Bannerium
Photoshop plugin for generating banners
My side project Bannerium got acquired.
TL: DR;
- I got the lead from SaaS Place
- I can't tell you the number, but it covered the costs and gave me some extra money to play with other things. No, I am not millionaire :-)
- My personal goal of building the product from scratch was achieved, which is the biggest value for me.
- Huge thanks to the Lunadio community, in which @tmvst @ctw helped me along the way. To be honest: It was my first online SaaS product.
- I am currently building ThreeDee - Lovely 3D illustrations libraries for your projects
If you want to read the whole story, here it is
Sam
This is my first launch on PH 🎉
After months of getting knowledge from IH community, I finally got courage to post something on Product Hunt. I am so thankful for that.
What is my strategy?
Because I know that my customers are marketing/digital agencies, I was wondering what I can make for them different from my main product Bannerium.
I decided to create a freebie - H A N D Z - 3D illustration library.
I realized, that I want to do assets/products for designers and agencies so that they can be more creative and effective. But I also believe, this assets can be used by non-designers to make their work outstanding.
###My motto is: sharing is caring ❤️###
If you like the library, feel free to support us on Product Hunt.
Let me know, what I can improve to make it successful.
I am thankful for all invaluable advice I got from our smaller community of Indie Hackers Lunadio. I helped me overcome imposter syndrome and I finally launched something!
🖖🖖🏻 🖖🏼 🖖🏽 🖖🏾 🖖🏿
Last time I wrote that 0 people bought the product, which was kinda sad. I was frustrated over a week. But I realized that times, which things are not going as planned, will be more often. I would say, I am just getting used to that. A built product is truly just a starting line.
After this week, one user (who came from marketing area) bought yearly access to Bannerium for 69$ as early adopter package and another digital agency bought Bannerium for 3 months (27$).
This is not a lot of money, but... the feeling is great. It is like fuel for upcoming months.
And I am pushing product forward, e.g. on Adobe market, but I am little sceptical about that. We will see.
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Congrats for persevering! Almost no one has instant success (as nice as that would be). Hope your customers start to snow ball.
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Thanks. We will see.
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Hopeium. The feeling you get when someone (unqualified lead) enquires about your product. Detox from hopeium. Stop chasing unqualified prospects. They've been burnt too many times.
Not Always Be Closing. Instead EEE (Educate, educate, educate). With education you build trust. Think of yourself as a doctor. Who diagnosis and fixes peoples problems
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Yes! this is so true. But I was trying to get as many qualified prospects as I could. I had 60% open rate of my newsletter (in my native language).
Can you tell me more about daily practise of EEE? Sounds interesting.
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Hi semy.
Sure. Basically you want to become a marketing farmer not a marketing hunter. Hunters go hungry half the time. To become a marketing farmer...
1 advertise to find people who are interested in what you do with free report, video, audio interview. This positions you as an expert.
2 add them to your database.
- Continually nurture them and add value. Occasional sales pitch with special offer. Keep in contact regularly.
Takes time and money to build such a database initially. Later on it's simply maintenance. Automate. Redeploy and consistently get the same results. Constantly building on and improving your marketing systems puts you far ahead of your competitors.
If someone else can do it 80% as good as you can. Then delegate it. Dont pay yourself minimum wage doing routine tasks. While sacrificing high value tasks such as building your marketing infrastructure.
Some businesses have built a marketing infrastructure that gets new leads, follows them up, nurtures and converts them into raving fan customers. Others do random acts of marketing. No infrastructure.
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Interesting, thanks a lot! I see myself as a newbie in this area.
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Today is the day when I reached 400 signups.
I realised that:
65% of people understand my native language (Slovak language)
Open rate of e-mail campaign (people who signed before beta was launched) - 65% (native language) vs. 12% (english language)
I got mostly people from specialised facebook groups. To be honest, people reacts positive on the demo.
I need to improve understanding of using my plugin in right way. There is hidden algorithm and it seems people need better explanation.
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This is really inspiring. Im currently growing https://litt.nyc but the core flow still is not complete. I think once the core function is done the marketing will make people sign up.
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Hey! The true is that I was posting on specialised groups/forums. I knew that people have this problem and there is no easy tool for them. Feel free to see the whole journey of Bannerium here on Indiehackers to understand the whole story.
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Thanks a lot! Here is what was my strategy
The thing is that I have people signed and now I need to move forward. And this step will be tricky-
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Sorry. I thought moving forward in funnel - basically: how to make paying customers out of these signups.
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I am glad that you are writing this :)
Actually, I had opportunity to talk with designers and I understood, that the biggest pain point is to generate the banners. I had meetings and had opportunity to call with them during beta testing.Regarding pricing - yes, this is what I need to test. I found out, that this tool is for people who do lot of banners. Other folks don't care that much about automatisation and they are not willing to pay even 4$ :)) But I will test it for sure.
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2 days ago I wrote that the product Bannerium went life.
These 2 days I focused more on spreading the word about the product. And because my product has niche market and also it solves my past problem, I understand who is the potential user as well as customer.
I defined two main groups of users who can be interested: marketers (mostly PPC) and graphic designers (in product, digital agency, freelancers, ...)
Both of them have different motivation behind creating banners.
Graphic designers are mostly forced to do banners. This type of work is not their cup of tea. And in many agencies, there are juniors who generate banners (to reduce cost).
On the other hand, marketers who want to test as much different variations of visuals as they can. So that they can get better numbers in marketing and optimize the campaigns
So I was looking for groups who were specialised in graphic design, marketing (mostly PPC) and I tried to ask for feedback on plugin. And if they find it useful.
- I posted in Facebook groups specialised in Graphic design (), Marketing - PPC.
- I posted on Reddit
- I also send few people on Fiverr who are specialised in making banners (with plugin they can earn more, right? - there is value for them)
Of course I got some haters and few people questioned the value.
But I got 66 new leads who saw the value.
The thing is, that this type of plugin is not useful for people who do 10 banners in a month. They will not pay penny to automate their process and it is understandable. One person even used e-mail: "thisisuseless@..."
They are far from my focus
But I would love to learn how to post on Reddit? I see that people there are mostly negative on anything. And the community there is kinda unique.
Do you have any advice?
Today is a huge day!|
After all, we have our first version of the Photoshop plugin, which is generating ad banners.
AND WE GOT 100 NEW ACCOUNTS.
Throughout our alpha, beta programme, I got 250 e-mail addresses on designers which I reached.
Also I was active in facebook groups which helped me to get new people. My focus is to build good relationship with them, because I have some other ideas in my head. Ideas which can help other designers to be more productive.
Take a look - www.bannerium.com and give me your opinion.
Follow my story, because it will be a ride.
BTW: It will be interesting to see, how many of them will be willing to pay.
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Congratulations 🎊
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Thanks a lot!
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Congrats on a hard work, for me it seems very useful tool, good luck.
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Thanks! If you want to try, feel free to try. I would be interested in feedback.
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Congrats! The product seems like a huge time saver. Are you planning to release Figma or Sketch plugin as well? My view is probably very biased (I am a software engineer), but Figma seems to be widely adopted within my designer friends lately.
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Patresk, thanks a lot! I was asking where people are doing banners and Photoshop won. It seems that "graphic design" as traditional one is still in Photoshop and slightly changing. I am planning to do sketch or Figma plugin, too. I believe it will be easier to do there, then in Photoshop.
Figma and Sketch is popular among UI or UX designers, but we will see. If there is market, I will be there, too :)
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Could you please elaborate on being active in facebook groups and how you approached that to get people interested in what you were doing?
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Yes, sure.
My product has niche market - graphic designers who do lot of ad banners. On the other hand there are marketers who want to test different versions of the same visual. So also marketers can do some banner sets.I joined local (Slovak and Czech) groups which were specialised for those personas (using term from design thinking). I inserted what I was working on and that I am seeking for their feedback. People were interested in the solution and I got these people. The thing is, that I was active several months on these groups and people knew that I try to solve their problem. I started from alpha version to beta until the product was live. You can see my whole story via milestones here on indiehackers.
Adam, did I answer your question?
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It did. Thank you!
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Congrats on the launch, best of luck! Looks like a useful tool for sure.
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Thanks a lot! We will see what is behind the corner.
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I created video again, I faked ideal end to end flow from user perspective. I posted video on Facebook group and I got 50 people into Beta programme. With 10 of them I had call, with all of them I was writing on Messenger or via e-mails
Our beta was not working properly. There were some basic flaws, but I wanted to understand if even this beta is solving their problem. I wanted to understand their sentiment.
It was great!
So, let's move on!
I was lucky. I was showing my product to developer who is working as Senior developer in Linkedin. You can imagine, that his level of building algorithms were much higher than ours. He even discussed the algorithm with staff engineer in Google.
Google is all about algorithms. It is their daily bread.
Our algorithm was improved and we knew, that we can move to BETA
It took us some time. It wasn't that straightforward as we thought it could be.
Reality was different than expectations. It took us few months of struggles to get here and I was curious if people still want us to develop the thing. Also me and developer were struggling with motivation to improve things. It was slow, we had other priorities which were better to do.
I asked on the Facebook forum again.
The answers from graphic designers were ... great! They still believed in our product. It gave us lot of courage to continue.
To be honest. We were stuck.
We couldn't do better algorithm with the ideas which we had.
We met with @tmvst and @ctw and we were ideate different version of algorithm. We came up with few pretty interesting ideas which were not doable.
BUT - we found some, which we wanted to try.
It was huge milestone, because there we defined, that algorithm should generate banners into 3 groups.
42 Comments
Congrats! Was the lead post-COVID or did you start the process before the pandemic hit?
To be honest, it was during the hardest lockdown period in Europe.
Congratz Samuel ! 🎉🎉
Thanks Nicolas! :)
Wow! congrats
Thanks a lot! :)
Great news, congratulations 🎉!!! and thank you for sticking it out. You have just motivated me! 💪🏾
That's nice! :-) Happy to help
That's a great plugin! Well deserved, congrats!
Thank you so much! :)
Congratulations Semy!
Thanks a lot Alex! :)
Congrats!! :D
Happy to see that saasplace.io was helpful!
We launched our products the same day on Product Hunt and it helped the same day :-)
Haha very cool :)
Congrats, your story inspires me to keep moving forward with my current project.
Happy to hear that :-)
Congrats!
Thanks
Congrats!
Thanks :-)
congrats
Many thanks :-)
Where did you starg promoting your content? 😨😨😨
What content do you think?
I mean, what techniques did you use to get known your side project to the world?
Mainly Facebook groups / reddit groups, etc. I wrote an article about this I got 400 signups with a video of a product that didn’t exist
Thanks for sharing!
Congrats! It's a huge accomplishment to build something so valuable that someone else wants to acquire it. Enjoy this moment and then chase the feeling!
Thanks! I have to admit, that I had the "happy tear" that I was able to finish the product. I was horrible at finishing things. I believe is more personal win :P
This is incredible Samuel!!
Thanks Preet! :)
Congrats!!!
Thanks a lot!
Hey Congrats!! Could you give any clue about legal aspects of such transactions? Do we need to incorporate (assuming deal is in 5-6 figures)? How do you set up contract etc. Again, congrats well done
Thanks! All the legal stuff was on the 2nd side, but I assume they were pretty light in comparison to other deals. I didn't sell the a nuclear power plant. Just my small side project :-)
Great work. Feels good to sell something that you created. Even if it's not life changing money.
That's true! It finished for me as a little win.
Congratulation!!! @Semy. I tried Bannerium for one of project in Photoshop but latter moved to Sketch. Good luck with ThreeDee, it's looking awesome too :)
Thank you @Andy77! I will do my best :P
great
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Timetravel needed!
I started with the script, but the problem needed a more powerful solution. I hope the solution will help designers to do more creative work.
Thanks! :)