Feedsauce

Coming from a user-experience and design background, I've always been fascinated by the way consumers behave and why they make decisions.

Running Feedsauce over the past few weeks with some real organic data has allowed us to learn a great deal. How? Well, simply being students. Students of our customers.

We've invested a lot of time into nurturing each customer relationship. I was inspired by the AirBnb story, where Brian Chesky would personally visit early hosts and also stay in the homes himself.

I feel taking a completely 'we are at your service' approach and learning from your customers is what gives you the best data to grow and also continue to deliver what people actually want.

Based on our early lessons, we're working on the following:

🕺 Creating more diversity in the content we create so that customers don't experience 'content fatigue' over time

💆‍♂️ Improving our image reviewing process so customers can have more say in tweaks/changes to their images

👨🏻‍🍳 Introducing an on-location experience so businesses such as restaurants and retail outlets can also benefit from using Feedsauce

We have many more plans for future features and growth of the product but getting the core foundation built out and solidified is critical at this stage.

So you just launch on Product Hunt 3 weeks ago, start running a few Facebook ads for re-targeting and the next morning wake up to this e-mail:

"Hi team,

Came across your ads yesterday on IG, spot on targeting! Are you talking to anyone at Facebook yet? If not, we should get you in, I really like your concept."

😲😲😲

Erm, ok, let me just wake my Wife up and hope she's as excited as I am about this.... right after I drop a quick reply.

By the time I've dropped the news in sheer excitement like a kid in a candy shop, I receive this follow up:

"Good times. Do you want to come in for a coffee? I’ll gather a few folks from our end."

😱😱😱

Ok, now she has to get up and do the Facebook shimmy with me. (We made one up) lol.

Regardless of whether this ends up materialising into anything, it was just a great form of validation. The person who reached out is a Head of Product and getting the nod from him was incredibly humbling, motivating and outright exciting.

We're tentatively arranging to connect next week - now I don't even know if this guy is based here in London or SF or even if it's something that will actually end up happening but the boost of motivation was more than I could ask for.

I'm grateful and I'm excited to continue building this thing!

Getting a product ready for Product Hunt can be one of the most anxiety-filled, nerve wrecking processes. Why? I suppose it was the following anxieties that kept floating around my mind:

😕I'm not a programmer but completely bootstrapped this entire idea, the real developers will sniff me out!

🤯You only get one big shot to launch and make an impact

🤞I hope we can manage the demand.

It's fair to say all of the above turned out to be such 'non-issues' - I was thrilled by the support the community showed. We ended up at #3 on the day's list of products and even got endorsed by Ryan Hoover (founder of PH) himself!

Peep the feature here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/feedsauce

In fact what we gained was incredible insight, fantastic customers and a shot to really make a mark in the content creation space.

The first version of Feedsauce differed in many ways from what we've got out there today.

The very first concept was to provide a monthly subscription where customers would get up to 30 images automatically every months. However, we really quickly learned that this model is not only daunting for customers but flawed in the long-term.

Here's why:

1. Brands don't want to wait 30 days for their images, if we can do it quicker then they should get them quicker.

2. The price point was way too high - an online product transaction of more than £500 can get super scary and feels 'too premium' - especially without brand presence it was slightly ambitious.

3. We can be much more profitable as a business and also efficient as a service to our customers if we let them decide how many images they want and when.

Hence, we flipped the model to an on-demand service. Plus, I much preferred being able to use the elevator pitch 'Social media images on-demand' as opposed to 'every-month'