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First day after soft launch - 83 signups!

It was a crazy first day at Elevator (https://tryelevator.com) - we pushed the platform idea and landing pages out to all of our networks and social, and managed to gather up 87 waiting list signups, which is great!

Got a few trolls on social media, but if you have haters, you're going in the right direction, right?

A few people in our network shared the site out on LinkedIn, which drove a few signups. It's funny how we believe "everyone will love this idea" and when we push it out, it gets a luke-warm response..!

Has anyone on IH had this experience?

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    Interesting. How do you prevent people from signing up with bogus profiles just to get paid by these companies?

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      Good question. We've workshopped this heavily. A couple of aspects:

      • We'd initially catch this based on duplicated payment info should anyone create (say) 3 accounts with the same payment info
      • We're implementing machine learning to identify similarity between profiles
      • Social proofing (feedback systems) will help to mitigate this.

      I'm of the opinion that if someone sets up 2 profiles that aren't identical, with different payment details, I'd be happy allowing that - some people are programmers AND graphic designers (for example). So long as the connection was valuable to the company paying for it!

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    Hi, congrats for your successful soft launch. Just out of curiosity, how big is your direct network? I mean approx. total number of followers and people you and your team can reach? It's like a few hundreds, thousands?

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      Hey @mfarajewicz, thanks! Not a large direct audience in our reach right now. Possibly over a thousand. We’re doing some digital marketing locally to try to drum up some interest.

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        Not so bad, most of IndieHackers have way smaller network. Just wondering about this network factor in pre-launch..how big part of a successful launch is a number of people you can reach vs product itself.

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    Looks good. Just 1 thing... you appear to have your dev stripe key on your site... you might want to change that when the cash starts rolling in ;)

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      Ah good catch, thanks @smythe! We're not processing payments just yet, but the application is referencing the keys - they're intentionally test for now, to 100% avoid any mishaps :) Will definitely change once ready!

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    Hey Paul, I like it.

    It’s an idea I’ve had simmering away in the back of my mind for about 6 years or more, but haven’t really felt passionate about pursuing it at all. That said, I’m particularly interested in how this may tie into remote opportunities more than anything else.

    Keen to see how it goes. Good luck!

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      Thanks Shaun. It almost seems like a no-brainer to me, I’ve been kicking the idea around for a couple of years myself, then with the improvements in payment technologies, APIs etc I decided to make a dash for it this year.

      The main reason I’m building it is from annoyances I’ve personally had trying to recruit for smaller companies. It shouldn’t be this hard. Or expensive.

      The remote part is really important to me for it, I still think companies tend to shy away from remote, so it’ll factor a lot into what we’re building. Thanks for the response!

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    I'm 84th in the queue! 😀

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      Thanks @Primer - these are solid words of both encouragement and resolve! This will definitely be a marathon. Paul.

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          So good to see someone “get it”! We think we’re on to something. As soon as we’ve proved locally, I’ll drop you a line - thanks!

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      Cheers for the feedback - unfortunately we can’t (and won’t) change who we are, but I can assure you the team I’m working with (that’s Simon in the vid) are genuine, great people!

      Also, just to be clear, Elevator is not about directly getting jobs; it’s about elevating people’s income from companies looking to connect with them (only - not place them or anything like that) 🙂

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          Thanks for clarifying Alex - agreed that appearance influences perception. We spent a good bit of personal cash on the vids so we can’t reshoot anything for now. However we are definitely looking at different video message formats. Lots of work to do to refine the conveyance of the idea.

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