Products that aren't for IHers?
I know that lots of us are working on products for other IHers. (We see the advertising here, do we not? 😜). But what about the folks who are targeting people outside the IH realm?
If your product is NOT specifically for indie hackers, tell us who you're targeting and how you decided to make a product for those customers. Don't forget to drop a link to your project!
Thanks!
I build a saas for construction companies, but I can’t send the link here. My advice is, don’t sell to other IH. Most of IH targeted products, only charge less than $10 a month, and most of us won’t pay 😁But if you build for business, you will easily charge for more than $200 a month
I've seen this advice a lot. B2B just has way bigger price tags than B2C. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I am building Our Web Site Assistant, a automated tool for small business marketing teams who look after their own CMS based website's.
Blurb from site:
"Our Web Site Assistant will automatically check your public web page content for common issues like broken links, missing images and much more. Keep your visitors happy with a fast loading & fully working website."
Why this audience?
SMEs (SMB) tend to have an agency build a site and then take it over themselves. As they grow over time, uploads change etc, things break but are hard to spot. This adds a low cost automated piece of mind in providing a heads up.
Reason for building:
I freelance (paid side hobby really) as a general web tech for a solo creative agency and quite often when helping her out found I broken links or other on-page issues on her clients sites. As some of them were 200+ pages in size doing a human check isn't viable, and expecting a busy "low tech" marketing exec to run desktop based software each week / month is easy to forget. It is slowly evolving each week when I find time to progress it. Another side benefit of the daily checks is to make sure their web hosts CDN (if they have one) is fresh and ready to load for real visitors.
I put together a simple proof of concept and she liked it so much its currently checking 4 of her clients sites each day. One client has already moved their WordPress site over to my 2nd side project of wordpress hosting to have everything under one roof.
This is a really cool example of finding an important problem to solve through a related avenue. Do you have plans for finding more users?
Thanks. I have a few ideas currently to weigh up.
It's a middle ground between a tool and a service. As a service I could charge a bit more for the human review factor and can avoid a management portal to schedule crawls. But this limits the scale.
As a tool that's self managed I then need to build an easy to use portal that adds to the overheads and dev time.
My ideal ground would be to set up the crawls for them and they get the results as an email to balance human factor vs scale. Not sure people would buy in to something they can't log in and physically see.
User wise I Would be interested to know anyones thoughts on these:
Offer it as a bundled USP for my web hosting offering - downside is I then need to compete with other hosts to get visitors first to then show off the benefits of the bundled tool. Bundled price would be a bit higher than main stream names due to my side and scale.
Try the engineering as marketing way and offer a stripped down free check, on a limited manual request basis. Or try freemium for automated once a week checks. Would include links to web hosting to cross sell on the result emails for those on cheap and slow hosting.
Approach other creative / design agencies for them to run on behalf of their clients as a low cost value add for them. Will need to cold email for this most likely as the target audience might not know of the existence of tools like this that sit between SEO spiders and uptime monitoring tools.
Thanks.
cool! You should come and build it with us in the WBE Space
Hey Brandon, I build a live chat product that integrates with Teams and Slack (https://www.socialintents.com). Our typical customers tend to be business with 50+ employees if using Microsoft Teams and 10+ employees if using Slack. I saw a lot of context switching between multiple messaging apps at my last company between Slack and the customer support tool so I decided to build something so that we could remain in Slack for everything. I've since rolled out the Teams integration as well as a Webex integration after being contacted by Cisco recently.
I find that the Teams/Office365 users are more than willing to pay as they already license Microsoft products.
Hey James! Greetings from another Atlien!
Wow, what a great looking product! You must be doing something right if Cisco is coming to you instead of the other way around! Maybe you should write up a post about your journey? I know I would be curious to read it!
Great question! I've been involved in software for years and then started my own product company selling on Amazon and Shopify. Managing inventory between the two platforms was horrible! And when I looked for tools to solve it I was underwhelmed. So I made https://gazel.app/ Gazel is to SAP, NetSuite what Instagram is to Photoshop. The right sized tool for most ecommerce sellers. If you have any friends that have an Amazon side hustle please tell them to check it out. Beta users wanted!
Yeek, I can only imagine the nightmare that managing inventories on two different platforms must be. This looks like a really helpful solution!
I am building Daito (https://www.daito.io/), a web-based 2FA authenticator that enables to securely share access to 2FA tokens, no phone needed.
My entry level plan currently starts at $49/month for 10 users after a free 30 day trial, so definitely not targeted at IH. My primary target group consists of tech-affine companies in the professional or IT services sector with 15-50 users, with the occasional larger customer thrown in.
I am considering a cheaper, but obviously more limited, entry level plan below $49/month, but I definitely would not go below $10/month per customer organisation.
Oh man, security is such a huge thing. How did you wind up deciding to build this? Were you faced with this problem in a previous job?
Yep, exactly. Saw this is as a real pain in lots of companies. People were not securing accounts with 2FA because they needed to share access (for various good or bad reasons).
I have a security background which naturally helps a ton. But building a security-focused B2B product as an Indiehacker? Yeah, it's tough :)
I applaud your ambition, sir! Please keep us posted on your journey!
This has been an issue for me with UpDog! It's a simple chrome extension to quickly check out engagement statistics on TikTok and Instagram.
Been trying to figure out where to reach influencer marketers and creators themselves, with the latter being easier since they already have communities. For sure, there are a lot of Indie Hackers that will benefit from UpDog, but it's not our main audience. A bummer considering how relatively easy it is to reach other people here 😄
This is a cool product. How many users do you have? Do you intend to monetize it at some point?
Hey Brandon, thanks so much! Currently at 600 active users. The plan has been to grow it to somewhere between 1.000-10.000 users and then sell it (perhaps on MicroAcquire) and let the buyer handle monetisation.
Ah, that's an interesting idea. Do you have a price tag in mind?
Only very aspirational ones pulled out of thin air, it would be nice to get a 6 figure sum, but I realise that might be hard for a non monetised product.
What do you reckon it could go for if it reached that range of users?
I guess the pragmatic answer is whatever we get, we get 😄
Hello Brandon!
I'm a founder of https://chainspy.net.
We're targeting savvy individual crypto investors that can use our intelligence to gain an edge on the wider market.
My co-founder and I decided to make the product because the data is freely available on the blockchain, yet companies like glassnode try to charge 800$/month for their graphs!!
We haven't fully decided on pricing yet but should be $30/month or less.
We also plan to have intel on some coins (like DOGE) for free, so people can get a feel for how the platform works with 0 commitment.
Hi JB! That's a really interesting idea! Incredible that some companies are putting an $800 price tag on information that's available for free... But I guess that speaks to how important the presentation of the information is!
What's your plan for reaching your target customers?
Luckily for us, our target audience will already be subscribed to small or large crypto communities online, so we plan to get some initial users through forums and community hubs. After that, we are contemplating an affiliate program where our users can get paid for advertising for us :)
Building cadstrom for PCB developers, which has a pretty small volume here. But the people I have talked to have been really great and helpful.
Whoa, so is this a product for Makers? People playing with Arduinos and stuff? Or am I way off the mark here? 😅
Will it remain free or do you intend to monetize it?
For Makers! Right now we are targeting circuit designers - so drawing schematics and boards - but eventually I foresee a range of support such as Arduino once we have market fit.
Keeping a free tier for hobbyists will be key to success, as we’d love to build a community around this, and other CAD tools are expensive. But subscriptions supporting ML tooling, private projects, and working with manufacturers could be avenues to monetization.
Super cool! I'd love to see a directory of projects people make with your tool!
Please do share updates in the future!
I am now developing a product for indie hackers. But before I was working on a climate change app and I got most of my users with SEO