YC Build Sprint - Blog 1

Startupschool announced a Build Sprint. They are launching their first-ever YC Build Sprint for the Startup School community. This is a 4-week intensive period for founders to focus on their company and build towards a specific goal. They’ll provide a peer group and goal tracking. They are also bringing back the very-popular Startup School Grant. They’ll be funding 20 $10k equity-free grants.

Wow. That was wonderful. Within a few minutes of reading the new, I was registered.

Then PANIC!!

What did I just do? I had set my goals as getting the number of registered users to 150 and getting 2 paid customers.

You laugh!

But for me that is quite a stretch. Currently, we have about 90 registered users and 0 paid customers. In fact, I had started thinking of paid customers only a few weeks ago. Payment is not integrated. The software is quite stable and user friendly but I had never focussed on getting paying customers.

Below are the charts for the unique users and registered users. The spike on Week 15 is our release on Product Hunt.

Evaluation:

Ok. How reachable is this? The number of registered users is kind of possible if I can launch it on a couple of platforms. The paid users is going to be much more difficult. The sprint ends on September 20th. So I have a little more than a month to achieve this.

Plan:

1. To get registered users:

Launch on HackerNews
I have not yet launched here. Hackernews is finicky. It may take off or it may be a dud. Hackernews also presents me with one big technical problem. The platform has the ability to export GIFs. This is very CPU intensive. So, if two users happen to export at the same time, the system slows down, less frames are recorded per second and the produced animations appear very speeded up.

This can be solved by doing the GIF generation on the client side. During my experiments I have already done that, so its only a question of getting it back to that state. I have forgotten the details, so will have to dig a little.

Complete the Chinese version.
I have numerous Chinese connections and many of them are artists, so it would appeal to them. The Chinese version is half done. I have to complete it

Post on Twitter. Unfortunately I have not found it to be effective.

Post on Reddit. Not effective.

Post on 4chan. Not effective.

However, each channel brings a little traffic and the combination is sorta okay.

2) To get paid users:

I have gotten some interest from companies that send out newsletters. They can send customized animations using our platform. So each user gets a slightly different version for eg. with their name mentioned in their animation. There is already a market for such customized videos, so my hope is to piggyback on to it. I have sent some cold emails to wineries and micro breweries with not much results. Will have to continue or tweak my approach some more.

Goals for the next 7 days.
Ok. So, that is the situation. Here is the plan of attack I have come up with:

1. Move the GIF generation to the browser side
2. Explore the cold emails more.
3. Continue posting on twitter, reddit, 4chan

Any other suggestions?

Original here https://toonclip.com/blog