Pinepipe

After working hard for the last 3 months, we managed to meet our self imposed deadline and officially launch in the beginning of July.

I say "we" because one of my old colleagues joined my cause, and we are now partners for better and for worse. I had previously contacted him as I believed that because he possesses complementary skills to mine, he would complete the team. Also I was feeling the need to share my decisions with someone, and receive a helping hand with other important chores besides the technical stuff.
It's not easy doing everything alone, and whoever says otherwise is either lying, or is special in many ways.

We already went through 2 pitches at startup accelerators, and while we didn't convince anyone to invest at this stage, we generated a lot of interest and the experience and all the advises we received were invaluable. This helped me further define my vision and understand some of the steps needed to continue.

This is why we decided to start promoting and gathering users from a smaller market niche like: start with the freelancers doing graphic/web design in our home country. I believe starting in our home country is a major advantage because we can offer a more personal experience to the users, and also communicate more clearly. There is also less to no direct local competition here.

Said and done, we also put together a domain and landing page in our native language.

Because we want to find 100 backers to develop a close collaboration in the beginning, so we can receive feedback and build in the direction most relevant, we launched a limited lifetime offer.
At first we thought about making the offer free, but after some additional thinking we realized that when you receive something for free, you don't feel any particular implication or ownership. So it would be easy for the user to forget about this free license, and we would never reach our goals. This is why we came up with a not to small, not too big, amount that we decided to ask for the lifetime license, so the users would feel entitled to demand something from us, and also give us precious feedback.

Please let us know how you would find the first 100 backers, or maybe how you already did!

Here's the story, and what I could have done better.

When I began to work on this a year ago, I first started with the name. I knew I wanted to build a simple, intuitive product that was easy to use, because this was my main problem with the existing ones. A basic CRM ... that was it.

After wasting a couple of hours searching for a domain name, I discovered that almost every short combination of real words relevant to me was taken. 90% of these domains are not used, probably never will be, but they are registered. I was a little annoyed, especially because I wanted to spend every free drop of my time WORKING on the product, not searching for domains.

This is when I decided that BaseCRM filled my requirements, it was free, there was no existing product with that name (there was a product named BaseCRM, but was rebranded) and I could continue to focus on what was important. After all, I could change the name latter when I had a real product.

What I did not realised at that time is that if you do collide with another product, even one that did not exist anymore, you inherit their image and reputation. So I started receiving emails with different proposals (lots of them spam), and they had one thing in common: they all where mistaking my tool with the other previous existing one. Also started to think about how I will improve the SEO, when there was a ton of articles pointing to the other product. What a disaster!

This is when I decided that it is easier to rename now, when I don't have a reputation and many users, than to do this later on. Said and done, after spending almost 2 days searching for names and domains, I came up with Pinepipe. Love it or hate it, at least it doesn't come with a reputation attached, and I think is kind of catchy.

Moral of the story is, If I had to do it again, I would pay more attention and dedicate more time for this in the beginning. Hope I help someone not make the same mistake. Cheers!

It took 3 moths to get here.

I started focusing full time on this in December. Had to quit my job because as a Project Manager I was busy 200%, and traveling to customers often. When I was home, in my 30 mins of free time, I wanted to spend some quality time with the kids, so no spare time to work on the idea.
But after setting up my finances through the year, and some investments paying up, I finally had a viable plan to quit my job and start the work. It was a risk, and I would not recommend this to anyone if they did not plan this through from the beginning, especially if you have a family and kids.

I knew I wanted to build a better product than what I found on the market, with 3 main goals in mind: simple, fast and beautiful.
Now I am here and will start gathering some feedback.

I know that at this time I don't have the most complete product in the world, I had to focus only on a handful of features to make this happen. But I also know that I can grow it further, and I am very excited to see what lays ahead.

After working as a software developer in a small software company for the last couple of years, I realized things where not that organized.

Came up with the idea of creating a project management tool that would keep things simple and organized. But what do I knew about PM? So I decided to get my hands dirty. Quit the software dev career, and landed a PM job in another small software company last summer.

Doing this, I stumbled upon another problem: handling the client relationship. If you want to keep things transparent and organized, there are very little options in the tool shed. Most of the tools out there are clouted with features or lacking the right ones.

After studying a bunch of them for a few months in the little free time I had left from my job, I knew I could do something better, more simple to use.

I came up with a plan: if I gather enough funds this year, I can quit my job and have a runway of at least a year to work on my project.
As a C++ dev, I had very little knowledge about web development, mostly html, css and php. So I started studying.

Decided to use the Laravel framework. It wont't be easy, but I already have the foundation of OOP and Design Patterns, so here goes nothing...