Starting to feel frustrated... how would you grow my product?
So last year we launched Viyo.io. Viyo let's you turn any device with a browser and a camera into a baby monitor/pet monitor/security cam.
We launched on all the big sites like HackerNews, Reddit, and Product Hunt, and a few others. We had really good traction and brought in about 300 users. Since then we are only up to a little over 500 users (and 2 paid subscriptions!)
I'm curious what you would do to grow our userbase? We are currently a browser-first app, but you can install the app as a PWA (obviously limited support on iOS). Do you think we need to have a mobile app? Should we be blogging to try and get more organic traffic? How would you get our target users? Or do you think this market is just not viable?
I'd just like someone to tell me "this is still viable and this is how you should grow it" or "give up, it's not worth it"
Sounds like you are experiencing the trough of sorrow and thinking that posting on sites will be enough to gain traction.
Don't give up, too many people give up too quickly. If you feel that it is worth pursuing, keep digging.
Think about doing Mom Test type research & customer interviews - https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/154-rob-fitzpatrick-of-the-mom-test
Traction book goes into the many different things you can be thinking about from a growth perspective, I stumbled upon a summary of it today - https://sipreads.com/traction/
Rosie said it best, the trough of sorrow is definitely a real thing and is where grit and tenacity are needed to keep going.
If you have a little money to play around with, it might be useful to do some very cheap, targeted advertising to just drive traffic to the site and watch how your funnel converts/where the pitfalls are.
Thank you! It definitely is tough when you hit those lows. I think you're right though. We need to invest a little money to drive traffic and optimize our conversion funnel.
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This is a really good point. Although the price point is largely because of our competitors. But I am definitely considering some different pricing options.
That conversion number is a little skewed too. Like some others have mentioned here, a lot of the initial users weren't actually our target demographic.
Anyways, thank you for your response!
You're right Rosie, I was feeling pretty discouraged last night, and part of it was just me needing to get this off my chest.
Thanks for sharing that podcast! I was already a huge fan of Rob Walling! (bought his book and have read a lot of his articles) I will definitely be giving this a listen.
I will check out Traction too.
Thank you so much for your encouragement!
Hey Geoff,
Just sent you an email about Traction. Also, as far as Rob Walling, you would probably be interested in the episode he released this past Tuesday!
Being on Hacker News, Product Hunt and such gives you a spike of hope but it doesn't do much in the long run, especially in cases as yours where the audience on these platforms may not be the right audience for your product.
I would suggest to step back and focus on the target audience. What problems does your product solve? Who has these problems? Where do these people hang out online and where do they go to find answers to problems such as the one your product is solving?
From a very quick look, your site doesn't seem to have much content either for Google to send you traffic. I imagine organic search being one great marketing channel opportunity for you as people might search for these types of solutions.
You should publish content on topics relevant to your product (look a bit more into keyword research so you can figure out what people search for so you can create content about it). Do comparisons to some of the more popular baby monitor/pet monitor/security cam solutions. What makes your solution different to the popular products in these categories? Why should someone choose your solution rather than something else? Take a look at how we did that on our blog for our product.
Producing this kind of content regularly will be able to open the organic traffic doors for you as you build your content archives and search engines start sending you traffic.
+1
If you're a developer, you spend time on communities like HackerNews, Product Hunt, etc. because that's what you're interested in and you find out about tools that can help solve your (developer) problems.
Your (best, paying-customers) target market isn't really developers. Think about who would pay and where they go to solve those kinds of problems.
This is really great advice. Thank you! You are 100% right, we need to be reaching out to the right users. A lot of the initial users we got were probably make curious about the product than actually in need of it.
you're welcome!
Curious to know if you did any market research to validate this product? From a parent currently in the market for a baby monitor myself, I have personal concerns around the dependency of having to use two devices, but more significantly the fact that you don't have a mobile application.
That aside, have you tried running targeted Facebook/Instagram ads around behavior metrics such as "mothers", "moms", etc? That's literally where your target market lives, and it shouldn't be difficult to reach them there.
Initially, no. We built Viyo for ourselves. I have 3 kids myself and my partner had a new puppy, so we were looking for a way to monitor through the browser. We also didn't want to have to buy new hardware or have a lot of setup.
We did a lot more market research after starting the project. Now we are fairly knowledgable about our competitors and their price points (Alfred is the most similar to us). The biggest differences between us and our competitors is the lack of a mobile app and the ability to record. Our assumption (which is still up for debate) is that the people that use our app would be comfortable enough with technology to use the browser (or would be willing to install the PWA) and also they may appreciate the privacy/security benefits of the fact that we don't record.
We haven't run any targeted ads, mostly because we didn't want to spend money on it. But you are right. I think it will be necessary if we really want to find out if we can scale Viyo in any significant way.
"We did a lot more market research after starting the project." What kind of market research did you do? Is it on your competitors only or is it with your potential customers? Usually it is both.
It seems that your service is aiming toward people with young kids. You may want to join groups of family with young kids (FB, reddit, education, children raising, etc.) and tell them about your service. Since you have a very usable free plan, if you don't get much tracker there, you may want to find out why, as they are your target customers, aren't they? But I assume you have done this market research already. So that is why you may want to share the market research that you have done about your potential customers so we can think of more ways to suggest...
Based on what you're saying here, I'm guessing that your target is parents who don't afford to pay for an actual baby monitor and are searching for an alternative.
If they’re fresh parents and one of them works from home, they don’t need a monitor.
If they’re fresh parents who aren’t working from home, and they actually are searching for a cheaper alternative, they might not have a tablet/phone hanging around with no purpose.
If they do have one, they might not be interested to keep it always on. Your solution doesn’t record anything so my understanding is that the monitoring device needs to be always on.
You don’t say anything about the other device, does it also need to be always on? If that’s the case, they would end up with two devices always on. As someone who’s obsessed with battery life, I would never use something like this.
I checked your FAQ and none of these things are mentioned. If your audience is someone who’s searching for a free solution to monitor their babies, do you really think they understand the technical terms you’ve put on the homepage?
The copy on your homepage might be good for geeks hanging around on Product Hunt, but I think moms who can’t afford a baby monitor are very unlikely to be on PH.
Like someone else mentioned, Facebook groups are probably a better place to promote your thing. But before paying anything on ads, make sure you’re addressing, in FAQs, their actual questions, not what you think they might want to hear.
If you don’t want to pay for adds and want to go the organic way, start by googling “baby monitor app”. You may not be offering an app, but that’s what your audience is searching for, because that’s how they think their problem should be solved.
I did a bit of research for you and from all the potential queries that appear on the first page of SE as suggested queries, we have the following:
cloud baby monitor app
samsung baby monitor app
ipad baby monitor app
ip camera baby monitor app
baby monitor app uk
motorola baby monitor app
baby monitor 3g
app that picks up baby monitor signal
None of these is helpful for you, however this suggestion might be: “baby monitor app between two phones”.
Now, go and google that and check the articles on the first page, the first 5-6 results. You can try to create something similar and push it in groups to see which audience responds (age, location, gender).
Alternatively, you can try to reach out to the blogs in the first positions and see if they’re interested to include your solution also. This is an example: https://www.watchfuldad.com/use-phone-as-baby-monitor/.
OMG all sorts of advice on this post, lol. My advice is you shouldn't be taking advice from us. You have users, ask them. Do they want a native app? Would they care about your content? What type of content?
Find more people like them. Who are they? Why are they using it? Market to people like them.
You are very right!
I was thinking of putting together a survey and sending it out to our free users. Then maybe sending a different survey to our paid users. Perhaps maybe insentivisizing them by offering a month of premium free or something.
Add an incentive for completing the survey. At least, that's what i will do next time. If you just send the survey with some nice words along, most people will not respond at all. Maybe not even opening your email...
I would seriously think about raising your prices! $5/month seems very low for the amount of value you're providing. As a potential customer, it makes me second guess how valuable your product actually is. If the creator only thinks it's worth $5/month, it can't be that good, can it?
It also seriously restricts your ability to attract new customers believe it or not! At $5/month x 12 months per customer (let's assume each customer stays on for a year), you're making a lifetime value of $60/customer. That's definitely on the lower side and means you have to spend way less than that on marketing/sales/hosting/customer support for each and every customer or you're losing money!
For a good home security system, I'd imagine you're dealing with more affluent customers who would be willing to pay $30-50/month easily to secure their belongings. Imagine how much more effective your marketing and/or customer acquisition could be if you could easily spend $100/customer and still make money!
My opinion for one is the branding could be more targeted. I don’t know much about this market but if I were to have done this I would make everything reflect your brand.
For example, use baby colors. Incorporate something childish in your logo (think gerber or another brand targeted towards young parents).
Also, chop out most of the text and use images. For ex, parents in bed with their phone set up as baby monitor with baby in the phone display. Maybe the parents are smiling. This is all stuff your users are looking for. Brand consistency and something they can trust. User reviews from parents will also help, but only if everything else is cohesive. This is the art side of the business that you need to nail.
Your site looks like it could be selling anything. Optimizing your website is so beyond important I wouldn’t invest in any ads etc until you get that down. Spending money to drive traffic without a beautifully branded website in my opinion is a waste of money.
Hire someone to help you with branding if you can’t do it yourself. Or I can help you brainstorm. I’ve taken courses at general assembly and have multiple profit generating internet businesses
Good luck
This is all really great advice! Thank you! Originally the intent was to try and cater towards all of our user types (home security, pet monitor, baby monitor). That's probably where we went wrong.
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Who is your customer?
HackerNews, Reddit, and Product Hunt have a younger tech mindset. Chances are they are more curious than actual customers. You have to discover your customer and where they are.
For me that is Twitter. Because my customer are active currency traders. If I relied on HN and Product Hunt, it would feel good to see the activity but would get very few paying customers.
You've made a really good point. I think that a lot of our initial traction was moreso from curious people rather than users that actually would use our product.
I'm starting to try and reach out to parents in FB groups now. I'm going to try and focus on FB as a channel because I think that's a good place to start for parents.
Appreciate the advice and feedback!
Two of your competitors have 10M+ app downloads. One is free + ads, one is subscription. So market has demand. We assume both models work. Although browser-first/only is cool, end users either won't care or won't understand. Push value not tech. I think you need a presence in app stores to help discovery. Show ads to free users or drop free tier. Your website could be punchier. Create different landing pages for different segments.
I really like your assessment. I completely agree with it! I think we will start pursuing this direction
You got some pretty awesome feedback. I love this community.
Like the way, you are using webRTC. 👍
My humble 2 cents. When it comes to monitoring, I will need to see recorded sessions. I firmly believe paying customers will need a way to store privately the recordings. Imagine a crime that occurred when no one was watching, and no evidence though there was a camera. Maybe an option to link to some third-party storage.
And night-vision. I know that is a steep ask.
As @armgitaar said, how are your customers using it.
Deep dive into a micro-niche, create user stories, and market how relieved your users are.
Keep the fight on! 🤺
Hi Geoff, I checked your website and I will try your product. Currently I own a camera from https://owletcare.com/ and I can tell you it's cumbersome and impractical.
My only recommendation will be to develop a small diy camera and also sell it on the website, for example, I don't have any old device, I trashed them all, so having an option to buy a new one (don't go crazy with the price) it's always nice.
Thanks Sergio! I would love to know what your experience is with our product! Send me an email at [email protected] and I can give you a promo code to try out some of our premium features too.
I looked into developing a physical product, but hardware is a lot harder to get into. I think we'd like to see if we can get more traction with our app first.
What is the decentralised web?
It is supposed to be like the web you know but without relying on centralised operators. In the early days of the world wide web, which came into existence in 1989, you connected directly with your friends through desktop computers that talked to each other. But from the early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, we began to communicate with each other and share information through centralised services provided by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle
So here's the thing, people are getting more and more privacy aware/concious and tech-savvy. I remember when I read that article it was right about the time that the Strava "information breach" came out (you could find military bases by looking for random square run patterns in the desert). Putting the two together, I thought wouldn't it be cool if instead of paying an annual license fee for Strava you'd pay an annual fee and they'd mail you a small "server" that plugs into your router resulting in your own personal web app and your data remaining within your own network.
Similarly, https://mastodon.social works on a distributed model.
I wonder if you could sell DIY local web apps. Essentially a person connects to your server and if they provide the right credentials they are passed on to connect with their own server within their network. By doing this you can access the camera from anywhere but recorded video never leaves their local network. You also might have options to encrypt-at-rest.
Happy to elaborate and bounce ideas around if I can help.
You might also look at testimonials on the site since parents often want to hear what is working for other parents.
We're working on that!
A very interesting application of the idea! I have heard of the decentralized web before, but I hadn't thought about applying it to our product. I think this would definitely be a pivot in our business model or a new product offering. This is definitely something to think about though. I will bring it up with my partner.
At the moment though, I want to focus on our current product/business and see if we can find out if it is viable.
Any thoughts on the existing solution?
I have cambackup.com
love your design!
Focus on a target customer. From your brief description, HN, IH, PH aren't where you customers are.
As a parent, I don't know if it speaks to me as a baby monitor solution. My wife was obsessed with being able to hear and see with clarity our children as infants. I don't think a phone solution is a good bedside solution for what we as parents would look for. Mainly, because we want something that is essentially always on. I tried a phone solution once and we quickly dropped it for a dedicated, physical recorder and viewer situation. Though, as a nanny cam sort of situation to see what my toddler and up kids are doing when we are away / in the other room, then that's sounding interesting. Plus, pet parents like that type of crap too. ;-) Though, again, not sure I'd want my phone to be the video capture device.. .
My kid loves stealing my phone and using it as a "spy" camera; maybe there is something there?
What do your two subscribers use it for?
👍
What are you currently doing to market your business?
Yo bud!
I don't know your business, but I will say that 12 months post launch without good growth isn't a great sign.
It's possible that you just haven't figured out how to target your core market; however, it may also be true that there just isn't a strong demand for your product.
Give this podcast from YC a listen. It talks about pivoting, and describes the tricky situation you're in (i.e. some traction, but not a lot of traction).
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3qwDIVY1Ufg2D2WIYYmfhF?si=f0FC9IbhTnagx77ihFPUKw
We're told time and time again to stick with it, but knowing when to let go or shift your focus is just as important.
Best of luck!
J
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