Broadcast Email Software
Self-Hosted Email Marketing Software
I had launched the first version of the landing page quickly and it showed.
v1 of the landing page didn't have:
A demo (super important for a self hosted software where users want to check out the app first)
Proper documentation
Enough screenshots
After about a month and with some analytics data (courtesy of Plausible and Google Analytics), I've reorganized the page so it is more visually appealing and filled in some of the gaps from the first version.
Why bother with updating the landing page so soon?
One of the reasons I wanted a landing page update was because I noticed a drop off in conversions.
I suspected that there were a lot of missed opportunities because most of the buyers in the first wave probably saw some of my demos on X/Twitter.
As a result, when new buyers came onto the website, they didn't have the benefit of seeing those earlier demos.
But most importantly, I want to launch an affiliate program. This means that the landing page must be effective on its own. Otherwise the traffic that affiliates send won't convert either.
A website I can build on
The other reason I updated the landing page is that I wanted to expand my "SEO footprint".
I started adding "free tools" and guides around the topic of email marketing and automation.
Still, as of 2024, this seems to be a high impact strategy for solo developers trying to get potential customers to visit.
Last weekend, I decided to prelaunch my project, Broadcast (https://sendbroadcast.net).
It started with a single tweet:
https://x.com/geetfun/status/1842798981715296755
However, the journey to build it started about a month before that...
I started building Broadcast in early September just when everyone on X were debating about servers vs serverless providers.
Many businesses, I knew, were tired of high cloud costs.
When launching a recurring software business model, the problem was that no customer ever wakes up thinking to themselves that they wanted to pay for yet another recurring expense. So, I wanted to build something that could be self-hosted and let people break away from high cloud costs.
Email marketing was already an established product category with a proven product market fit. I was a Ruby on Rails developer, and had experience building email-related apps. So, I set about building Broadcast, an email list and automation tool.
Initially I thought it would take about 2 weeks to build. In fact, it's about 95% done at this point and it's 4.5 weeks in as I write this.
I'm expecting an alpha version to be available for my several prelaunch customers (thank you if you are one of them and are reading this).
My goal is to make Broadcast the best self-hostable email marketing software, with an installation and upgrade process as easy as apps like Wordpress.
Let's go!
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