ChatKitty

Since we started selling, we went from five customers in April to seven in May (four of five customers staying with us plus two new customers). And so far this month we've got three more customers. Getting us to ten paying customers.

I'm feeling super motivated after this. It's helped me feel more confident about our product. We're also getting recurring themes from our customers about what they love about ChatKitty and what they need us to improve. For example, better documentation and an organized knowledge base.

ChatKitty has three payment plans, a $9/mo. Hobbyist plan for early-stage startups/solo developers and two "premium" plans for larger companies ($99/mo. and $599/mo.). Yesterday, I got an email from Stripe informing me someone had paid for our standard premium plan!

@August_BK and I previously spoke to the customer, building a healthcare platform connecting patients to medical providers, and they loved ChatKitty. I'm glad they went through our 14 day trial period and decided to stay with us. I think this is a good signal about our pricing, and from now on, we'll be focusing on selling our premium plans.

Earlier this year, @August_BK and I decided to participate in the WInter 2021 YC Build Sprint. The YC Build Sprint is a great opportunity to choose a business goal and work hard over a 4-week period to hit it. Along the way, meeting other founders, get advice from YC group partners and staff, and checking your progress along the way.

We set a goal to getting two paying customers.

Sounds pretty modest, right?

But for me, that was quite a stretch. At the start of the sprint, we had 0 paid customers. We hadn't integrated a payments solution into our platform. The core product is stable and we had couple hundred people trying out our chat API but I hadn't focused on getting paying customers.

We're a little late but today we've officially hit our sprint goal!

We spent the first two weeks talking to our users, trying to find a price point that worked for them and for us. We did the math and ended up with a $9 per month flat fee for our Hobbyist plan. This pricing works great for early-stage startups, and none of our direct competitors offer a plan that works for pre-revenue startups.

After ironing out pricing, I spent the next couple of weeks integrating a payments provider. I decided to use Stripe because it's super developer-friendly and easy to use. We got it hooked up at the end of March 2021 (without some hiccups but it works!).

That brings us to now. Fours days ago we got our 1st paying customer (yay!), and this morning I woke up to an email from Stripe informing me another one of our users paid for ChatKitty, reaching our sprint goal. 😁

My next goal is to get 15 paying customers and then I'll go back to building more features for the core Chat API. Lots of work to do!

After launching four months ago, we've started to see our first sales! We launched with a generous free tier which we recently decided to convert to a super affordable paid plan. After this change, we've gotten a lot of serious sign-ups, and our existing customers have been willing to pay for our service.

Our pricing works great for early-stage startups, and none of our competitors like Sendbird or Stream offer any plan that works for pre-revenue startups without serious funding. I think we've found our niche there.

Having spent the last couple of weeks building out and testing our payments flow (with some hiccups along the way), I'm glad it's working.

Back to building more features for the core product. Lots of work to do!

After 8 years working at various financial institutions, my co-founder @August_BK has decided to join me full-time working on ChatKitty. And I couldn't be more excited about having him on board!

We've had so many new beta users in a short period. It's looking like people are noticing our chat API and serverless computing platform providing affordable chat features.

The meta-post I guess.

It's launch day and a good day to start getting feedback. Wrote this as I'm filling out the Indie Hackers product page for ChatKitty. Earlier today, I made a post on the Landing Page Feedback Indie Hackers group, and I've already received some great feedback.

A couple of users helped me rework the landing page and make it easier to express what ChatKitty is and its value to prospective customers. I think it's super important to ask for feedback from anywhere you can find it. You spend so much time looking at your own work, and you get blind to things like readability and being concise.

Don't be afraid to reach out to friends and strangers for their opinions, you'll thank yourself for it later on.

After spending the summer reworking the codebase from our previous startup and generalizing our chat features, I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for ChatKitty.

We realized early on that the biggest thing making it hard to build scalable chat apps is creating and managing a chat backend, so I decided to build a serverless platform that replaces the need for any backend after talking to a few potential customers.

I worked all day, every day, and I coded the whole thing in Spring Boot using Kotlin, since that's what I'm most comfortable with. I built a JavaScript SDK because we plan to focus on helping developers build chat using React Native at first. I also built an Angular dashboard that allows developers code their serverless cloud functions, replacing a chat backend.

In hindsight, there were a few features I built that probably could've waited until later. But I think we've got a solid MVP and I'm super excited to start talking to customers and see what they think about the product so far!

While working on Howdi, a social network for university neighborhoods, I realized we could do more by offering our chat tech as a service. Democratizing chat for startups.

I envisioned a chat platform where any developer could create their own chat app like Howdi. By providing a complete "chat kit" to help developers build real-time chat, we could make a difference.

After much brainstorming, I settled on the name ChatKitty as ChatKit was already taken, and because kitties are awesome. :)