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35 Comments

Preparing to Launch!

Hello Everyone,

I’m so excited to be part of this community. While I’ve been a member since 2018, I have to admit that I’ve been a lurker. I was working at my corporate job and was trying to figure out exactly how to branch out and bootstrap my own company.

I’m building a simple, easy way for developers to add downloadable PDF exports to their applications. Every technology company I’ve worked for always had some kind of generated PDF that they needed (invoice, report, etc.). There are a few solutions to lighten the process, but you end up writing a bunch of code and maintaining it. I figured why not create a tool that makes it easy for companies to implement without all the hassle.

These are the main pain points I wanted to solve with this product:

  • A visual editor to make it easy to design any PDF template (for example: invoice, reporting, proposal, e-ticket, etc).
  • A solution that developers aren’t responsible for hosting and maintaining.
  • The ability to update templates at any time meaning applications don’t need to redeploy for a simple export update.
  • A debugging system so users can test different data payloads with the template.
  • Team based accounts allowing developers, designers, and project owners to work on the templates together.

Once a template is built, add the few lines of code to the application. PDFs are fast, predictable, and available on demand.

While I am putting the final touches on my project, I launched a landing page and would love to hear your feedback on the idea / landing page.

https://exportSDK.com

Diane

  1. 2

    Hello Diane,

    I took few minutes to feature your product on ProductStartups

    https://my.productstartups.com/c/saas/exportsdk

    Good luck to you

    Keep in touch

    Venkat

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    Congratulations! The product looks really nice.

    I tired your landing page on mobile, it took me a while to figure out your value prop exactly. If I understand the product correctly it's like the Mailchimp of PDFs, right?

    I think you could try and leverage this kind of parallelism (visual building + on demand "code" trigger in your product).

    Also, you blog links to the docs? I was going to ask you about your editorial strategy 😅. I just launched a blog for my product Adflow.ai and I wanted to check in with someone that's just starting as well 😃.

    1. 2

      Thank you so much! 😃

      That's exactly right, I want to make it easy for app developers and no-code builders to add PDF exports. With ExportSDK people can easily add PDF exports to their system in minutes.

      I will continue to work on making the landing page more clear and making sure people understand the value prop immediately! Thanks for your feedback.

      I plan on releasing tutorials and tips similar to log rocket. I want to help other developers and builders with valuable information. Congrats on the launch of your product adflow.ai, I will definitely be following along your journey.

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        Thanks, just followed you as well. And best of luck 🤞

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    Congrats on the progress! I was the PM for an internal tool that generated PDFs for our sales team. Saved so much time. This definitely would have shortened our launch timeline. Excited for people to check this out!

    1. 1

      Thank you so much Rion! :) I'm excited for other people to check it out as well.

  4. 1

    Hi Diane, I don't know how exactly I found your post but I really liked your product.

    Coming from a non technical consumer of the product (I'm on the finance field) it looks like you are really building a good solution (in my startup I am a consumer of internally developed systems that almost NEVER have an export version - and I always need it for presentation for investors, or board members...).

    Is this still your pre-launch mode? If not, I will refer internally to my team to see if it's something useful to integrate with our systems...

    Thank and congratulations once again on putting your product off the ground!

  5. 1

    Everything is looking very nice and professional, it's awesome, keep going!

  6. 1

    Personally, I am tired of the same illustrations everybody use (I love unique illustrations, though). Otherwise could be a good product, good luck.

  7. 1

    Great idea, hope you have great success, here's a note on my 10 - 15 second impression:

    Seems awesome, I could probably use it in future projects and implement on old ones, but you are making me learn about some idiosyncratic way of measuring value by using credits. I'm confused by it. Again, just 10-15 seconds into it, I'd have expected maybe something around pdf prints, api calls, N of templates, minimum fee

    Hope that helps.

    https://ibb.co/1bQc4gq

  8. 1

    Can't wait to get this launched!

    1. 1

      yes!!! So excited 😃
      🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

  9. 1

    This is a phenomenal idea...

    I was looking for something like this a couple years back when working on another product idea (which I eventually abandoned). If I were you, I'd explore the angle for bloggers to easily create PDFs for their blog posts and use them as lead magnets. I know this product is aimed at developers... but you could very easily build out a tool for bloggers and marketers.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much for your feedback! That's a great idea, do you have an example? I'd love to look into this idea more 😃

      1. 1

        I can't find the site that was doing something similar to what I'm talking about. I handed that project over to my ex-partner a while ago and never looked back. lol

        1. 2

          Thanks for the follow-up!

  10. 1

    Diane : I like this idea. Years ago I developed a SaaS product, an infographic tool. One of the features was that the user could download it as a PDF. Have you consider converting D3 charts to PDF? not sure if that's part of your plan, but may be worth to consider in the future. Best of luck!

    1. 1

      Thank you for your comment! I am creating the JS sdk which will allow you grab charts from a webpage and send them to the PDF template as a static image. Later on, I plan to incorporate SVG charts as an option for the templates. Would something like have fit your need?

  11. 1

    This is great! Embeddable services like this for SaaS businesses is going to explode. We're executing a similar model.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much for the comment. Are you looking at only app developers or no-code builders as well?

      1. 1

        For us, we're choosing to focus on engineers as somewhat of a differentiator to incumbents that take a more no-code approach. Time will tell whether it works, but the theory of the case is that (for our market) the engineering team ultimately makes the decision to implement using a tool like ours (or not), so why not meet them where they are? Many no-code tools frustrate engineers, because it's not how they think.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much!

  12. 1

    Looks very handy. Congratulations on the launch!

    1. 1

      Thank you for your kind comment! I'm very excited.

  13. 1

    Awesome! This is a very cool idea. I've certainly had this pain point before.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much! The goal is to make this as easy as possible for the end user.

  14. 1

    Looks great!
    As a developer, I always look at the quality of documentation for such products, so I'd recommend dedicating some time to it.
    Also I couldn't understand how pages/files are converted to credits ^^

    1. 1

      Thank you so much! I plan to devote a good amount of time to the documentation. I won't officially launch until the docs are ready.

      In regards to the pages/files being converted to credits - The credits are based upon computation time. I'll make sure it is obviously how it works.

  15. 1

    This is cool!
    What's your plans on getting users?

    1. 1

      Thank you for your feedback, this is a great question!

      This product was created out of a pain point / frustration. I'm wanting to make sure I have great SEO around the keywords surrounding this problem. I'm also planning on doing a product hunt launch in the near future.

      1. 1

        What is your target user persona you are targeting? Maybe you can get validation quicker before seo will catch up

  16. 1

    Congrats Diane! Super excited to get started with you!

    1. 1

      Thank you! I'm very excited!

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      Thanks so much! I started this project based on the struggle I had with doing PDF exports in the past.

      This is a great piece of feedback. I am planning to have a high-quality gif on the landing page of the editor so people can see how easy it is to use. I'll make sure that's done before our official launch!

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