Tell me what you're building and I'll tell you how'd I get more users.
https://twitter.com/AnthonyCastrio/status/1541738189676630017
Reply here or on Twitter and I'll answer as many as I can today.
Reply here or on Twitter and I'll answer as many as I can today.
I and a couple of friends, are building https://app.centrit.io, which is a free (for now) customer feedback tool that helps businesses easily collect feedback on their platforms.
Looks like you linked to the app login instead of your landing page by accident: https://www.centrit.io/
First of all I think the landing page could use a refresh on the copy. It's a bit hard to understand as-is.
Couple of questions for context:
What's your price point?
How many customers do you have currently?
Who's your ideal customer?
We actually recently launched, we don't have pricing yet, it's 100% free. We also have no customers yet. We want to keep it free because right now feedback would be extremely valuable. We are trying to provide value for SMBs, saas platforms.
In that case my advice is to talk to as many potential users as possible.
Have quality conversations where you really push to understand their pain points and the problems they'd pay to solve.
This will help you:
Read this for more details on how to do customer interviews well:
https://wizenguides.com/how-to-interview-customers
I'm in the earlier stages of building a deal tracking application. The idea isn't too crazy, you'd be able to say what stage the deal is in, whether its an SMB, Mid-market, or Enterprise deal, as well as the price of deal and other factors of it.
My theory is that Salesforce and other CRMs are really too bloated and unrealistic for most users. Sales people and others would be fine with an application that let them handle the important details aka, how many deals are they tracking a year, how many are succeeding, which markets are succeeding most often, and the main contact of the deal.
Perhaps I'd describe it as a paired down version of Pipedrive and Salesforce. A lightweight application just for deal flow, tracking, and some other features (TBD what those are). Anyways, curious how you'd go about launching a new CRM in such a crowded field. I think modern and slick UX is a must, so many of these CRMs these days are really boring and a pain to look at.
What's your pricepoint?
I’m finding the project to have multiple complex technical challenges, so it’s not on the market.
I’d like for it to be free the first 50 deals added, at that point I’d ask to charge (hosting data ect).
What do you think is realistic to change for something like this?
Most of these companies I believe charge by seat.
You could even make it free for individual sales people to use and then a per seat charge once they want to create a team.
That way individuals find it easy to sign up and you make money at the SMB level where they're less price sensitive.
Check out what your competitors charge per seat and undercut them a bit for a start.
As for finding your first customers? Well at the beginning it's purely hustle. Message as many potential customers as you can. Get to know them and their problems.
These conversations will serve double-duty as customer interviews for product development and opportunities to sell people on your idea.
You might find this guide to doing customers interviews useful:
https://wizenguides.com/how-to-interview-customers
I'm working on a study app that uses AI to summarise lecture recordings and create revision quizzes automatically - https://jamworks.com - We have plans for the UK, which are starting to take shape, any tips for getting in front of students in the US? 🙏
If you let students publish their notes publicly then you'll have great SEO potential.
Make it so that when students search google for "notes from CHEM101 UMD" they find an upload to your website.
Provide space for students to label notes with:
School, semester, year, subject, course code etc so that you can make all that information scrapable by Google.
Now the more notes that are uploaded for a school, the more useful your resource becomes.
Target specific schools and try to achieve a density of users there.
Start local to yourself, that will be easiest.
Thanks Anthony! 🙌 I see great potential in sharing the notes for growth purposes, that's a great point and I appreciate the detail. We have a concern around the IP of sharing educational content in this way, but that's a whole separate issue.
Yea, IP might be an issue, but I think it's worth exploring.
btw if you're bootstrapping this thing you should definitely think about joining https://indieworldwide.co/
Would love to have you as a member :)
Hey Anthony! Loved your comments and advices in this thread, but I would love to get your feedback on mine. I'm running an Ai-based logo design maker called Instant Logo Design
So far, we're reaching our ramen profitability, but it's not enough. We're also about to revamp our landing page for better UX experience and SEO purposes.
But I would love to know your thoughts on my business :)
You might as well try the same Twitter strategy I used here :)
"Tell me your startup idea and I'll design you a logo for it"
Every reply you just use your own service and share a link.
Oops didn't see my notiff right there, but that's pretty easy, simple, and cool! Thanks for giving a tip :)
Hi @AntCas ,
Great post! Congratulations!
I am creating a mobile application builder No code https://www.nwcode.io/
We have just started, I will be glad to hear your thoughts and ideas
Thanks
From your website looks like you already have some decent traction. How many users currently?
If it's less than 1,000, here's what I would try.
Give away your time for free. Post on IH and Twitter that you'll build someone's idea for free. Publicly build several people's ideas using your tool.
@noahwbragg did this really effectively https://twitter.com/noahwbragg/status/1327308301437071360
In your case I think it would work even better because you're "giving away for free" a demo of your product.
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
Hey @AntCas, congrats on this success and boosting your Twitter followers to over 5k!
I am building https://doqs.dev, an API to fill your predefined PDF templates. I am curious about your ideas and suggestions!
Who's your target user? What customer would be sending mass amount of email?
That's the first thing to figure out.
I'm guessing with a business like this you're going after law firms, auditing companies, older-school businesses perhaps.
In which case cold-emailing can be highly effective.
If you're making $1k/month per customer, then you can put a lot of time into sourcing good leads and warming them up.
I wrote a guide together with @NontechAna and some other folks on the topic. Maybe you 'll find it helpful.
https://wizenguides.com/cold-email-outreach
Thanks. Yes, I am very niche / specific on my customers, but it's not only old-school businesses.
My focus was on highly regulated sectors, e.g. financial and energy. I worked in both of them and know companies that are using such tools.
Luckily my current employer will be my first customer.
But travel, law, and insurance can definitely be interesting too.
Unfortunately, no revenue yet, focussing on a bit of organic SEO visibility and then will definitely try out cold emails, when I have a bit of MRR.
Hey @AntCas, congrats for this blowing up on Twitter :)
I am building https://zite.design . The site sells templates for Carrd websites. Looking forward to hear your ideas!
Thanks Gregor :)
Are you able to sell templates directly within Carrd? That would seem like the best way to get distribution.
What are people searching on Google? Are they looking for Carrd templates?
I'd create landing pages for each search term, things like:
Carrd template for design portfolio
Free carrd templates for students
etc etc
In some cases you might want to provide a "lite" or free version of templates in order to act as lead generation.
In those cases include a link to your own website in the template.
Many people will set up a carrd site but not customize it or be too lazy to remove the backlink which will give you some free link juice over time as well as the opportunity to upsell them on a paid template.
Appreciate you taking the time to answer all these people including me!
1 - not really. The actual sale is handled via Carrd but I am not listed in Carrd's template directory.
2 - The landing pages are a great idea, I will go with these. Backlinks, yep - those are already included and making a contribution to SEO.
Thanks again and good luck on the journey to 1k MRR and beyond!
Thanks Gregor, best of luck to you as well!
Nice, thank you Anthony!
I'm building https://shroud.email -- an email alias service that hides your real email address online, stops trackers, and prevents spam.
I'm currently targeting privacy enthusiasts, but I think this concept of email aliases is becoming more mainstream. There are some competitors out there, but their UX generally leaves a lot to be desired!
That's cool, any way you can go upmarket and create a solution for businesses? They're much easier to sell to.
At the individual level with a low price point you need to reach a massive amount of people.
That means you need to create content, good content, with an emotional hook.
I'd pick just one platform to focus on at first.
Maybe you write detailed rants about privacy on Twitter.
Maybe short videos for TikTok about how companies are spying on you.
Something evocative that inspired people to take action immediately. How will they protect themselves? By signing up for your service of course.
Thanks Anthony! That's very helpful. This is definitely more of a consumer product than a B2B thing, so you're right that good content will be important!
Hey Tao! Not Anthony, but very curious about your email alias service as someone super passionate about privacy. I’m familiar with SimpleLogin & Apple’s new email alias service and would love to hear your thoughts about them & where Shroud.email is headed.
Hello! Sure, let me try to sum it up :) I've used a lot of the existing tools on the market and found problems with all of them:
With Shroud.email I'm trying to check all the boxes: it blocks trackers, it's libre/open-source, it's hosted on renewable energy in the EU, and most importantly, it's easy to use. I think there's room in the market for a really good and accessible alias service -- kind of like what 1Password did for password managers.
I'm currently getting the privacy basics right (i.e. making self-hosting easy). With that done, I think it's already a strong contender. Afterwards I'll be working on a browser extension and mobile app so that it takes minimal friction to adopt email aliases.
If you're interested, feel free to send me an email on 1os0lo7axj9zvow3@fog.shroud.email and I'll set you up with a lifetime account -- and of course, any feedback is very welcome ;)
Wow, thank you so much for this detailed breakdown! I didn’t even know Firefox Relay actually uses AWS SES. Firefox being the biggest privacy-focused browser, choosing to use AWS SES for this seems a puzzling decision and the thought of my emails going through Amazon is just creepy.
I wish all my privacy products checked all these boxes :) Also this detailed comparison would be powerful on your marketing website for people like me, imo.
Just emailed you!
Mobile app for affirmations: https://believeaffirmations.com/
Hey! love this post! Working on https://lunarpad.co/
We have a couple hundred super cool users on but no subscribers and want to grow the user base. What wold you do?
We are Spade, a chrome extension that allows you to annotate on web pages (pen, highlighter, textbox). Your annotations will be saved in the cloud so that whenever you reload, they will be right there for you. Not only that, there are sharing features that allow you to directly share your annotations with someone else by sending them a link, or you can simply just send them a PDF. You can check it out at https://spade.tools.
How do you think we should advertise this?
Thanks @AntCas for doing this :)
We’re a team of two tech people very new to the sales / growth side of things and would love to know your thoughts on our interactive cybersec learning platforms: https://www.devaviary.com
Even just reading your replies to what other people are building is super helpful. I learnt a lot from your thought process!
https://compozly.com/ Around 500 users at the time - (not paying users unfortunately).
The simplest shared chores app for roommates:
https://neato-app.com/
Built out of frustration that my partner and I always thought the other had watered the plants each week, so they never got watered...
I am making https://modapkclub.com/free-fire-hack-apk/. The site deals with templates for Card websites. I am glancing ahead to hear your thoughts!
Hi, Anthony. The feedback you gave others was very substantive and I would appreciate your thoughts on my current project.
Token Tabs is a browser extension that makes the new tab page more productive and rewarding. Users can keep life organized with a smart to-do list, take quick, easy notes with a sleek notepad, and stay up-to-date with real-time crypto news and prices. In addition to productivity widgets, Token Tabs monetizes the common activity of opening a new tab with small ad banners and returns a share of that revenue to users via weekly giveaways. Every new tab becomes a chance to win crypto, for simply surfing the web like users already do.
We are currently focused on building a waitlist and you can find our website at https://tokentabs.com/
I’m building a blog post writing service for businesses, marketing agencies, and blogs. I believe these should be our target audiences, and have favoured stream lining our service to consist of just blog posts rather than all forms of content to keep the service simple.
Awesome! Thanks Anthony!
Building Anytime Design - our unlimited design subscription service for $2500/mo.
We're looking for our first few clients at the moment. How would you approach this?
Btw, here's the landing page: https://anytime.design/
For $2,500 per month you can invest a lot into individual leads.
Agencies tend to make great clients because they're making money on your services.
I'd look at cold emailing agencies to form white-label partnerships.
Wrote a couple of guides with @NontechAna on those topics to get you started:
Guide to cold emailing: https://wizenguides.com/cold-email-outreach
Guide to strategic partnerships for indie hackers: https://wizenguides.com/how-to-grow-your-startup-through-partnerships
SMB Accounts Payable Automation
Got a link? How many users?