Flick.tech
A platform where you can execute your social strategy
More resources from our agency team were deployed to the hashtag tool. Our wonderfully talented Head of Marketing, Sam King, started diverting his time away from the agency client work. This allowed us to start our first paid re-targeting campaigns and optimise our landing page conversion rates.
Further improvements to the platform's UI were made in the hopes of transitioning from an MVP to a stable V1.
These changes allowed us to reach £8000 MRR and Ramen profitability for our founders Andy, Sam and Loic.
By the end of January we felt our product was stable enough to launch on Product Hunt.
We were excited to share our work with the PH community and see what less warm traffic would think of our product.
We were overwhelmed by the positive feedback we got. By the end of the day over 500 hunters has upvoted our product putting us as the 3rd product of the day.
This was beyond what we could have hoped for considering our website and platform were still quite basic and not much more than MVPs.
From this, we got a few hundred more sign-ups and a good source of traffic for a few weeks.
You can check out our Product Hunt post here https://www.producthunt.com/posts/flick-2
After our initial launch, we continued to improve the product's UX and on-boarding.
Since we had very little resources to spend on marketing, we needed to maximise our trial conversion rate and word of mouth.
To do this we embarked onto three initiatives throughout the month of November:
- Improve our product marketing & on-boarding emails to increase activation rate
- Double down on our product's core USP
- Facilitate referral marketing
To improve our product marketing we used third party tools:
- Intercom for messaging and supporting our users
- Amplitude to analyse our data and find opportunities to optimise our on-boarding funnel
We understood quickly that our product's USP was allowing users to filter outputted hashtags by their size or average engagement. We built those features out, improving the UX and UI.
We custom built our referral program which worked but if we had to do it again we would probably opt for a third party service.
All these changes fulled us to reaching £2000/MRR.
@andyasprou and I opted for a 7-day credit card upfront free trial. So, 7 days after our big launch, we were hoping to get our first few users.
Little did we know we would be welcoming our first 30 users to Flick's platform - bringing our MRR to £300/month!
We were so thankful to everyone who thought our product was worth paying for and excited to see where we could take this.
From the day after deciding to work on Flick - called "The Hashtag Tool" at the time, I started jumping on calls with potential users.
I used the data visualisation prototype @andyasprou had built to showcase our idea and start understanding what features would be needed in an MVP.
Whilst I did this, @andyasprou worked on building the structure of our website, login system and code infrastructure.
Luckily, I was fairly recognised in the space and was able to have over 30 calls in those first two weeks. As the days went by, we had a better and better idea of what needed to be included in our MVP.
By the end of the first week of interviews we had settled on a base feature set.
The following week @andyasprou worked on refining our prototype into an MVP as I prepared our marketing website, emails and affiliate partnerships for our launch.
In order to speed up the launch, we ruthlessly prioritised our based feature set:
- Users could only log in with Facebook
- No Billing section where users could cancel their accounts, they would have to email
- We didn't have a name for a platform and launched it as "The Hashtag Tool"
The goal at this point was to build a software that could help us financially support our agency and cover our operating costs.
When launching our tool would cost users £10/month to use. The pricing strategy was simply based on what other softwares serving similar audiences were charging.
My co-founder @andyasprou, came into the office with a data visualisation of hashtags after the idea was mentioned in a meeting we had with a client the week prior.
Having worked in Instagram for three years, I knew this could be turned into something more.
We both started working on designing and developing an MVP.
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