciate the feedback!
          I will go thro the articles you listed and make some changes to the readme.
          Thanks again, very valuable insights.

          btw I signed up for sassify. seems like a great product! I strongly believe the future is code-less and sassify is paving the way for it

  6. 2

    Hi Travis,

    That's a really cool post header image! 🌼

    If you are still doing this:

    1. What? You bring traffic to your website, but it's not converting. You don't know why.

    2. How? A single analytics platform that helps you understand what your visitors do on your site.

    3. Who? Any website owner who sells something on their site, and, preferably who also has some ideas about how websites work.

    4 Why? By understanding your visitors you can learn how to bring more valuable traffic to your site and make the most out of the traffic that you get. To understand users you normally use analytics, but each analytics platform you add to your site adds extra monthly costs, privacy concerns for users and your own site data and it also makes it harder to see all the information in one place. There is no reason to sacrifice privacy in order to get insights on your visitors. You shouldn't have to use 2-3 different analytics tool on a site for which you also pay large sums monthly.

    My solution: https://www.usertrack.net/

    1. 2

      Hey Christian 👋

      • Really solid and clear value prop.
      • Your landing page is well designed and clean.
      • Your main h1 "Analytics to increase conversion rates" doesn't pop for me. Maybe think about emphasizing the "increase conversion rates" part of things like Hotjar does for their h1 "The fast & visual way to understand your users" with "understand your users" being emphasized as the "why".
      • Oooh bouncy buttons :)
      • Your hero video is too small. Make is 2x. I have no idea what I'm looking at right now.
      • Remove the "Quick video showcasing some analytics segmenting features." People understand what a demo video is.
      • Add some audio to your main video. super easy and makes it more engaging. i'd highly recommend using Loom or a similar tool to actually add your face on there as you narrate what's going on. right now i'm just dropped into some dashboard that i don't care about. spice it up. it'll do wonders for your conversions.
      • https://fleek.co/ has a pretty solid intro you can use for inspiration (and at a much more appropriate size).
      • features section is solid, though I would increase the size of the images a bit. Assume people are looking at things quickly and that they're distracted while doing it.
      • the self-hosting part needs to be emphasized a bit more. i know it's a bullet point at the top but i was confused once i got to the "Why would I use a self-hosted analytics script instead of a service?" question and I was like wait a minute, isn't this thing a SaaS?
      • gumroad 💪
      • "Ready to see the dashboard and your recording?" - I don't care about the dashboard. I only care about the recording. Cut the excess text.

      Okay, here's my main question: why is this thing self-hosted and constrained to only work if I'm using / familiar with PHP and your very specific tech stack? I was going along and saying okay maybe I could find a use for this until I got to this one tiny FAQ question and I immediately said oh okay I'd never ever use this. I get that it costs $ to compete with someone like https://www.hotjar.com/ but your product will be significantly more appealing to a larger audience if it's not solely reliant on PHP.

      If, however, your focus is Wordpress and other PHP hosting platforms, then this needs to be much more clear on your landing page and all over the place for SEO.

      Overall, it looks like a solid product and it's clear you've put a lot of time & effort into it. Keep up the great work & take my advice to heart cause I really only mean well.

      If you found this feedback useful, please consider giving saasify some love on socials.

      Cheers 😄

      1. 1

        Wow, thanks a lot Travis for your feedback, it's surprisingly good and it actually helps me a lot!

        I assume you are a busy person, I won't comment on each point individually, only on the ones that I found really insightful (but all of them are good).

        • Good to know my hero text isn't too useful. Before I just had "Self-hosted analytics", I think "Analytics to increase conversion rates" is better, but I will try to find something even better. This is also related to the point about self-hosted not being emphasized enough. I also assumed that the "Download" in the hero button gives it away that it's self-hosted, but I should be more direct.
        • The video was a quick replacement of an older video, and currently a placeholder until I decide what to showcase and how (doing everything by myself, I make regular improvements to the landing page until it's good enough, so I don't waste too much time polishing it, something like the 20/80 rule).

        Regarding the design, you're the first one who said it looks nice. I started updated my landing page a week ago (was a really bad design) and I keep changing a few things every day. It went from "hire a designer plz" to "well designed and clean" pretty fast 😅. I guess I'm making progress.

        Okay, here's my main question: why is this thing self-hosted and constrained to only work if I'm using / familiar with PHP and your very specific tech stack?

        Because the stack userTrack is built on should not matter (for most users).

        I agree that the fact that the script is built on PHP should be emphasized. I think that the biggest concern about self-hosted software is that it's hard to setup.

        All you actually want is to make use of the analytics platform and as long as it's easy to setup, how it works behind the scenes shouldn't be important.

        My biggest focus will now be to create a good tutorial showing how easy you can set it up. I would probably recommend a DigitalOcean droplet so the process would be something like this:

        1. Create new one-click LAMP stack $5/mo droplet.
        2. Upload the userTrack.zip archive to the server using FTP.
        3. Run the installer wizard.
        4. Done! Now you have your own analytics platform where you can track as many sites as you want, sites which are built on any tech stack.

        Would you still not consider using userTrack if you had a step-by-step guide to set it up in 10minutes max?

        Thank you a lot for your feedback! I think that during the 6 years of userTrack being a side-project I never actually received any feedback from someone who is not already a customer. Hearing your feedback made me realize that solving the problems/concerns of existing customers will probably not bring in new ones and that I have to get more non-customer feedback on why they wouldn't buy userTrack.

        PS: Your Saasify website looks amazing! Followed you on twitter. 🐤
        PS2: I didn't want to write a long reply, but ended up writing a novel.

        1. 1

          I realized I only answered to why is PHP needed, not to why it's self-hosted.

          That's because the hero h1 text, until this week, has been "Self-hosted analytics". I am also advocating for self-hosted software and increased user privacy. I think self-hosted software is the future. I am not going to list the advantages of self-hosted software, there's some of them on the landing page (before actually the landing page only talked about self-hosting).

          I could make it a SaaS, there are many userTrack customers who purchased it just to make it a SaaS, but I have told myself I will never do this. I am thinking of the current way of selling userTrack as "paid open-source" and will probably go open-source at some point, if I earn enough to sustain myself.

          I am still a bit conflicted on how to promote userTrack, either focus on "self-hosted" or focus on "best analytics for landing pages" stuff (because I know it will be the best one very soon). I decided to start promoting the advantages more than advocating the self-hosted part, as people who are into self-hosting already know the advantages and people who are not, probably don't care, but once they start understanding how it works they will like it.

  7. 2

    Hi Travis. Nice topic!

    So I will start right away by
    WHAT?

    • Everyone is creating newsletters to drive traffic and user engagement with their products.
    • People what to be informed.
    • People eventually lost track of newsletters that they are subscribing to.
    • Creators of newsletters usually don't know if the subscriber is active or not, and the whole process of newsletter creation is somehow tricky.

    HOW?
    ManyLetter (https://manyletter.com/. Its primary focus is to reduce the number of email messages that users are receiving every day, by merging many newsletters to one (that is where the name of ManyLetter comes from). ManyLetter has built-in features that provide users with options that save time, make the inbox tidy, reduce the number of notifications received as well as help creators to create newsletters that their subscribers will fall in love.

    WHO?
    Subscribers and creators of smaller newsletters

    WHY?
    For subscribers:

    • Fewer newsletters email messages for subscribers every day.
    • Users can search and return to newsletters messages whenever they want.
    • Automatic unsubscription
    • Message categorization
    • ManyLetter can protect user's privacy because when users are subscribing to newsletters, their email address stays anonymous, but they will still receive the messages.
      For creators:
    • Simpler newsletter message creation
    • Automatic newsletter propagation to ManyLetter subscribers.
    • Possible faster subscribers acquirement
    • Better control over subscribers and segmentation (active, inactive, unsubscribed)

    Thank you for your feedback I'm looking forward to it!

    1. 2

      Hey @manyTomas, happy to try & help 😄

      Have you talked with this fellow IH? https://www.indiehackers.com/post/email-newsletter-aggregator-b0fc1b0457

      • Overall core value prop sounds good.
      • https://mailbrew.com/ is a really, really well designed product that seems related. Also if you haven't already be sure to check out https://feedly.com/ and https://leavemealone.app/ for inspiration.
      • Overall, your marketing site is pretty solid 💯
      • Your main header "Get email newsletters under your control" is excellent but it's smaller than "ManyLetter - newsletter manager". Remove this second part - it's worthless and distracts from the main marketing message which is your first one. Then keep the small follow-up description "ManyLetter makes it easy to find and join any newsletter, as well as to create one, and share it."
      • I like the artificial scarcity but "Limited spots available!" with a "!" seems pretty bogus to me. Be honest and don't yell at the user.
      • On your about page, the "A brief history of news telling" is wayyy unnecessary. Make this into a blog post. Keep your about page / mission simple & to the point. The more your iterate on this type of stuff the better it'll get over time.
      • So you kind of have a few diff products if I'm understanding correctly? Do you already have traction with one of them? Split your focus across these diff sides of the equation may make sense eventually but if you don't have some significant traction with one of them, it just muddles the message of what you're offering for the time being. My advice would be to pick one and focus. Then branch out once you have an existing audience.
      • I get that you're using green as your primary brand color, but in general UX terms, using a single color for elements that the user can interact with (CTAs, buttons, links) as well as background elements is a design no-no. I'd advise you to search for a complementary color to your main green and use that for one instead.
      • Referral program is a great addition.
      • Email page leads to 404

      Love where you're at and I think you're def ahead of the curve in terms of indie hackers. Keep up the great work 💯

      PS if you found this feedback helpful, please consider showing saasify some love our socials 😄

      1. 1

        Thank you for your valuable feedback. I appreciate it so much. I have already made some changes to the page based on it.

        • The main header - I had like 30 different titles before I get to this one :D. My head was overwhelmed, and I was not able to think objectively about it anymore. You struck right to the point when you mention that I should remove the "ManyLetter - newsletter manager."
        • About page - I removed that super long text. I was thinking exactly about making a blog post from it.
        • Design - I have tried complementary colour, but it was not looking good from my perspective, and I will not change it for now.
        • 404 pages were removed ... thx.

        So you kind of have a few diff products if I'm understanding correctly? Do you already have traction with one of them? Split your focus across these diff sides of the equation may make sense eventually but if you don't have some significant traction with one of them, it just muddles the message of what you're offering for the time being. My advice would be to pick one and focus. Then branch out once you have an existing audience.

        • Another good point from your side about the product. From the beginning, I'm trying to devise how to approach it, and I know that it is important to "choose a side" :D. I need to brainstorm it more with the team and also with external people (maybe with indie hackers).

        PS if you found this feedback helpful, please consider showing saasify some love our socials 😄
        Sure I will 🤙.

  8. 2

    Hi Travis,

    Thanks for sharing your insights and spending your time.

    Here goes my overview:

    1. Difficult/costly to find/make a tailor made valuation for a small (offline) business (revenue lower than 5 million)

    2. Providing a professional valuation report online based on clients' input (10-15 data points) + concrete tips and insights to increase the value of the business (e.g. in preparation of a sale)

    3. Targeted towards small business owners (yearly revenue from 100k to 5 million), across all industries.

    4. High quality valuation methodology + explanation, tailor made, speed: get report in 1 business day, +personal follow-up on value increase. Price = 99 dollar

    Thanks,
    Gus

    1. 1

      Hey Gijs 👋

      Welcome to the community 😄

      • Really clear value prop and product. It's great that you can bootstrap most of this manually by "doing things that don't scale" until you automate it down the road. You don't have to do this but it's the smart thing to do to focus your time on what will matter more: bringing in customers and validating your core idea.
      • Is the valuation for tax purposes? The biggest thing missing from your thought process in these answers is to go one level deeper into why different companies would need this type of valuation, and I think these different use cases will inform how you design your marketing and inbound sales funnels.
      • $99 seems reasonable for this type of service.
      • I'd suggest setting up a basic landing page with email capture asap. This will also help you refine your exact marketing pitch. It's one thing to say what your service does. it's another thing entirely to start thinking about how you want to pitch to real customers and making this concrete with some basic marketing & copy text.
      • Before you get too far on the impl, this is the perfect use case for a no-code MVP. I would highly recommend you check out https://typeform.com and/or https://www.makerpad.co before writing a single line of code.
      • This will allow you to get something released super fast and start focusing on what actually matters -- bringing in actual customers and validating that they will pay for this service.
      • Only once you've done this, then put in more time into automating the process and possibly creating a more tailored website.
      • I think the single most important aspect you'll need to focus on will be outbound marketing. Here are some great resources to level up on this side of things that you may find useful: https://blog.saasify.sh/indie-saas-resources/

      Overall, I really like what you're offering. Before building anything I would try to get some real customers who want to use this as a manual service (maybe you already this from past consulting work?). Maybe talk to other tax professionals who offer this at a higher price point and understand their specific customer and distribution channels?

      I hope this feedback was useful & keep up the great work. 💯

      Please consider checking out saasify.sh & letting me know what you think.

      Cheers 😄

  9. 2

    Hello Travis, a big thanks for your efforts!

    https://pingr.io/, still in development.

    1. What problem do you want to solve?

    I want to solve the problem with people are not fully confident that their site is up and running, so that they don't loose customers while their site is down

    1. How are you solving it?

    Notifying users through different channels that something's wrong with their site

    1. Who are you solving it for?

    Owners of: e-commerce sites, web apps, developers. Overall any site which should be monitored

    1. Benefits / Powers

    If something goes wrong, they'll react quickly thus they won't loose orders/visitors

    1. 1

      Hey Victor 👋

      Happy to try & help.

      • The UI & marketing on your landing page looks really clean 💯
      • Market research & competitive analysis are really important and often under-emphasized by indie hackers who like to focus on their own solution (i've been guilty of this too at times 😂).
      • Have you looked thoroughly at https://uptimerobot.com/, https://checklyhq.com/, https://cronhub.io/, https://www.easycron.com/, https://apex.sh/ping/, https://microlink.io/ (releasing a service like this soon), and the dozens of other similar services?
      • To be clear, I'm definitely not trying to discourage you. The fact that all these services exist means there's def a large market need. I'm just pushing you to focus a little more on what's differentiating about your solution.
      • Pricing seems way too high compared to competitors.
      • I recently built http://simplecron.dev as an open source example for saasify, and in doing so I did quite a bit of market research around other solutions in this space. I only spent about a week on Simple Cron in total, so a lot of my advice for Pingr could prolly also be used to add some love to that at some point.

      Overall, I think you have a great MVP. The most important differentiator for success / failure of your product will be whether you're able to market it effectively and a large part of that will be differentiating yourself from more well known competitors. This is a crazy crowded space, and unless you're really lucky it will take a long time to grow a user base, but if you're persistent, and get really creative with different marketing experiments, I think you'll do just fine.

      I'd recommend you check out this list of free resources for developers wading into the wide open seas of marketing: https://blog.saasify.sh/indie-saas-resources/

      Hope this helps 😄

      Also, I'd be really curious to hear if you were starting today from scratch whether or not you'd consider using saasify.sh as a solution to launch this type of service in a few days?

      1. 1

        Thank you so much for such a deep answer.

        Regarding pricing: I've just put it as a placeholder, I'll make a big analysis of all competitors prices and then decide. However I'm kind of inspired by https://hyperping.io/ whose prices are high and still he's making good revenue.

        The prices varies, starting from free ending to like at least 30-40$.

        I see, it's quite upsetting to see all these competitors. But you know, I've spent almost 500 hours to build this, and there is just no point in stopping now :)

        I'll try to find something differentiating. I have telegram notifications and later I'll have whatsapp notifications (nobody has it). Plus nice UI, which not everybody have.

        Regarding saasify, I'm just kind of person who likes building from scratch and taking full control over application. I use some integrations of course, like mailgun or paddle, but everything else is on my duty.

        Regarding the idea itself, it was my plan: instead of inventing something new and spend time to validate it, I've chosen what I understand and where there are a lot of customers. Like building a cafe: you know people drink coffee, and you know it works. The only problem is differentiation, and I'm bad at marketing but I'll use your link, as well as many other resources :)

  10. 2

    Travis, founder of trainermade.com here

    What? Most Personal Trainers (fitness industry) are limiting themselves to only in-person training sessions with their clients.

    How? trainermade provides an online platform for trainers to create and deliver their training to their clients so trainers can benefit from an additional income stream and their clients have access to their workout programs at any time

    Who? Personal trainers who are interested in taking their training online, or arent training online yet

    Why? An additional revenue stream for personal trainers. Easily accessible workout plans for their clients to workout to even on days they don't have their in-person trainer sessions.

    1. 2

      Hey Reza 👋

      • I love the really focused target audience and from your profile pic it looks like you may be a trainer yourself haha 😄 Always great to focus on an audience that you understand really well.
      • there's a lot of momentum with COVID around solutions like this to take traditionally in-person interactions and move them online. it's great timing for a solution like this -- but you'll need to move fast.
      • while I really like your general business idea, the current MVP needs a lot of love on the design and copy text side of things.
      • create a more professional logo quickly & easily with https://looka.com
      • your main hero text on the landing page is way too long. be concise. break things up into fragments. expect your visitors to be viewing this really quickly before they decide that it's worth their time to even consider.
      • the main background video is excellent.
      • consider hiring a cheap designer to make a pass over your site. a single pass changing the colors, layout, fonts, and copy text will make a 10000% difference in the professionalism and polish of your solution. imho this is the single most important thing you can do right now.
      • the example videos are key especially since your entire product is based around video. right now, they're way too small i have no idea what's going on in them. make the text smaller and focus on the video content. also cut down on the text content everywhere. like take a hacksaw and just cut most of it out. people will not read this much stuff on a landing page.
      • pricing - I get that you're just trying to get this out there and things aren't fully automated yet, but my advice is to NOT make this free up front. you're going to get much better feedback from early users if they actually have skin in the game. people like me who will give you real advice for free are very hard to find.
      • I love that you already have iOS & android apps and they look like solid MVPs. i'm curious what technology or dev service you used to create them?
      • not able to log into the trainer portal so can't give feedback on that side of things.
      • the most difficult part of two-sided marketplaces like this (and saasify 😄) is that you really have to have enough supply to justify demand and your marketing / sales efforts are duplicated across two very diff groups & channels for supply vs demand respectively.
      • read everything this guy has written about bootstrapping a marketplace: https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-to-kickstart-and-scale-a-marketplace
      • add a separate landing page like /trainers that just focuses on the supply side of your marketplace.

      Overall I really like what you're doing. Keep up the great work! 💯

      Also, if this feedback was useful, consider showing saasify some love on the socials 😄

      1. 1

        Hey Travis, Thanks for the in-depth summary - really valuable stuff here. A couple of things that may have actually not come across (which means I need to update the copy some)...this is not a marketplace or two-sided. This is a tool targeting personal trainers, for use with their own clients. I purposely tried to mention 'Personal Trainers' and 'Trainers' in many places to thwart off anyone that's not one ha :-) So my ads and target audience are just that, personal trainers. Most of my users have been organic.

        I've been going back and forth on the main header video copy...its a little wordy (I am following the Storybrand one-liner headline method) but I can't seem to convey the what and how with fewer words - I will keep tweaking it some.

        I agree with the word count - I tried to jam as much in but will try to cut down more. I figured id rather have more and cut down that too little and not explain anything.

        As for pricing, I am competing against a bunch of major players in the market that I don't see an immediate reason why anyone would pay-me right off the bat, hence it's free as I develop more features to be comparable to the major players.

        The web-app was built by an off-shore team with me helping with coding and testing as well, the mobile apps were built by me using Xamarin. If you wanna talk coding shop or shoot the shiz def shoot me an email and we can connect offline.

        1. 1

          Sounds good & glad you found it useful 😄

          re:wordy and going back and forth - look at other really well done & well funded services in your space and try to model your constraints around what they do. it's unheard of to have anywhere near this long of an intro text in the main header. 5-6 words to grab your attention big & bold. and then take what you currently have and make it smaller right under that.

          whether you know it or not, you're working on a marketplace 😄there are literally dozens of different types of marketplace archetypes -- it's not so simple as a basic two-sided marketplace. in your case, you have supply side trainers with an existing group of demand side trainees, and your marketplace is helping to facilitate transactions between those two groups.

          it helps to understand this fact because marketing strategy & tactics from other marketplaces will be really valuable. it's also important to understand because if you talk to any type of investor, they're going to expect you to know this.

          Cheers 😄

          1. 1

            (more formally, a marketplace is any platform that facilitates transactions between a group of buyers and sellers)

  11. 2

    Hi Travis,
    Thank for this opportunity

    1. The problem is difficult to find a single source of information on which we can find all the events online around the world

    2. We propose an online platform where people can post, find and join any online events

    3. Who are solving for all sector but for moment we are focus on tech sector, like virtual conference, webinar etc...

    4. No longer subscribe to multiple sources of information. Have only one source of information for online events.

    My website is https://dcolevents.com/

    Thanks

    1. 1

      Hey Boris 👋

      • Be careful of https://xkcd.com/927/
      • The big player in this space that I'm aware of is https://www.meetup.com
      • There's always room for competitors to come in starting with a very, very focused niche and then expanding from there. Just know that if you try to focus on too big of a niche (like all of tech sector), you're going to have a really tough time getting initial traction. You'd always rather have 10 people who really need your service than 1000 people who check it out and never use it.
      • Wow, https://hopin.to is extremely well done (one of your events links there). I wasn't aware of them but I really like their design & messaging. I'd encourage you to use them as inspiration and really think hard about how you want to differentiate your service from what they're doing.

      Overall, I think this is a great start on the path to an MVP. I'd spend some more time doing market research to understand the existing competitors, their pricing models, and whether or not there are really focused niche communities that you can serve better than they can. Otherwise, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to compete with these related companies that have been around a lot longer and have a lot more resources.

      Keep up the great work! 💯

      Also, if this feedback was useful, check out saasify.sh and let me know what you think 😄

      1. 1

        Thank you so much.

        I am different from Meetup because on my platform we can create any type of event that leads to Meetup, Hopin, Zoom, Google Meet, Eventbrite, Goto Webinar, Messenger Rooms, etc.

        I have not yet added the different types of events, such as conference, live, webinar, which Meetup or Hopin also does not offer.

        Hopin inspires me a lot, but he does not manage the before and after event in terms of communication tools.
        So I think I can offer services to facilitate the communication of on different channels.

        I will check and give you feedback for saasify

      2. 1

        Also, check out some of the other answers on this thread. There are other indie hackers who are working on similar events focused solutions.

        I think you'd learn a lot from looking at what they're doing and maybe you could collaborate together.

  12. 2

    Hey thanks for doing this. I've set up an MVP of my product which aims to make it super easy to set up a website. Thinking of nicheing down to a portfolio creator for freelance writers since I'm that person.

    http://68.183.190.10/ - mvp...can't preview the website right now but you can build using components. A lot needs to be updated and changed.

    1. Creating a website is complicated and a lot needs to be considered. My app just gives some components for people to choose from and all they have to do is fill out the content, then they'll have their website done. When I wanted to create a freelance writing portfolio, I was reminded at how difficult it is to get a simple website running and I'm a developer.

    2. I provide people with website components to choose from, they select those, fill out the content, and then they'll be able to have their own website without hiring a dev, setting up Wordpress, coding anything, or setting up hosting.

    3. I might target freelance writers looking for a portfolio because it's a smaller market to enter rather than 'anyone who needs a website' but I feel like my web app will be able to target 'anyone who needs a website' eventually.

    4. Why? It's complex and time consuming and there's a lot to consider to build a website. With my app, you get to pick and choose what components will make up your website, filling the content and then you're good to go.

    1. 2

      Hey Albert 👋

      • "A lot needs to be updated and changed." - No worries haha this is how I always feel no matter how far along the project is 😂
      • Competitive analysis is super important to do thoroughly before getting too far into this type of thing. I'm def not saying it won't be possible to succeed on account of competitors -- rather, I'm saying that it's important to really understand what similar solutions exist before diving into a solution.
      • I'd recommend you check out https://carrd.co and https://www.oneprofile.info as two products that have done pretty well in this space recently. It's a pretty crowded market to be honest. With that being said, that doesn't mean you can't be successful -- it'll be important to understand how you want to differentiate your offering from these existing solutions and if possible, really, really focus your initial MVP on a very narrow use case. If you're focusing on freelance writers & their portfolios, instead of trying to create something so generic, I'd encourage you to think about a more rigid solution that solves this really, really well for that one group and that one group only. Like a single template that looks great for a writing portfolio and you can just edit basic content. Instead of the more generic portfolio creator it looks like you're working on right now.
      • What are you using for hosting that's giving you at static IP address? I would really recommend you check out https://vercel.com or https://www.netlify.com which will give you a much better developer experience and allow you to move faster.

      Definitely like where your head's at overall 💯 Keep up the great work!

      Also, if this feedback has been helpful, I'd love it if you checked out what we're cooking up over at Saasify.

      Cheers 😄

      1. 1

        Hey that's great advice ! I definitely need to focus my offering more, thanks for the insight!

  13. 2

    Hey Travis, I'm just getting started with my idea but would very much appreciate some feedback! I posted some more in depth information in a separate post which you can find here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/prove-it-3858b35be5

    1. The problem is the lack of motivation and accountability surrounding our commitments, big and small. Reminders and check boxes just don't seem to cut it for most.
    2. I want to solve this problem by having users participate in their own motivation and accountability by having them document their process. And also give them access to a community of individuals who are going through the exact same thing (given the same commitment)
    3. This is where I struggle a bit, because I don't want to say "any adult who needs motivation". However, I would say the target audience would definitely be individuals who do better when their work is in the spotlight or at least do better when they are able to see progress.
    4. The biggest benefit I have seen (being a user of the app myself), is that I can see my own progress and that there is retrievable, viewable documentation backing up my claims of "completion". In other words, I can look back at yesterdays clip to know what I worked on. On the flip side, if I slacked off, I can also see the lack of clips. The idea is more than checking something off the list, it puts the user in an active role of their own progress. They document their journey, and if needed, can see others "in the same boat".

    Thank you for your time!

    1. 2

      Not the OP, but I'm playing in a similar space and I've got some thoughts. The 4 Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin has been a game changer for me in understanding how people form and break habits and why I couldn't keep any habit until I read that book. My own project helps with emotional stability and is helpful with procrastination and breaking bad habits. Just set up anlanding page with some info at wujuapp.com. ping me if you want to play with some ideas together.

      1. 1

        Love that idea as well! And absolutely, let's get in touch.

        1. 1

          Let's get on a call then. I got a calendar set up at https://calendly.com/elifiner/video-call, can you find a time that works for you?

    2. 2

      Hey Josh 😄

      Happy to try & help.

      • Overall, I really like the choice of problem and your high level thoughts on a solution so far. It's a lot better to start with this solid base.
      • Documenting progress and sharing / accountability are both great pieces of a solution. I also think keeping track of streaks is an important psychological incentive to re-enforce good habits (see this app for inspiration here). This is similar to how AA and other support groups encourage users to stick with gameplans.
      • I could see two possible high level paths forward. On the one hand, really spending a lot of time studying the underlying psychological effects, researching how other platforms & apps have tried to solve this problem, and understanding their various strengths & weaknesses would ultimately allow you to approach things from a better foundation. On the other hand and more indie hackers style, I think getting an MVP out with a small set of core features will probably be a better use of your time with the primary goal of not necessarily getting users and solving their problem right away but rather to get it in front of people and get valuable feedback that will help guide your roadmap.
      • I'd encourage you to find a balance between these long-term and short-term approaches. Depending on how invested you are in solving this one particular problem, then leaning more heavily on the long-term approach will be better - just know that it'll be at the expense of short-term progress. There's nothing wrong either either approach btw -- just be aware of their tradeoffs and really try to think internalize this decision process consciously when you're deciding what to work on day to day.
      • Oooooh one thing I think is incredibly enticing here and could be really unique would be the ability to frame this process as maintaining video clips of your progress streaks with the ability to ultimately compile them into inspirational montage videos. Like https://1se.co but with more of a focus on motivation and accountability. This would be really, really interesting and something I'd consider using myself.
      • I'm the author of https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-concat which is free and open source and could be useful if you want to concat these clips together. Honestly though it's more focused on interesting OpenGL transitions which if you have quick clips may not be necessary.

      Anyhow, I love what you're doing. Keep up the great work!

      If you found my feedback helpful, please consider checking out saasify & my twitter. Cheers 😄

      1. 1

        Thank you so much for taking the time to provide some excellent feedback! This is really encouraging :) And I will most definitely be following up, talk soon!

  14. 2

    Hey Travis, great offer, here is mine

    My site is https://inboxes.com

    Users want to be able to get offers efficiently from retailers without subscribing to their newsletter.
    Allow users to search recenttly sent newsletters from 100’s of retailers
    US online shoppers
    Less spam and inbox load, full text search engine for newsletters and deals. Follow your favorite brands.

    1. 1

      Hey Oron 😄

      • Holy sheise, how much did you pay for that domain?! 👀

      • My first thought on inboxes.com is that it's a premium domain that has to be worth upwards of $20k. If you didn't purchase it for this project specifically and are well funded, that's great but if you did throw down this type of $ up front before validating your MVP and graduating from being an indie hacker, it's probably not the best long-term option. I know I'm making a lot of assumptions here so you can probably ignore me - just giving you my stream of consciousness thoughts.

      • Overall the value prop is pretty clear and there's def a lot of potential in what you're doing. It's a unique solution and I really like it.

      • Remove the emoji from your main hero text. It cheapens what you're offering.

      • Your main tagline should be more concise if possible and if not, maybe break it up visually to emphasize the "without" part by using a diff color / font. look around online to find some common examples of this type of UI pattern.

      • The actual content and subpages load really crisp and quickly. You have a huge advantage of being able to have these preview and detail pages look 💯UI-wise off the bat by the fact that each of these newsletters is designed by teams of legit folks and you can just piggy back off that polish.

      • I suggest adding some type of social / gaming numbers to each page (# of views, users, etc). To artificially inflate these numbers up front, bootstrap these numbers with an estimate of how many email subscribers the actual newsletters get. These are the "suckers" in a sense that your users are being more efficient than and this is a great psychological tactic to show the concrete value of what you're providing.

      Overall, I love the value prop and implementation -- you're definitely further along than the average indie hacker and I wish you all the best 😄

      If this feedback was helpful, consider checking out & giving feedback on saasify & my twitter.

      Cheers 😄

      1. 1

        I paid for the domain alright, but not that much!!! I don't think any domain is worth $20K, bought this one for a different project which didn't happen. I'm not well funded, running this as a side project without any funding, wrote most of the code myself.

        Re the emoji I think I will take your advice.

        Good idea re the adding some numbers although hard to see how to do that without complete using BS tactics.

        Thx for your feedback.

        1. 1

          Hahaha awesome -- best of luck dude 😄

  15. 2

    Love it! Great idea and thanks Travis. Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

    https://www.wetabletop.com/online-events

    1. It’s hard to find people to play online board games with.
    2. A free, community-powered event directory of upcoming events.
    3. Board gamers who don’t have a group to play with, yet.
    4. Organized by game, weTabletop helps players find events they care about without having to sift through Meetup or Eventbrite.
    1. 2

      Hey Joe 👋

      • the idea sounds great -- there's a lot of value in creating online communities for traditionally offline events especially post-COVID.
      • "board games" in general is pretty generic. I think it'll help a lot to be able to filter by game type which will also do something really important for you.. it'll make sure that your top game types are listed prominently on your home page and nav footer for SEO purposes.
      • ahhh i just saw that your "online events" link isn't actually your homepage.. your actual homepage is 💯😄
      • keep this persistent footer nav on the online events page as well.
      • ahhh the search page is excellent.
      • when I typed 11201 (my NYC area code) into the search page location for magic the gathering, it just gave me the default search results and as a normal user i'd prolly bail right there. are you using normal google maps search for this? when I autocompleted "new york" the search worked as expected.
      • im guessing you'll eventually monetize board game stores for traffic and the event widget. since you have a two-sided marketplace (supply side stores that put on events and demand side gamers who want to attend events), you really want individual landing pages for both of these. i think your current landing page is excellent and targeted at gamers. i suggest adding a page devoted to the supply side marketing your benefits and developing those relationships. check out how other two-sided marketplaces focus separate landing pages on the two sides of things for inspiration.
      • the most difficult part of two-sided marketplaces like this (and saasify 😄) is that you really have to have enough supply to justify demand and your marketing / sales efforts are duplicated across two very diff groups & channels for supply vs demand respectively.
      • read everything this guy has written about bootstrapping a marketplace: https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-to-kickstart-and-scale-a-marketplace
      • overall I really like what you're doing & wish you the best!

      Hope this helps 😄

      If you found it useful, please consider checking out saasify, my twitter, etc. Cheers 😄

      1. 1

        Thanks for the awesome advice! I really appreciate it. I'm working on redesigning the page to make it easier to filter out by specific games this week. Awesome to see we are aligned on that.

        And thanks for the link, that article series looks super helpful! I'm checking out sassify now :)

  16. 2

    Hey Travis thanks for offering to do this! https://www.posterday.club

    1. Create a community around Academic research posters online (the in-person gatherings are very strong but short, exclusive, and regional. a limitation in my view)
    2. Allow people to upload, comment, share, and search on a single site.
    3. Academic research scientists who present their work in the form of posters.
    4. Free access to research around the world. Cross-pollination and inspo to accelerate scientific breakthroughs! Able to host their posters in perpetuity online (i also provide QR codes)

    Its been a pleasure reading other's comments

    1. 1

      Hey Akin 👋

      First off, I'm curious if you've used Pitchgen to create any actually useful ideas? 😂😄

      Alright, onto Posterday.

      • I love the online community aspect -- it's clearly a trend with COVID and will only become more important in the future. Great long-term bet.
      • This reminds me a bit of Indiehackers for new age academics which a great idea.
      • I see that you have some social signals on the detail pages which is great (star ratings and number of views). They don't appear to be functional yet but this is an important feature for a community because gamification and dopamine hits and all that psychological goodness. I would recommend that you add these stats to each entry in your gallery view as well.
      • Really, really love your Videoask. It's an excellent way to provide a friendly intro to the community as you gradually polish the MVP over time.
      • What are you using to embed the posters? I feel like PDF will probably be the preferred format. Whatever you can do to make the onboarding experience for new researchers easier to handle the format they're already using.
      • Early community engagement is going to be important. You're going to be battling against the "empty room" problem of a blank community -- but don't be discouraged cause every community starts there. 😄
      • I'd think about how you can get really popular for an even smaller academic niche and then have a searchable hierarchy of metadata for diff fields. If I'm a distributed network computer scientist I probably don't care too much about diff topics but that's kinda just the default. Maybe include ask for this enum when a user signs up so it's clear on their profile page that you have structured data for A) their university affiliations B) their primary country C) general field of study D) specialties

      Overall, I like the direction. Maybe ask around IH for tips on building a strong community from people like @csallen who've already done it before 😄

      Hope this was helpful && best of luck!

  17. 2

    Hi Travis,
    Thanks for the opportunity. Here we go:

    1. Files stored in cloud object storages need to be downloaded to be analyzed
    2. A tool that can query files in cloud object storages (AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi) directly through their API keys, without needing to download them
    3. Customers from Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, that have no way to analyze their files without building a whole pipeline. Also devops and dataops that want to build Server Log Analytics or a Data Lake
    4. A 75% cost reduction when compared to AWS stack (AWS S3 + Athena), plug'n play solution with data access permissioning and auto-schema detection

    https://storagequery.com

    1. 1

      Hey Valdir 😄

      • "Be the first to try it out!" makes it seem like nobody's interested. I'd suggest something more gated.
      • For your "use cases", the nav header is great to use this as a catch-all but your footer should ideally have individual links for each use case since it's important that your home page rank for each of these search terms highly.
      • Your target customers are very very narrow and honestly selling to developers is a very difficult approach because we tend to be very skeptical and you also have the "build vs buy" mentality to contend with. I'm not saying this can't be successful but your choice of target market is going to make things difficult. I'd be curious to hear what your go-to-market strategy is around acquiring these target customers? If you have some existing authority or distribution channels for these devs, that would change the picture quite a bit.

      A tool that can query files in cloud object storages (AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi) directly through their API keys, without needing to download them

      Is this a strong need? A critical ask that you've seen over and over?

      I'm not trying to be discouraging at all -- I'd much rather give you my honest opinion than sugar coat things and I'm having a tough time seeing a customer who really genuinely needs this. The % cost w.r.t Amazon is compelling and if you're an order of magnitude better and cheaper than I'd say that you've found yourself a great product, but AWS, GCP, Azure are all racing to the bottom for pricing things like this.

      Reading your about page the product makes a lot more sense now (sorry this is stream of consciousness as I go through). I honestly may not be qualified in terms of understanding what this cloud storage landscape at scale looks like so don't take my opinions too harshly.

      I guess when I think about the types of tech companies and enterprises that are using this amount of data at scale, I feel like cost isn't generally the deciding factor in purchasing decisions. The phrase "nobody has ever been fired for buying ibm" seems very relevant here. In other worse, if my understanding of your target buyers is correct, they're much more likely to go with the known vendors AWS / Google / etc even if they're more expensive or slightly less convenient because they're the safer bet.

      Customers from Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, that have no way to analyze their files without building a whole pipeline. Also devops and dataops that want to build Server Log Analytics or a Data Lake

      This is how a developer would answer this question. If you take one thing away from my feedback, I'd encourage you to really develop a much, much clearer picture of who your target buyer is. E.g., a VP of technology at a Fortune 5000 company whose organization is using multiple cloud providers and his decision process looks like X and the way I will get in touch with him / her looks like Y.

      The clearer of an answer you can have to this the better.

      Overall, the tech itself looks really awesome btw -- I'm sure it's crazy complicated under the hood.

      Congrats on launching & I wish you & your team all the best. 😄

      1. 1

        First of all, thanks so much for the detailed feedback. I can see you really invested time in doing this, you are a hero!

        It is indeed quite complicated on the backend, but this is only a small portion of a bigger goal at my company. We intend to launch several products, always providing the infrastructure needed to perform several data-related operations.

        About our possible customers, you are right - it is quite niched, and we are building a partnership with Backblaze B2 / Wasabi to help the distribution. Adding this capability to their customers is a win-win situation in this partnership.

        Our intention with this product is to target startups / SMB developers, but you are right, we can narrow them further.

        Again, thanks for all your input, and I'll let IH know when we launch, for sure!

        1. 1

          Sounds good 😄

          If you found my feedback useful, please consider showing saasify some love on socials 😄

  18. 2

    My company is called Summit. Landing page link at the end.

    1. Status meetings are slow and interrupt deep work.
    2. Summit provides fast & comprehensive status updates in Slack, Teams, and the Web. Fill out a status prompt, link items from the tools you use, and share with your team.
    3. Technical teams.
    4. Summit users can share rich status updates in their team with minimum interruption to their work.

    https://summit.work

    1. 3

      Hey Bryan 👋

      • Awesome branding, domain & logo

      • Instead of "fast & comprehensive" maybe "fast & unintrusive"

      • I think the async / lack of interruptions / unintrusive portion of things should be emphasized a bit more as that's the main pain point I've experienced.

      • You don't mention the word "scrum" at all. Is that intentional? I think at some point it'll be important to focus a whole page on this use case and ensure that it's linked to in your site-wide footer for SEO purposes.

      • I've been seeing a lot of what I would call Micro SaaS point solutions that are focused on a really targeted use case like this around connecting a few services together. Zapier and a whole slew of low/no-code platforms are doing this pretty well in the more abstract case but I've also seen where these types of focused SaaS integrations (essentially a single Zap as the MVP) can do really well because you're able to focus bottom up instead of top down. Both directions have their merits and clearly the bottom up approach is more reasonable for indie hackers 😄

      • I like your use of the calculator on the landing page.. I'd be more focused on trying to figure out who your target user is at this point maybe via a Typeform. I know you're focused on technical teams and at $3 / user / mo it's focused on being self-serve. But how does this get adopted? Maybe it would be a PM that tells their team they're using this or a fellow indie hacker who convinces the rest of their team to use it? Either way, it's probably not that useful unless your whole team buys in and you probably need to focus on the "invite my coworkers" aspect of things once you've signed up.

      • I'm guessing the Stripe side of things isn't set up yet?

      • Overall it's a really solid and clean MVP. kudos

      Hope this helps!

      1. 2

        This is great feedback. Thanks for taking the time to do it. We’ll be working it in over the next couple days.

        Not mentioning “scrum” is intentional at this point, but we’ll have to add it soon, like you mention. We’ve been sending it out to several types of teams, not just technical.

        Stripe is set up, but we collect payment info after two weeks. We’re trying a few different approaches to get that conversion.

        1. 1

          Awesome dude -- you're definitely well ahead of the curve.

          Best of luck 😄

      2. 2

        One more piece of feedback.

        • What I think you're actually selling is the promise of a more productive, focused team.

        Answer #4 is the most important one for marketing & sales and I'd really encourage you to think about the distinction between your current answer and this answer. See the mario graphic at the top of this thread. It's a really important distinction that'll help guide how you write copy text and think about pitching your product without focusing on the "what" or "how" side of things too much.

  19. 1

    Thank you for this awesome opportunity.

    About: Side Hustle Market is an e-commerce marketplace where successful Side Hustlers promote and sell their products and/or services to those who are seeking a side hustle.

    What?
    There is a large market who would like to start a side hustle but many do not start because of procrastination , fear, or cost.

    How?
    I create side hustles with explanation of how to get started. Anyone from elementary aged to the elderly could purchase download and get started. The prices are also reasonable.

    Who?
    Those who want to start a simple side hustle that could be used anywhere, one that is a reasonable price, one that could be profitable.

    Why? There is no need to procrastinate because the initial work has been done for you. If you apply time and effort you will be a success. You won’t need to worry about any high cost.

    Website: https://sidehustlemarket.com

  20. 1

    https://lineartzen.wixsite.com/marc

    Hey there Travis,

    Marc here working on my Guided Breathing, Music Mindfulness, Relaxation App. I currrently have the above Landing Page (please watch at least one of the three videos there), and I am seeking Tech co-founder, early adoptors, partners, and advisors.

    What?
    I create a more engaging and desirable way for people to do thier Breathing and Mindfulness exercises... to relieve Stress, improve Health, and increase Productivity.

    How?
    I do so using my Minimalism Animated Artwork, combined with customized Music. Autogenics, and/or Affirmations can be added as well.

    Who?
    People with Stress, and Stress related illnesses such as Diabetes, Hypertension, High Blood Pressure, COPD, and and other ailments are my target audience.

    Why?
    My target audience will lower their blood pressure, improve blood oxydation, strengthen immune system, and detox the body...all scientifically proven benefits of deep breathing.

    Thank you very much...I am greatful for your time, attention, experience.

    Marc
    https://www.instagram.com/life_lines_art/

  21. 1

    So awesome you are doing this Travis! Thanks.

    Our website: bulkhackers.com

    What? People who lack motivation for fitness or who don't know how to get started + people who are into fitness already, but would like to take things to the next level.

    Also, for fitness professionals, an opportunity to promote themselves and what they offer clients etc.

    How? We interview people who do great in fitness, so people can learn from their stories and get a motivational boost.

    Who? People who are interested in fitness/getting fit + fitness professionals.

    Why? Reading the interviews, you get motivated and learn new things about fitness.

  22. 1

    Hi Travis,

    thanks for allocating time to help people!

    https://meetfriends.app/

    1. What?

    People forget to contact important people (family, friends, professionals). People are on autopilot and distractions or changes (location, habits, corona ...) negatively affect quality relationships, if they don't reach out.

    1. How?

    An app, where you can set interval based reminders to e.g. contact a person at least monthly. The reminders show up and you get three actions. You were in touch already, you get in touch now or you update or remove the interval, if you don't care anymore.

    1. Who?

    Still learning here.

    • People who are conscious and mindful about social relationships
    • People with many contacts
    • People, who travel a lot and don't have regular habits to meet people naturally
    • People, who want to be more proactive and not just rely on the other side to reach out
    1. Why?
    • The reminders allow making a conscious decision to reach out or not
    • Small time to get started. No account or long onboarding needed.
    • Focused and simple UI compared to complex contact apps with many features
    • Privacy. Again no account and no tracking.

    This is a side project. I recently got my first customer and it was even yearly, but I am also seeing major challenges as I learn more.

  23. 1

    Hi Travis - bookmarked Saasify earlier this week after your HN post!

    What? https://do.delivery/ adds online ordering to your business quickly and without setup costs or monthly costs. e.g., https://sandalwood.do.delivery/

    How? We use a simple mobile-first layout and Stripe Connect to get payments from customers directly to businesses.

    Who? Some businesses like butchers, fishmongers, hobby farms and small restaurants fall between the gaps of Shopify, Uber Eats and so on. They don't want to spend hundreds or thousands setting up an online store that might never get enough orders to be profitable.

    Why? A business can get started risk-free with online ordering in minutes without messing with their main website or even buying a domain.

    1. 1

      Hey Isaac 👋

      • First thought is that I love the value prop.
      • "Start taking orders now" is an amazing CTA.
      • Great start for an MVP - landing page def needs work. Social proof, some quotes (even if they're from your friends), etc would be great.
      • The yellow all over is a bit much. I like it at the top but below the fold the gradient seems cheesy.
      • Your inline video is 10000% awesome. Show, don't tell -- kudos.

      Best of luck 💯

      1. 1

        Thanks - will get going on that advice. Appreciate you taking the time to reply!

  24. 1

    Thanks Travis. Here's what I got:

    • problem: logging set/reps during a workout breaks flow
    • feature:
      • replace sets/reps with after-workout gym selfie
      • Get a 30-day selfie reel to see your progress
    • audience: anyone logging sets/reps
    • Benefits
      • avoid data-logging interruptions of your workout
    1. 2

      Hey Geoff,

      This post got a lot more attention than I anticipated and I'm trying to give in-depth feedback for each reply, so hopefully I'll be able to respond more in-depth soon. My first thought is that this sounds like a great project to ease into things but it'll be difficult to turn into a product. The 30-day selfie reel is 🔥Someone else in this thread has a similar idea -- you two should definitely connect. And check out the feedback I posted on their response for some more ideas.

  25. 1

    Hi Travis. Thanks for taking the time out.

    I'm working on https://www.jobtrackable.com/

    What?
    A job application tracker. A lot of people use spreadsheets or note taking apps to keep track of all the companies that they apply for. Slowly this list balloons to dozens of applications sent. And spreadsheets are not that friendly when it comes to tracking individual applications. And not everyone can DIY Trello+Calendar+Zapier.

    How?
    Job seekers can add an opening they're interested in. Kanban board and Calendar view makes it easier to visualize the applications. Reminders and follow-up tasks make it easier to track and follow up. Notes and contacts makes it easier to save all the information you'd need.

    Who?

    1. People who apply to a large no of jobs and understand that they're losing track of all their applications.
    2. People who need an integrated solution and can't DIY it themselves.
      I am struggling with defining the buyer persona. And how to target the customers

    Why?
    37% of candidates are rejected simply because they did not follow up with recruiters. https://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?ed=12/31/2016&id=pr960&sd=7/28/2016.
    And because of COVID and layoffs, people are going to send a higher no of applications. Unless there is a way to track all this, people are going to lose out on the opportunities. We make it easier and give them a chance to convert more job opportunities.

    Huntr and Jibberjobber have been in this for quite some time. While Jibberjobber is tilted towards being an online career coach+job search organizer, Huntr is focused towards being a job board+application tracker. I'm trying to focus more on the reminders and follow-up part as I feel that simply increasing the no of applications sent will not lead to more conversions.

    1. 1

      Hey Himanshu,

      I will hopefully get to this soon. This post got a lot more attention than I anticipated and I'm trying to give in-depth feedback for each reply. My first thought is that your landing page, core value prop, and UX are all really sharp.

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    1. 1

      Hey Eli,

      If you want people to give you their time, then at least read the post and follow the format.

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    1. 2

      Hey @xtbyhn 👋

      • I love what you're working on. We should definitely chat as I have talked with a few dozen diff companies in the low/no-code space. Hit me at [email protected]
      • You should be dog-fooding your email subscriber particle on your homepage and make it very clear that it's a live example. People will try out the example and in doing so also implicitly sign up for your beta. Not having a live example of one of these particles is imho the biggest thing missing from your site.
      • https://memberstack.io does a great job of having a live "particle" that you can interact with. Use this as inspiration.
      • I have a list of 10-12 other competitors that are doing similar things, some of which have raised some non-trivial funding. This is great -- it means you're onto something, but it also means you really need to have a solid idea of these competitors so you can develop a strategy around how to position yourself in the market. It may not be winner take all but momentum and being aware of your competitors, what they're doing well, etc, definitely helps.
      • fucking awesome domain. when I first read particle systems, I thought it was related to gpgpu graphics stuff which I'm a huge fan of. this is my personal site btw https://transitivebullsh.it so you can see what I mean 😄
      • your current instructions are very focused on adding to static sites that are developed via node.js which i think is great to start. i think where you'll find a lot more adoption, however, is by targeting non-developers (think wix, squarespace, etc). i'm sure this is in your roadmap, but it's worth discussing since i've learned the hard way that it's really, really hard to sell early solutions to developers given their inherent skeptical nature and build vs buy mentality.
      • you really need to have an OSS presence with this type of product. it will help sooo much in the long term as a natural form of content marketing. even if it's just a placeholder for now. i wrote about this in-depth here: https://blog.saasify.sh/saasify-open-core/

      Overall, I love the idea and your current landing page is really solid. I think there are some small tweaks that would really help you out and I'd be glad to chat further. I could also intro you to some of the more established players in the low/no-code space.

      In return, I'd love it if you showed saasify some love by checking out our socials 😄

      Keep up the great work && cheers 💯

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    1. 1

      Hey Rahid, happy to help 😄

      • (minor but worth noting) "Yeah sure" isn't a great way to thank someone experienced who's offering to help you for free. Kindness and gratitude are really important online because we can't see each other face to face and it's hard to tell what someone's thinking.
      • "My target audience would be..." - this is a great start. I would recommend focusing much more narrowly on a specific segment of digital marketers and a specific use case for now.
      • Your core value prop makes a lot of sense.
      • "Direct your customers to a checkout page rather than a webpage." makes no sense to me. when i read "checkout page" i think ok that's a webpage. be more clear especially in your Hero copy text.
      • The checkout process itself is a great MVP. Your checkout page UX needs a lot of polish and since it's your 100% core offering I'd focus your time there since right now it's not something visually that I'd feel comfortable sending customers to. Hire a cheap designer from fiverr if you have to - this flow has to be rock solid UX.
      • Having address be a text box instead of individual fields is a no-no for web design. Are you using Stripe under the hood? If so, I'd strongly urge you to use stripe elements which implements all of these fields in a 100% consistent and compliant way.
      • In terms of your main product offering, selling physical products like t-shirts vs digital goods & services is a large distinction with lots of diff implications. Are you focused on e-commerce or services? Right now, your example is e-commerce but everything else seems like it's focused on digital goods... really focus on one of these use cases.
      • Why would I use this over Gumroad? It's okay to compete with them - they've been wildly successful because there is a great market for this type of product. You should spend some time understanding their UX, marketing, and impl very very closely. And then pick a super narrow niche that will be able to compete with them in a much more focused way.

      Overall, I really like the product and direction and your MVP looks relatively solid. Great work & I hope my feedback helps.

      -- Travis

      1. 1

        Hi,

        Thanks for your feedback.

        1. No problem. Thank you for your work and feedback :)
        2. I think I might focus on PPC advertising
        3. Thanks.
        4. Sure, I'll change it.
        5. Yeah, I think I should focus on designing the checkout page.
        6. Well, the system lets businesses integrate with multiple payment gateways (e.g Stripe, Braintree, Paypal). So I guess I would have a nice custom design as the work is done at the backend.
        7. Yes, I'm focusing on selling physical products.
        8. Gumroad doesn't focus on physical products, can't integrate a payment gateway of your choice, you can promote with a QR-Code and you share a URL not a piece of code.
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