FreshBuzzer
Call-forwarding & Automated Access For Your Buzzer
After reaching $100MRR mid 2022 with 34 subscriptions, I finally tripled that in the next months or so to reach my first 100 customers!
Throughout 2022 FreshBuzzer had a pretty steady 10% growth rate month on month which is pretty decent for not doing any advertising whatsoever.
I stuck to my guns and continued improving the product, talking to my early users and making sure to learn from every little thing they told me. I wrote a few more blog posts including https://freshbuzzer.com/blog/why-you-should-choose-freshbuzzer which highlights some of the new features and the development speed in general.
I'm super happy with the positive feedback and super low churn rate. A solid foundation for continued slow growth (or maybe some more!)
... that's why BuzzMeIn is now FreshBuzzer!
I started "BuzzMeIn" just over 4 years ago - back then with the brilliant buzzme.in domain. The name was great, the domain was clever and I could focus on building a great product.
As time went on I saw people struggling with the .in domain. Maybe your target audience is extremely tech savvy and knows their TLDs but even then you'll loose a bunch that didn't remember your domain correctly.
Unfortunately buzzmein.com was taken - by a defunct competitor - so I went with buzzmein.ca as I'm based in Canada. I didn't think much of it, I figured it's easy enough for people to distinguish the two and know which website is the "real BuzzMeIn".
One day, after looking at my visitor analytics (by Plausible!) that for every 10 visitors from Canada I only had 3 from the US - and difference is even larger for my actual customer base. Unsurprisingly Google didn't rank me very well for searches in the US - they probably think I'm some kind of local mom-and-pop shop doing local only business.
So I tracked down the .com domain owner and they demanded "something in the high 4-figures to the low 5-figures" or a lease agreement to hand over the domain. I know this extortionary practices are common in our industry, I still think they're unfair and unethical.
Unable to acquire the .com domain, I didn't make the same mistake again and go for .co domain which probably would have solved my SEO ranking problem, but worsened the confusion with the defunct competitor.
A few nerve wracking weeks later I finally came up with a new name - FreshBuzzer 🎉 - and I start liking it.
And if you don't listen to me, listen to Paul Graham who made all this common knowledge almost a decade ago 🙄 http://paulgraham.com/name.html
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I also switched to .com and I don't regret the decision. For all new projects I only search for .com domains.
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Just don't go for regional domains (.in, .ca etc.) and you'll be fine (and avoid the cheap ones e.g. .info, .cc etc.).
.com works great, but .co, .io have risen to ranks quite well. -
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Interesting... I have changeit.app and I have around 150 visits per day and most come from the US... Did you see a big difference now that you own the .com?
ps: I do own the .com for the wbe space
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Still too early to say but in your case it should be fine as I assume that Google treats .app as an international TLD.
Actually even though .co is the Columbian TLD it is treated as international by Google (at least for now)
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@tiagorbf I still don't have that many visitors daily but I noticed a 45/55 split between US and CA compared to 25/75 before
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I've been looking at the domain industry for a while and have seen this a ton. I find that changing names when good domains are not available is a pretty decent approach. as you say, .com domains are really the best there is and chances are your brand is not big enough yet to warrant major concern with the name change. Even multimullion $$$ businesses change their names on a regular basis.
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Thank you for reading and your support!
It seems a little counter intuitive because we're often too attached to the name we gave our projects. But in fact customers usually don't care.
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I started marketing BuzzMeIn at the turn of the year and was hoping to grow to $100 MRR after just 3 months. It was an aggressive goal for a brand new service solely on organic marketing/ growth.
In mid-March I was half-way there and just shy of 2 months later I finally did it!
Paid subscriptions: 19 >> 34
MRR: $33 >> $102
In the meantime I launched BuzzMeIn Professional which supports short-term rental use cases (will write more on that another time)
Long story short: sustainable, slow, steady, organic growth - that's my way!
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Congratulations! Keep it up, and you’ll be at $1k MRR before you know it!
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Thank you for the kind words and motivation. Will follow along your journey as well as you seem on a similar path (from my first glance at MealPlanner)
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What a cool product! And you're making steady progress on the marketing side too. What inspired you to build it? Did you have a buzzer like that and needed to share door duty with some friends?
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Marketing keeps being tricky... I'd like to stick to organic for now (while MRR is low at least).
It's working and usually getting a steady flow of sign ups with quite high conversion rate (40-50%) considering that some folks sign up and don't use it at all. I can usually tell about a week into the trial.My next major marketing focus will be the Airbnb integration with some more guerilla tactics like Reddit and Hosts Forums.
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My goal for January was to double my customers of BuzzMeIn and for the quarter to break into triple digit MRR.
Paid subscriptions: 9 >> 19
MRR: $27 >> $53
I've had a lot of new customers choose the yearly plan which has a slightly lower MRR/subscription but I appreciate the trust they put into the product.
While I'm not on schedule for my ambitious $xxx MRR at the end of the month, I've been big strides with a new product feature for short-term rental properties like Airbnb and VRBO - stay tuned!
I've been putting this off for too long - I have a perfectly fine product that actually solves a pain point for many people, yet I only have a handful of users.
Why?! Well cause nobody knows about BuzzMeIn.
There is the odd person finding it somehow on the big wider internet, but as a "new" website with low traffic I don't rank very high on search engines.
So I revived the Facebook page I created last year, started posting more blogs and sharing them with friends on FB.
I almost got 2 dozen likes on the new page, and even better, a handful of new sign ups for the product.
In addition to that I commented on a bunch of Reddit posts I found on Google using search terms I think potentially customers would use.
Next step: keep writing blog posts explaining the product and distributing some business cards for the product in my neighbourhood 🤞
I had this one on my todo list for quite some time. My previous landing page lacked focus and didn't even look that great.
My homepage to sign up page conversion rate was still about 3-5% but I feel like I was loosing a lot of people who didn't get BuzzMeIn after a few seconds on my page.
To read more, check out my blog post: https://buzzmein.ca/blog/new-landing-page
Towards the end of 2020 I finally focused my efforts on marketing - which still has a lot of room for improvement - and spent less time building the product.
That was definitely the right decision and I need to get back to that. However, over the holidays I also managed to get some more dev work in that was overdue.
The UI accumulated a bit of cruft already, so I was super eager for a little facelift. And also I knew from the beginning that I wanted to offer two different modes for your buzzer call forwarding - PARALLEL (present from the beginning) and SEQUENTIAL (new!!!).
Now I finally got around to build sequential call forwarding. Users can choose in which order the forwarding numbers are called and BuzzMeIn will try one after another until someone picks up.
I think this is a great feature and I'm happy how it came out. Though I know there is room for improvement, e.g. letting users fine-tune the call timeout (e.g. to make sure their voicemail doesn't pick up and ruin the whole thing).
That's all for today, back to marketing.
- Axel
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Also published a blog post buzzmein.ca/blog/new-year-new-look-new-features
Hi all,
I'm new here at IndieHackers but I'd like to share my journey with BuzzMeIn in case it's useful or interesting to anyone :)
I started working on this project over 2 years ago. I have a few customers who use the product every single day since, but I never spent much (or any) time to promote it and get more people to sign up.
Building a product is often the easy part - sure I could add more features, fix some bugs, refactor some code or improve the UX. But the thing is it works! And people use it.
But I never cared about SEO, a blog or tying to find users. It also doesn't help that BuzzMeIn doesn't fit in a small, well-defined niche where it's easy to find the target audience. It's for everyone!
Last weekend I wrote up a little blog post about why I built BuzzMeIn - https://buzzmein.ca/blog/why-i-built-buzz-me-in - and shared it on HN. I got exactly 0 upvotes or comments, but I did get ~500 views on the blog post and ONE SIGN UP - thank you!
In the coming weeks I will share more of my journey so far and focus more on SEO and content.
Onward and upward!
Axel
8 Comments
Thanks for posting, I'm really interested to see how you do with this product idea! I had the same idea around the same time as you but decided not to pursue it as I didn't know how big the market could be. Are you planning to try advertising at some point?
Always great to hear that someone finds it useful. I think the market is quite large but hard for users to discover your service. I'm hoping that as my customer base grows I have more potential for word of mouth - in combination with doing some more SEO work.
I'm open to ads but I'm very skeptical on how well they'd work. It's usually quite expensive, but hoping to do at least an experiment sometime later this year or next.
Great progress mate. Thanks for sharing. How you came up with the Idea?
Thanks bud!
TBH I wish I'd come up with it earlier when I lived in a highrise apartment with 2 roommates. But wasn't until later when my buddy kept having to walk down to the front door to let me in (and it annoyed me to have to text him when I'm 2-3min away or wait for him haha). He had a "long distance" number (BS even the same area code, same metro) and couldn't get it hooked up to the buzzer.
So I whipped up a manual call forwarding in my Twilio account and then built up the whole service around it as I wasn't aware of alternatives back then (now I know a couple).
Also wrote about it a while back https://freshbuzzer.com/blog/why-i-built-freshbuzzer
Wow! That’s awesome.
You say you learn from every little thing, but how do you figure out what’s most important?
Do you focus on the happiest customers? Or the least happy to reduce churn?
Great questions and thanks for reading!
I do have my own agenda and vision for FreshBuzzer, which is critical to set you apart and move into the direction you want.
But I have a very long list of things I want to do - when a customer is asking for something further down, I probably move it to the top. That is especially true when it accelerates growth, e.g. I had one STR owner ask for managing multiple properties which unlocks additional MRR, increases spend per customer AND unlocks a larger audience.
Unfortunately the least happy once usually don't talk and just leave. I don't even know if they just had wrong expectations or specific issues. They usually don't respond to me reaching out either. Once I have a larger customer base (and the small percentage of churn is a larger absolute number) I will likely try to automate some feedback gathering, e.g. when canceling, and hope to get more insights that way.
Oh that makes sense. Thanks!
Have you tried catching them before they leave? What does the activity of people look like when they’re about to leave versus happy customers?
Yes definitely - I'm using Posthog to capture all in-app activity server side so I can see what users are up to, if they use the product, seem to have issues etc.
Usually folks who sign up and then don't come back for weeks - they obviously churn. Maybe I can tackle it with some more automated (and actionable?) e-mails...
The challenge is that after signing up for an account, you get your phone number - but before you can do much with it, the building needs to update the buzzer (aka enterphone) with your new number. Many buildings take forever which kills the momentum (or maybe some folks never even ask their building to switch the number)