Bugasura

After gaining a good traction on daily active users and paying customers, we decided to go launch on Product Hunt. This was primarily an idea of our newly hired Head of Marketing.

She came up with this vision and aligned our teams internally to launch ourselves on Product Hunt. We did a prep and picked a date. We then preponed it by a day :)

To our fortune, we had @rosiesherry hunting us and enabling us to get a good launch pad. The support from the world started to pour in. Our real users and customers pitched in to make us the number #1 Product of the Day and #2 Product of the week.

We got a great visibility, more paying customers, plenty of signups for our free plan and some decent tweets and mentions by people.

Gratitude is one word, we can express at this moment.

Getting reviews from B2B users is hard. Why? They are busy and we respect that. However, it is a combination of their kindness of our users plus little requests and nudges that has got us into a spot where our users have moved us to be voted as a Noteworthy Product in the Issue Tracking Category.

This is a good step forward for us because people do read reviews before B2B users decide to even signup.

As our reviews are growing, we are seeing the first trickle of our existing paying customers recommending our product to their friends and ex-colleagues.

This is moving the needle slowly but steadily for us and our active user base is somewhere around 250+ during weekdays.

Slow and steady, we are learning what makes people fall in love with our product and what they don't like about it. We removed a few things and made it a lot more simple for our existing free users to convert to paying users.

Removing is an unconventional thought but removing after a time is more powerful than adding.

1. We moved away from a 14 day trial period to a Freemium model.

2. We used a bit of Adwords and listed our product in several stores and review stores.

3. We implemented user feedback on what they needed to deepen their usage.

A combination of this enabled us to move up the value.

We were getting plenty of signups but not converting to DAU. We understood the obstacles we put on their way in experiencing the platform and fixed the signup and post signup experience.

This led our "let's try this out for now" people to fall in love with our product and become regular users + invite their team.

We are an issue tracker and reporter. A lot of people thought we are competing against Jira but no. Atlassian listing us proves that we make it simple for early stage startups to adopt an issue tracker.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1225390/bugasura-tracker?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

We ran signups - found that 2 people who signed up were known connects on LinkedIn. I spoke to them, setup a less than 10 min demo and closed the deal.

While we did get this, we are asking ourselves, how do we scale this? We can't effectively talk to a lot of people. I understand that initially we have to do things that won't scale.

We still don't know to drive quality signups that convert.