Bakup.io
Secure automatic backups for databases, files and servers.
Finished university with my co-founder and wanted to build something within the B2B world and created a data backup SaaS to help others focus on their core product rather than worrying about how their data is backed up.
Since launching Bakup.io we started to do some advertising, as a bootstrapped company so far, we don't really have an advertising budget so we decided to explore free options for now. We also wanted to take a slow approach with growth to begin with, making it easier to fix any bugs or problems.
When we launched we literally did launch with an MVP, so the whole website wasn't as refined as we would like it to be and we didn't feel comfortable going hard on promoting until we were happy with certain things.
So we have been focusing on:
- Fixing/improving the UI
- Created a specific webpage for each data backup solution
- Database
- File
- Server
- Both my co-founder and myself started our own blogs
- Integrated a live chat support service
- Advertised on Twitter
- Launched on HackerNews
- Launched on ProductHunt
- Reached out to potential users via Twitter and Email
馃搱 We feel we are in a good position with the website and the service itself. Our goal now is to increase our efforts on marketing and promotion now that we feel more solid. We started off slowly and now ready for growth.
After months and months of hard work, testing and refining, my co-founder and I finally finished our product MVP for Bakup.io! It has taken us much longer than expected but we were glad to put it off multiple times so that we could get it right.
During the way there were so many things we didn't think about during our MVP build, testing revealed that we needed to rewrite some components. My advice is to keep going until you feel the product is right but don't leave it too long to launch with an MVP.
Our main issue for why it took so long was a mixture of earning money to live (less time on the project) and where our design didn't match how things work in real life (unexpected bugs or design flaws).
The goal with Bakup.io is to solve a problem for people, we wanted the process to be as hassle free as possible. The UI needed to be simple and the process error free, so it took us longer to get things stable but the work was worth it with the result.
At this point it was over a year since we had the initial idea for Bakup.io - We needed to get something working and launch an MVP.
We wanted to get things moving much faster with features and coding but we had our issues along the way, we also had to earn money to live at the same time. I ended up working part-time and my co-founder was working another job.
We were both putting in as much time as we could but we were getting affected by feature-creep and major bugs in our platform.
Our goal from this point onwards was to get an MVP done! We locked in features and focused on fixing bugs and only introduced new features where we had to, if they solved an issue.
We had our main requirement for working database, file and server backups met but we needed to fix many bugs and usability issues.
Before December 2020 we worked on the project in modules, I'd work on one half and my co-founder on the other, a very simple explanation but that's what we did.
At this point we actually had something to show for all our time we spent working on Bakup.io. It wasn't ready to be shown publicly but we had something that was working, something that was a foundation to continue from.
We basically decided that we needed to get data backups working in the order of databases, files and servers. That was our MVP goal and at this stage we had database backups fully working with the OpenSource agent we were building along the way.
However, we weren't out of the woods yet. We still had a lot of work to complete and we were still working in different cities and tackling not being able to both work full-time on Bakup.io.
It was nice to finally piece together the work we'd both done and finally see a UI and output from our CLI program we developed.
It wasn't until the end of August 2020 until we started to make some real progress on Bakup.io - Leaving university, going back home meant my co-founder and I were working 100% remote. We both were also working more asynchronously and living in different cities.
Because of our working and living situations, progress took a toll on Bakup.io, my co-founder was working as well but luckily I was able to work full time on the project.
We basically spent every waking hour on it and used Discord whenever we could.
At this stage Bakup.io was just a few components we didn't have a working solution, we needed to bring everything together.
We'd been building asynchronously and needed to merge together in order to advance further with the project.
My co-founder and myself left university in February 2020 with a Computer Science degree, we were happy to move on and discussed that we wanted to start a business together.
During the final months of university we actually already had our idea of Bakup.io - We just wanted to wait until we finished to focus on it more.
After February we started planning for Bakup.io and working on it!
We both had a passion for software tools, automation and server/network management tools. We knew the enterprise market needed new software and we both enjoyed working with databases, so we started to think about what was missing.
Bakup.io started because we felt we could offer a complete solution to data backup management, letting other founders, business owners, devs and teams not have to worry about data backups, we wanted to create a solution which does all this for you.