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11 Comments

Struggle with finding a problem to solve

Hey guys, I am working on MightyForms which is a form design and optimization software. It's not so indie, really. I spend about 50k/mo developing and marketing it...😔

I am really stretched into many different directions with it, trying to solve elusive problems. There are so many industries and each client seems to demand a totally different thing, with no common voice out there. Thus, I am unable to really best my competitors in many things as I am trying to serve everyone at the same time.

What are your suggestions on figuring out what to focus on? We have certain distinctive features like strong Stripe product integrations for payment/subscription forms and super strong optimization tools, i.e. figuring out when and why users abandon your forms with features to effectively recover those abandoned leads.

I am basically at 2.5K MRR and barely moving up and with 50k/mo bill I am not sure if I can keep it on for much longer.

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    50K/month is steep! And since you already have MRR, can you hit pause on any aspect of the development and marketing to lower that number or get rid of it for a little bit?

    Also, consider giving your existing customers a price break if they refer others who sign up for a paid membership. Since they already use the product, they'll be the best word-of-mouth advertising so you don't have to pay extra on marketing.

    ALl the best!

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      Thanks for this info! I do have a referral program for existing customers but it’s not really popular. I should start testing NPS to see why

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    Hello Bogdan,

    I'm current user of your app :)
    But I'm about to leave by the end of the next billing cycle, it perfectly met my needs. Here are my feelings about :

    First, I think that TypeForm has taken survey tools to a new level with its great design
    but it was expensive for my needs. I been through many others tools and after 2 days I found MitghtyForm.

    I believe it's the best alternative for TypeForm for great designs and integrations (Drive, Dropbox ...). Unfortunately there are some frustrating bugs and some unexpected behaviors (we could discuss in PM).

    Somes advice from my opinion :
    There are too much templates and many similar don't invest more on them.
    Keep the prices.
    Improve SEO, it's not easy to find it in search engine results.
    Target people searching quick start, low price, and especially great designs because most competitors I saw don't.
    Bugs fixing

    I hope this help :)

    1. 1

      Hey Sean, thanks for using MightyForms! Would love to chat more in private to see how I can make this app better. Can you DM me at IG @porthas? I don’t know how to DM you myself

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    What do you spend 50k/month (600k/year) on?

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      40k payroll, rest are ads, infrastructure, marketing related expenses. Mostly engineering payroll, trying to focus on the product but maybe doing it wrong

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        Don't take this the wrong way, but I am having trouble making sense of your post and numbers. 40k/month payroll on engineers - that's like 2.5 fully loaded experienced bay area software engineers. What do your engineering resources look like?

        And what marketing are you doing? If you are at 2.5k MRR then that's definitely an achievement, but if growth is flat (or you are losing more each month than gaining) my sense is you have not yet found product/market fit and you should therefore not be spending anything on marketing.

        If are you able to afford 600k a year (not to mention personal living expenses) - are you independently wealthy or something?

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          Well, MightyForms is a very complicated and software engineering heavy tool. There are frontend devs, backend devs, and architect. Thus the cost. It is not cheap to develop this type of tool.

          Well marketing is mostly SEO now. We've been trying some ads but CPA is too high so we are thinking of alternative channels. Influencer router we think is going to be a failure and waste of time since the product is not for wide audience.

          Can afford because there are other businesses that I have doing pretty well.

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    What's your niche? Find a niche! You can't be everything to everyone.

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      I guess my problem is to figure out exactly what to niche in. We do solve a ton of actual problems but which are the customers willing to pay for? Going thru real customers it’s impossible to tell because the spread is crazy. We have people from all over..

      Ideally I would focus on entrepreneurs and solo business owners for TA as these who we find are our most common users but the niche is hard to define. The problem we want to solve is high implementation and optimization cost of custom web forms but that’s not really niche..

      For some users it’s subscription forms they need, for others it’s complicated rules, and someone else it’s PDF filling. Do I make any sense?

    2. 1

      I think this is awesome advice, niche down to a target market you feel has the lowest risk (sales, market and product) and just focus on them.

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