What do you think about my side project? (IdeaOcean.io)
Hello IndieHackers!
I’m going to launch my very first side project soon and I’d like to get some opinions.
My side project is called IdeaOcean.io. It helps you to document your ideas.
I built it because I was abusing a notes app for my ideas, but I wanted to have a dedicated place for them, so IdeaOcean was born. You can sort, tag and search your ideas. I added a configurable challenge to the app too, so people get motivated while using it.
I’m almost ready for launch, but I’m struggling with one very important thing: pricing.
I initially thought I let users pay $2/mo. after 90 days trial, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. I also thought about having a free tier and people have to pay for premium features, but I couldn’t think of premium features worth paying for.
What do you think about pricing IdeaOcean and is my app even something you really would like to use?
Nice and simple frontend!
About the pricing, i have two suggestions.
The first one is actually to make it completely free. Use the product to gain experience, and at the same time gather an email list together. You will in this way have an entire email list you can ask about their problems and so on, and in this way create another or extend this product to something that could make money.
The other one is not to limit the premium accounts with features, but instead with a number of total ideas. So free tier can maybe have up to 15 ideas, and premium unlimited or something like that.
Personally, i would go with the first idea, because as mentioned earlier are their thousands of notetaking apps out on the market, so it would be hard to compete against the others.
Thanks for the feedback. The problem with the first one is that I am currently in college and don't have much money to pay for the hosting costs.
I would strongly caution against leaping into trying to make money off of yet another to-do or note taking app without a very firm idea of your unique value proposition. From a casual glance at your website, it seems like another to-do app that you're just supposed to use for ideas.
Who is the customer and why does your app do this job so much better than alternatives that they will pay for it?
I’m trying to build a place where you can store all your creative thoughts, not shopping lists or to-dos like “answer mail from important customer”.
I’ve heard the advice that I should differentiate my product more from evernote and co. for the second time now, so I’m really gonna look into this.
Thanks for your feedback!
Nice idea.
Looks good (and signed up)
Premium features could be :
Dunno, just thinking out loud.
Thank you for your input!
For (2) I mean the quantity of ideas you can create (eg max 20 on free tier, unlimited for £4.99/month, something like that)
Ahh! Thats a great idea! I've got now 6 things on my "premium features" list. I think that could be enough.. (limit ideas, import, star/prioritize, archive, sharing, alexa/google assistant integration)
Finally - don't wait for them to be implemented!
You have enough for the free tier already (maybe limit the idea count first).
Get it out there and get people signing up. It's already good enough to launch. The more people use it the more ideas you will get.
Thank you! I'm gonna extend my landing page a bit (I've got some feedback for it on reddit) and then try to get it out!
Did you use a template for the landing page? If so, which one? Whilst I don't want exactly that I do like the design and can't find the right search terms ...
I didn’t use a template, I did it myself. :)
Even more well done to you then :)
First of all, great work on putting this together and getting it out there!
To answer your question about pricing, I think you should reduce the 90 day free trial to something like 30 or 14 days. 90 days is far too long and you'll be waiting 3 months+ (a long time in SaaS!) to see if users convert. In terms of the actual pricing, it will help you to think about who you think your ideal first paying users would be. Is it tech founders? Writers? Product teams in a startup?
As it seems you're solving for your own problem, it may make sense to start with people like yourself, ie those on this forum. In which case $2 would be a good starting point. You can always increase as you start to get some traction and add features.
Also, bear in mind that this is a very competitive space with many good free options, ie Evernote, Keep etc. So think about how to differentiate your offering to your particular target user.
Thanks for the advice! 90 days might really be a bit long.
I'm gonna take look at how I can differentiate IdeaOcean more from Evernote and co.
No problem, happy to help. It's a good MVP and I think you can get a few paying users relatively easily, because this kind of market is quite huge. Keep iterating and good luck!
Thanks for the motivation!
Building this product is a rollercoaster of emotions. One day I think people really could like this and on another I think I should just quit, because no one would even use it.
That's the frustrating thing about building things :) there's a way around it which is to spend less time building and more time marketing! Happy to share ideas on the latter if you like.
That'd be awesome!
Cool! What strategies have you followed so far to spread the word?
I submitted IdeaOcean to BetaList, and tried to educate myself on “how to get traction”
Yes, traction is a good book!
Looks cool. Signed up.
its beatiful! good job... but you can import from trello! can be good feature!
Thank you! yea, you're right. trello importing could be useful!