Frenl
Meet the hackers nearby
It’s been a while since I posted an update but hey, here is a first big milestone for me: Frenl has now over 120 active users 🎉
It feels like a big milestone because I am a developer that started with a near zero experience in product/marketing. I'm happy 😬
Here is the one thing that I learned on the way: the goal and the value of your service needs to be crystal clear to you. It is definitely not breaking news but even knowing about it, it's easy to make the mistake.
At the beginning, I started with the idea that I wanted to do a tool to help with networking, focused on 1 to 1 interactions.
I chose a first headline (“Networking for lazy people”) then a second one when I decided to try to plug on existing communities (“Meet your community”). I iterated so many times on this idea, tried some new features and built separate community landing pages (Indie Hackers, Hacker News…) to be able to target people more precisely. I could get people to join but I was never satisfied. I was building things that were having zero impact. Something felt wrong.
Then I had an epiphany. It may sound stupid but I realized that a tool for networking wasn’t a value. It was just a way to do something. It made me think: What is the actual value of networking? Why do people say that it’s so important?
To me, networking is about getting out of our usual social bubble and feeling supported: hearing about fresh point of views, learning from some usually inaccessible expertise and getting new opportunities.
What I did: I kept the original concept but reworked the matching system, user profiles and rephrased my landing page to aim at this value.
I was able to remove a lot of code, custom landing pages and even reduced the needed user input during the onboarding, while sounding more useful.
Results: The conversion/signup rate raised a bit (to ~20-30%), engagement from the new users seems higher (they tend to spend more effort filling data, which may indicate that the value is now appearing more clearly) but most importantly, it really allowed the service to be simpler and more focused. A lot of the things that I was developing were in fact useless. I feel like I can start building again 🙂
Over my last iterations on Frenl, I mostly focused on the landing pages and on raising the conversion rate. It is now around 20% and I am happy with it.
So far the only input I was asking from the users were two free texts "I can help with" and "I need help with". These were displayed in introduction emails.
I realized that it wasn't enough to spark interest and start conversations so I decided to add social/community links (Twitter, Medium, Indie Hackers...) to the Frenl user profiles.
Since it was a significant raise in the effort asked to the user, I wrapped it inside of a new multi steps gamified onboarding instead of asking for everything at once.
I am now in the situation where I have no clue if it was helpful and I would love to get feedback on the onboarding experience :)
In particular, do you feel like the requested amount of input is overwhelming?
Are there some field that you would only consider filling after testing the app more thoroughly?
Anything that felt odd?
Thank you so much in advance 🙏
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The signup process was pretty smooth, although I did feel a little overwhelmed when I needed to fill out the two-sided part at the beginning, though it wasn't that bad since I could mostly click things instead of typing :)
One thing that wasn't clear to me was if all the fields are required, but I ended up skipping them because I was lazy, not because I don't have them. It would be really nice if there was some autocomplete.
Other than that, well done and congrats on your new flow :)
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Haha that's exactly what I thought too: "It's a lot of buttons but since it's only clicking it should be fine".
Everything is optional in fact. I used to display "(optional)" in gray next to the fields but since it was everywhere it looked a bit weird.
For the autocomplete, I think that in the future I would allow to link LinkedIn/Twitter accounts at the beginning. It would populate automatically half of the fields. It is definitely annoying.
Thank you! And a quick question: if I had added a "Skip" button in the onboarding, do you think that you would have ignored more input?
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I'm not sure! I mean, since I started the signup without the "intention" to use the application, I think I might've been more impatient with the inputs than people who find you organically?
One helpful point might be that i don't remember my medium username or my linkedin url off-the-cuff so i didn't want to open a new tab to fill those in.
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If there's one thing that I learned so far, is that whatever happens, users are always impatient :D
Yep not sure what would be the best solution to tackle this...
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The only suggestion I have is to keep you call to action (signup button) visible without scrolling. It’s probably fine on desktop but on mobile it was offscreen. It’s also good to remember that no matter how amazing your onboarding is, there will always be drop off for every step. So keep it short 😬
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Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to improve my mobile flow!
Yes definitely, I'm still trying to figure out what data is important. Not easy to choose :)
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I like your use of magic links. Are you using a library or service for that? or is it a custom implementation
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I really like magic links too. It's nice to not have passwords to manage.
I did it custom. I pretty much over engineered everything so far :)
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I pretty much over engineered everything so far :)
I'm working on a magic link service, that also includes crypto based device auth to speed up subsequent authentication flow. Would you be interested in talking further about how magic links is working for you?
By the way if you want to see an example of our flow you can try out forgetpasswords.com
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Nice!
crypto based device auth to speed up subsequent authentication flow
What do you mean by that? You would somehow do device fingerprinting? Interesting concept.
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Not fingerprinting, we use the webcrypto api supported by most browsers now. so we use a public/private keypair that the device keeps hold of
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
"Networking for lazy people" is out and "Meet your community" is in.
A lot of things have happened since I released Frenl.
In the past iteration, listening to the feedback of indie hackers, I redesigned the whole sign up flow and went from a 0% (ahem) to a 10% signup rate. The passive networking approach (as opposed to another professional Tinder) seems to be appealing.
This was great but I was still receiving interrogatory feedback: "Who am I going to be matched with? Who are these people?".
Well I couldn't find a good answer to this question.
I realized that even without any kind of matching logic, what made Kismet (the app that inspired me: https://findkismet.com) great was the fact that it was about the Hacker News community. Matching wasn't so much of an issue because you knew already the kind of people that you would meet. It's this feeling of being at home that worked.
I decided to pivot slightly from a standalone app to a tool that could help connecting already existing communities.
I thought it could also help for SEO and communication.
Here is the result and I would love to hear what you think :)
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Yup, good idea and I've signed up.
A while back I wrote a blog post about an idea for "location based [social] networking". Essentially, the idea comes out of Hack-urdays (Hacker Saturdays) that a friend told me about. He said devs would go and co-work, drink coffee, network, etc. I thought, leveraging technology it would totally be possible to do that within a coffee shop without disturbing other patrons who are not participating. You could essentially see people on the app, who are in the same geographic location, who have turned location/profile sharing on. Through the profile you could find people who can help with a given problem. You could then message through the app and because its location based you could then walk over and meet the person and network or get help as needed.
Hope that helps and thanks for developing,
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Hey Simon, thank you! This is definitely an aspect that I wanted to tackle. Emails are great to spark and interest and kickstart a conversation but being able to meet in real life is I think a game changer. Sales people know that better than anyone hehe.
To be 100% honest, I don't have enough users right now to be able to efficiently match by location. That's why I started with communities. But it will come for sure!
Btw I'm still a bit unsure about what should be the landing page. Do you feel like I should keep it the way it is now ("Frenl: Meet your community"), or should I keep it neutral ("Frenl: Lazy networking")?
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Makes sense. Users, in a lot of apps, are one of those frustrating things where you need a critical mass to make the app work but how do you get up to the critical mass. You have a great idea to start with emails.
Offering just location-based chat and partnering with events, co-working spaces, and business conferences might grow the user base. But then the other challenge is the revenue model and I would suggest you need to have a viable revenue plan before growing the users otherwise you'll end up with support costs and no income.
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Hey Fabien,
Got my first match - but the switchboard sends out the messages in a very garbled style - might want to smarten that up a little bit!
Andrew
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Arf I know. Emails are just a nightmare. I think this issue arises when the email is sent from Gmail. It does some weird html -> text conversion and it looks like that. It's on my task list :)
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I like the idea!
Will definitely sign up when I have time. ;)-
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Thanks Christian! :)
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I think you're on the right track with targeting members of preexisting communities. Exactly addresses the questions you got about what kind of people you're gonna get matched with.
Also narrows down the target audience.Removing the "lazy" tag line is also a good move, since passive != lazy.
The passive part could be communicated more directly though, instead of being the third point in a list somewhere down the page. Since that is what sets it apart from being yet another "professional tinder" I'd say.-
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Very true. Actually it made me realize that maybe the main landing page should be less about communities and more about communicating the value like you said.
Because also I would like to still be able to appeal to users that don't recognize themselves in any of the communities.
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I empathize with your desire to appeal to everyone, I struggle with that too.
It might be worth considering to bravely exclude people. Making clear that something is not for everyone will strengthen the appeal to those it really is for.
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Hi Fabien,
Curious to try this, but just got "An unexpected error occured. Please retry later." when I tried to sign up.
Andrew
Disclaimer: I have got no data underpinning the statement made in the headline of this post :)
I was finally able to release Frenl last week after quite a bit of work spent on it. From the feedback I got on IH, I instantly I realized that something was wrong.
My sign up flow was a catastrophe and pretty much nobody could even understand how to join. It was a big form on the landing page where I was asking all kind of information about the user, followed by a small sign up form, with a separation between the two.
Rookie mistakes:
- The form was too big and it seemed like too much work to join the platform.
- The separation between the two forms made it unclear that the user profile would be saved when validating the sign up form.
From there, I followed what indie hackers told me to do and started to convert my form to more of an interview kind of thing. But something was really hard: I had to choose what data I would ask in the "interview" and I couldn't decide.
When trying it, it was just too boring. Not much better than the old big form.
Then I noticed that one of the field of the form was getting more attention than the others: the Traits. These are a few stereotypical qualities that people found a bit funny.
So I decided to try to go full steam in that direction and replaced the whole landing page with a trait selector.
I just released it and I would love to get on feedback on it :)
Thank you!
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I just signed up. I updated my profile and clicked save and nothing happened. I was expecting to be redirected to the homepage so after seeing that the save button was disabled I assumed my profile was saved so I refreshed the page and I was back at the same spot. I would suggest that you redirect after the form is saved to a different page. Overall I'm excited to see what comes of this.
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Thank you! In fact the form is not an onboarding, it's just the "my account" page. That's why it stays there afterwards. I'll try to make it clearer in the future with a real proper multi step onboarding. So many things to do haha.
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I tried out the signup, like the concept, and the signup is now pretty easy. My hesitations would be around not knowing who I'd be introduced to or why. I found the traits of people a bit confusing but also engaging, think it was a good idea to focus on that. I ended up choosing the everything one though because hackers didn't display the sort of matches I wanted. Perhaps you could ask which trait they have, and which ones (plural) they want to match with instead?
After signup on the longer form, I wasn't sure what 'Field aspirations' or 'Focus aspirations' were, but filled them in anyway, I guess they are what you want to be but are not at the moment?
It felt a bit weird that the home page frenl.com was just serving my profile settings after I updated them - I'd expect this to show a gallery of people to match with, or previous matches, or anything other than a profile update page. Perhaps to drive engagement after signup you could do something there.
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Thanks for your detailed feedback it's really helpful. Also it just made me realize that making the traits a big thing on the landing page would lead to think that it's actually important during the matching process. It is not really right now haha.
The matching is still rough around the edges for now. It basically just takes all the different aspects of the profile without particularily pushing one.As for the profile update page, it is also the bare minimum now. I'll tackle the different aspects one after the other:
- First I want to really find the perfect angle for the landing page and get a high conversion rate. Won't be able to do anything interesting without gettting a lot of people in. I'm still in this phase.
- Once I'm good enough on this aspect, I'll focus more on the quality of the data and the matching.
- Then I'll think about building more features and in particular the "in-app" aspect like you said.
It's all on the roadmap and I'm sure there's a lot of fun things to do. I'm just trying to do things in the right order :)
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I just signed up, sounds like a cool concept and I like the design, slick ;) Just one small thing that got me was that I couldn't deselect traits, moods, etc. I didn't save though, so I just refreshed and they were deselected, maybe a "clear" button or something would be useful?
Looks really cool though, looking forward to seeing who I get matched with :)
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Thanks for signing up! Arf yeah it's because these selectors are radio buttons. You cannot unselect anymore once one is set. But there shouldn't be a reason for unselecting theoratically 😬. You couldn't find an option that fit you?
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Yeah, maybe a null option could be added or something?
I guess, I didn't feel like either of the moods really fit me and wanted a half way between the two, I'm indecisive like that though :p The traits part was similar, I would fit somewhere between hacker and bulldozer, but I didn't like that hacker meant I was taking shortcuts (I guess I perceive shortcuts as a bad thing, even though I see it can be good). I can be indecisive about things like that though, so it could very likely just be me lol.
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I see. Maybe I could allow it to be a muti selection then if it could be less frustrating. I will also change hacker to "like to take shortcuts" or "knows when to take shortcuts" to make it sound more reasonnable :)
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Today is the first time I actually deemed a project of mine good enough to be added to Indie hackers.
I got a few sign ups and positive feedback already and I am now trying to understand what should be my next steps, in particular regarding growth where I am a full newbie.
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Love the idea. Great job! Keep it up~ Hopefully you achieve the necessary critical mass for it to turn into a successful network.
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Thanks a lot! Yes it's definitely not going to be the easy part. I'll do my best ;)
Just a small question, what do you think about having the profile form on the main page like I did? I am trying to use it as a way to raise perceived value (by showing on what the matching is going to be done) but I'm fearing that it could be overwhelming.-
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The value proposition was pretty enticing, but yes the questions were a bit overwhelming and could turn people off. I'd do it window dialog style.
I'd ask just one question at a time, with a progress indicator (perhaps of an animated/static persona getting closer to being able to meet another compatible persona). The email and password can be left till the end.
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Gamification ftw I see. Yep it seems to be the way to go from what I see in the comments. I'll keep you updated thanks 🙏
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Congrats on the launch!
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Love the idea!
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This really looks awesome! and helpful! I do have one suggestion (please feel free to completely ignore) - I recently read somewhere that a great way to improve your UX is by not slamming the end-user with all the questions at the same time - you need to reel them in slowly.
For example, when I was building my side-project (https://tripfate.com), I'd ask new subscribers for their tracking preferences during sign-up... once I switched to a 'step-by-step' approach, I saw an increase in conversion.
In Frenl's case, while I love the design, it might make sense to not ask for all the details required to create a Frenl profile on the homepage; i.e. make it a guided step-by-step process) to reduce signup friction - your target audience is supposed to be lazy after all :D Good luck!
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First of all you definitely have more experience with this than I do so yeah, feel free to tell me that what I'm doing is not good :D
Then dayum that's a cool and beautiful website! I just signed up! (I just noticed that the price slider doesn't seem to be working on iOS). I'm definitely going to copy all your call to actions everywhere. The flow feels good.
I think I will have to revamp the landing page yep. Thanks 🙏
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This looks really nice, congrats on launching! I'm a long term user of a similar tool but the problem has always been the quality of the matches as they were mostly like myself ("Need help with marketing, can code") and so we couldn't really help each other much. What are you doing differently?
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Thank you! For the matching, there are I think three challenges here:
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The diversity factor. To be able to find people capable of helping each other out, we need to have vastly diverse people from all kind of backgrounds, with all kind of personality and all kind of motivations.
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The data relevance. Even having a lot of people at hand, we need to be able to understand/sample the meaningful traits of the different users (in our matching context).
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The matching algorithm. Even having a lot of people and relevant data on all of them, we need to decide which traits would be interesting to match to which traits.
All of these are complicated by themselves but I think the current state of the app is really not that bad for the two last ones. At least it should do the job for now :)
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To be 100% honest, I actually didn't realize that this first milestone would pop up right away on the home page. That's how bad I am with these modern communication tools.
I will try to do a more proper introduction regarding the whys and hows in another post :)
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Thank you! I spent more time on it that I'm willing to admit 😬
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Yeah something is definitely off there. I see multiple options:
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I could remove the top profile form, only keep the sign up orange area and have people enter profile data on a page afterwards.
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I could keep the top profile form and add a sign up button next to it that would take the user to a sign up page.
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I could do something in the middle and remove the profile form while moving a few selectors to the bottom sign up one (main field and field aspirations for example).
What do you think? Thanks for the help btw 🙏
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3 Comments
Awesome idea and real clean site. Best of luck!
Thanks for sharing Fabien!
You're welcome! Maybe I wrote a bit too much though 😄