Dekks

Whaaaat just happened?! Betalist released their 10 Startups of 2020 and Dekks is one of them. I'm speechless.

At the beginning of the year Betalist releases their list of startups which they have high hopes for the coming year. In previous years they’ve highlighted success stories such as Pinterest, InVision, Airtable, IFTTT and many more. All before they became the juggernauts they are today.

https://betalist.com/collections/startups-of-2020

Today I created finally a facebook page for Dekks. After years of silence from my end on fb, I decided to go back and make finally a product page where we can post and hopefully communicate with our future audience.

In the last few days (over Christmas) I read a lot about audience, pricing, growth hacking, cac and clv (cltv) … and it made me think … if you are serious about running a startup that is mainly data driven and not based on your own believes or personal opinions (of course you need that too, but not so smart to make decisions entirely based on these personal feelings) then you need to go where your audience is.

Let's try and see how good it will be.

I signed up to Ship from Product Hunt a while back to get Dekks on track. However we haven't used the paid plan. Today we launched the Dekks on Product Hunt's Popular Upcoming Products page. Thanks to @jitsalunke for pointing it out and sharing his insights.

Another milestone accomplished 💪

I read a lot about BetaList on Indie Hackers and other platforms and the responses were quite diverse. So I'm curious of how much traffic it will bring to the site, but for now I'm happy, since it said that it will take up to a month to be featured, if you choose the free route … Dekks was featured after 4 days, so that's a win.

You can check it out here

The first week of the dekks.app product page launch has been an absolute blast. 1000 Early adopters in one week was beyond all expectations really.

However the overall traffic has slowed down a bit now, but it is still going strong in terms of subscriptions. In 5 days, the first month of the launch will have passed and we will 2000 Early Adopters subscribed to Dekks. So grateful. Thanks to everyone who has signed up.

We are now fully focused on the app itself … the internal goal is to get 10K subscriptions till launch. Go strong or go home 😂 … let's see how we get on. I will share progress as we move foreward.

Almost 3 years ago, my friend Thomas Traum (big shout out for always pushing) forwarded me this …

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Courtland from Indie Hackers

Date: 23 Feb 2017, 19:02

Subject: Building a $62,000/month open-source business 😇 + 3 more founder stories

Message:

Hope all is good, this is a really sick newsletter with super transparent infos for “Bootstrapper” like us.

See you soon!

T

---------- Forwarded message ---------

This is around the time where the first podcast from Indie Hackers has launched and I have been a big fan ever since.

So last night I did my first podcast on Indie Hackers (first podcast I've ever done) … I hope it turns out well and maybe it can give you some insights about how we approach Dekks and who we roll. I think it launches tomorrow, Friday 14th of November here.

Big hugs to csallen for having me on his show and providing real stories from real people.

📢 Major announcement!

Today we hit a major milestone that was actually set for the end of the year. I'm super proud of ourselves and the work we've been putting in!

Our goal was to find 1000 people from our target audience within 2 month who would be willing to give us honest feedback and their email in trade for an early beta on-boarding. Today, just one week later after launching the dekks.app product page, we hit the 1K mark for our early adopter subscriptions and received almost 300 surveys, which we asked to take on 'please confirm your email' notification.

This milestone is especially important and useful to us, since all subscriptions are from the audience that Dekks is built for — 100% quality users 😍

So what did we learn? Simply launch where your audience is and ask for feedback. People are helpful, just ask!

Thanks to everyone who signed up.

We just launched our product page dekks.app and killed the simple subscribe site — it's a real thing now and feels amazing.

I think developing an idea and building the product silently under the radar is super productive, but can become quite challenging. It doesn't feel real and it's nerve wrecking at times since you have no actual validation if it's needed or not.

We know that getting this user validation only comes from launching the idea as fast as possible, especially for a bootstrapped start-up like us. But what if you are an experience design studio, that works on a design driven presentation toolkit that needs to look tight and feels amazing?

Perfection is your enemy. Not really when it's at the core of your studio. At International Magic we seek for visual power and design driven experiences so we just had to walk the extra mile and took a little longer (roughly 2 weeks 😬). So here it is, the very first iteration of our product page … we hope you like it ✌️

Tell us what you think in the comments.

We have been working on Dekks since June, but haven't had the time to create an interim signup page to collect email addresses since we've been focusing on the app itself.

On the 19th of September we (International Magic) had a talk at the Design Matters Festival in Copenhagen, where we introduced Dekks for the first time to a wider audience. We needed quickly a sign-up page to collect email addresses. So we launched a one-page with a simple subscribe field that morning to not miss out on the opportunity to collect quality contacts.

Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt writes in his medium article about building an audience first and shared a link to 1.000 true fans, which I read and was inspired by.

About 100 people signed up that day → first 10% done. 🥳