Basin

We've been heads down for the past year, working on the next iteration of our no-code form backend, and it's finally live! The app frontend has been completely revamped to be more intuitive, flexible and easy to use. And we shipped a bunch of new features and improvements, including a projects layer, more control over form settings, a better custom email templating experience, and much more!

It's been a long journey, but this was an important milestone for our small 3 man team. Now we're at the point in our product life cycle where we can really dig in and devote time to growth. Exciting times!

Truth be told, we haven't spent a lot of time working on our overall growth strategy. Setting up an affiliate / referral program is always something we wanted to do, even just as a test to see how it would impact customer acquisition and MRR. So we built a landing page (https://usebasin.com/affiliate-program), hooked up https://getrewardful.com to manage it all, and hit the GO button!

On the same day, we decided that after 3 years it was time to raise our prices. It will be interesting to see if our growth trajectory changes at all over the next couple months. Here's hoping for an increase, right? :)

Today we deployed a massive update to Basin, including new branding, developer docs, a public roadmap, and a complete redesign of all our marketing pages. Super proud of the new look, as it definitely showcases how much we care about the overall customer experience. We re-skinned the app to match the new design spec, but the long term plan is to completely redesign the app front-end in the new year.

After a year of steady, organic growth month-over-month, Basin eclipsed the 100 paying customer mark. This was a BIG deal to me, and got me really excited about it's future potential. Something I started thinking about a lot at this point was how to convince more free users to upgrade to paid plans. Our conversion rate at this point was abysmally low -- like less than 1% low. Time to take a break on feature development and focus a bit more time and attention on marketing and sales.

As an early adopter of Product Hunt, I was confident it would be a good channel to gain some exposure and hopefully subsequent traction for Basin. We weren't the first form backend product hunted, so I wasn't expecting a massive amount of upvotes, but to our surprise, we ended up being the #5 product of the day! After the dust had settled, MRR had increased by 314%!

Today one of our customers converted from free to paid. They even paid for a year of our service upfront. It felt amazing to get that kind of validation. Whenever you make a dollar off the internet, it's a good day. Hopefully this will be the first of many!

As a side project, we dedicated whatever weekday evenings we could to building an MVP. In hindsight, we probably could have got to market faster, but we decided to spend some extra time testing various use cases to ensure we were building the right initial feature set. Our soft launch included some light promotion through our personal social channels and direct emails to personal contacts we thought would be interested.

Every website needs a contact form, right? But not everyone knows how to build a custom form backend. I had tried a number of different products -- from form builders to backends as a service, and none of them were solving the problems I cared about. So I pitched the idea to a developer buddy of mine, and we decided to build Basin.