Intellifox
The best way to optimize your product listings on Amazon
14 months after pushing the first commit to our git repository, there we stand with this milestone that was only a dream in the beginning.
We didn't post a lot of updates here during the last 6 months, but what we did during this time is quite simple:
- Listen to our users
- Do a lot of customer support
- Simplify the app
- Produce content on YouTube
- Create new features
- Try different ways of marketing
All of that being focused 100% on this one and only product.
Some numbers:
- 300 customers
- 90% of our customers come from our affiliate marketing strategy.
- 99% of our clients are from the French market.
- 99% of our international market is not yet aware we exist (working on that).
Next steps:
- Launch referral program (1 month free for 1 referral)
- Try more narrowly-focused marketing strategy
- Expand internationally
But before that: enjoy this accomplishment!
We knew it would happen at some point, but it still felt weird to receive the notification that one of our dear user decided to stop his subscription.
Instantly, we reached out to him.
As it happens sometimes, It had nothing to do the product itself, and everything to do with the user personal situation.
He was glad we reached out, and told us he would come back when his project moves forward. Not so bad!
We recommend reading this article by @arvidkahl : https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/churn-retention-and-revenue/
It helped prepare us for this (hopefully) rare event without taking it personally.
Our hard work is paying off. It has been an amazing month for us.
We reached profitability and sold for 10 806€ of annual and monthly plans, ending at 107 paying customers. We wouldn't dare dream about such results for a first month.
If you go back in the history of Intellifox on Indie Hackers, you'll quickly see that this is not an overnight success. It has been built during the last six months by working really hard.
It's an amazing feeling but it doesn't remove the fear of loosing everything for some weird reason.
After doing the math, we are now at 2800$ MRR with a 29.5% margin! And our fixed cost will stay the same, so each new user is not a lot of monthly profit.
We had a surprisingly high number of annual plan (40%) which is amazing for cash flow!
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Glad to hear of your success!
I see you still have no English version. Can imaging how you'll speed up when you have it.
There is also a room for improvement of the landing page.
After a first opening last week, it was time to go further to the next phase.
We opened the doors to 160 potential customers by email
They have until Sunday the 31th of May to subscribe with a 30% discount.
Breakdown of the results for the 27th of May
25 new customers :
- 7 annual plans
- 16 monthly plans
Total revenue for the day: 2327 €.
We're still quite shocked by the amount of customers choosing the annual plan.
35% conversion rate (so far)
We now have 76 customers.
Our initial list had 214 potential customers.
This means a 35% conversion rate as of now.
Still 4 days to go
We will continue to send emails until the end of the week. We may reach 100 customers by then. Who knows?
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You need to update the CSS on the app asap. It looks more than 10 years old. Even if you have to pay a designer, at least for tips, it's worth it.
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Can you point to me what you dislike about it? :)
Just be a little more specific please-
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Sure! The color palette, the background and the buttons would be a good place to start. Check www.dribbble.com to see the latest trends on design. You could also go to fiverr.com and ask someone to review Intellifox.
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Our strategy is starting to pay out.
End of Beta stage
We spent three weeks in the beta stage with our first 17 paying customers. We spent time on video with each of them to help them onboard and get them to the key features.
We then used the feedback to simplify every aspects of the application, using recurring questions and pain points.
We started cutting our monolith in four different processes, connected through RabbitMQ.
Last big scale test before the battle
Then we opened the doors to 20 more customers, using the list collected one month ago. We had to close the form 24h after sending the email.
Since the 20th of May they can subscribe by themselves and we created a series of videos tutorials to help.
Only in French
We have this question often in the IH community. Yes Intellifox is 100% in French. Because we're French. Because our first clients are French. Because nothing is stable enough to warrant translations.
Translations will come later when we grow.
What we don't have (yet?)
Email system. Reset password. Admin dashboard. Free tier. Trial period. Presence on social networks. Perfect landing page. Demonstration. Social proofs.
What we have and is quite efficient
In-app chat support. User impersonation. Video conference. Tutorials. Powerful distribution network.
Breakdown of the results
After 28 days, we now have 45 paying customers :
- 42% have chosen the annual plan (19 customers)
- 58% have chosen the monthly plan (26 customers)
The total revenue for the first 28 days is 5250€.
What's next
In three days, we open the doors a little bit more.
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Email system. Reset password. Admin dashboard. Free tier. Trial period. Presence on social networks. Perfect landing page. Demonstration. Social proofs.
Some people have all of this and no paying clients (I think myself included as well...). Thanks for the heads up, that you don't have to have this necessarily.
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Congrats, that's great!
I love how you got paying customers even before many of those things that we consider must-haves for our products. This gives me a confidence boost.
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Thank you for sharing ConradL. We are ready to start this process too and your example is very helpful.
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Very inspiring, congrats on your growth i enjoyed reading the travel experience. More success ahead.
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Your product is well done !
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Woohoo!
Congratulations! 🙌As a lover of customer feedback, I'm thrilled to read you took the time to ask those hard but very valuable questions of all your early users. I'm sure the data you got back really helped in guiding your next steps.
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How long did it take to build the beta?
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Impressive stuff! where did you get the traffic from?
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Love your idea! Great concept! Wish you lots of success and keep going guys! It looks awesome! 🍾
- Karolina
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Thank you very much :)
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Holy crab! Congratulations on having balls of steel and on the successful fir month😄🥳
Love your approach.
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Balls of steel 😄 I love it.
It's the (first) result of a lot of efforts and right now my mind is consumed by this project. Every day I'm awaken by an idea to solve some problem in the product. I'm starting to understand what this "focus" concept is all about.
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Hello, I think it’s awesome you’re already starting even though there are a few things missing as what you said.
I checked your website using google translate and I think your product really adds something of value.
Keep it going and congrats with the sale
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Thank you very much. Starting before it's ready because it never really is :-p
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Yeah, that's true, the work is never done, and never too early to open the store, everyday you make it better, bit by bit.
If you're going to search an SMTP service, I hope you give Kingmailer (my project) a try (for the password resets and other transactional emails etc)
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Great work! Nicely rounded post and great your sticking to your native language to begin with.
A lot of people forget there are plenty of other ways to do things like reset password for customers at the start
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Thank you! I made the mistake once before to look at the "bigger pond" and forget about my native language. It's a mistake I'm not ready to make again. I'm having so many customers actually telling me "this is so good that this is in French, I'm so happy to be able to talk with you". I'm simply loving it :)
Yeah this is the other kind of barrier you create for yourself, being used to the perfectly crafted products around you and thinking "it would be great if...". But in the end, you have to understand that this is not where the value lies. And it's not even a requirement to be able to use your product or sell it. (By the way, I had a client loosing his password and my solution was to give him the "impersonation" link, the same one allowing me to take control of his account :D)
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We've started the onboarding of beta users and had our first video conference with our first customer. What an experience...
We can't count the number of bugs we encountered. We almost felt bad about having a paid customer. "Refresh the page" was something we said quite often.
But guess what: he didn't care.
He had seen enough of the product beforehand to buy the annual plan upfront!! That's what we call trust and believing in a vision.
We learned so much during this meeting. We learned what our customer saw in the product and why he was ready to pay for it.
And now we're going to do this 19 times in the next 10 days. One hour video conferences with our beta users. Looking forward to it!
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Great news! Can I ask a question though? Why are you only in French?
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Thanks! I'm only in French because growth is a patience game.
I'm not ready right now to conquer the world.
I only have so much energy.I'm focused on my community because that's the best place to start to build true relationships.
English will come later when everything is stable enough ;)
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Respect 👊,
how did you connected with your customer? Can you recomend books or tutorials that helped you?
Because this is my pain point right now. I want to fix it and I am willing to work hard.
Wish you a great day.-
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Thanks! It's all about community, finding where your audience is and making your way inside it.
I can point you to two main resources I've used:
- Chris Guillebeau in the $100 Startup https://www.amazon.com/100-Startup-Fire-Your-Better/dp/1447286316
- Arvid Kahl (a fellow Indie Hacker) summarizes it neatly : https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/power-of-the-niche/
I'm inside a community and I've convinced the leader to distribute my product, in exchange for affiliate commissions. I've used the power of an established leader as a mean to promote my product, and it's only possible because I'm part of the tribe.
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Thank you very much. I will use your tipps :)
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This is an evening we will remember.
With our distributor, we set out to try to find 10 clients for a paid beta version.
Out of the 1200 members of his (private) community, 120 persons joined the live webinar and watched the entire 1 hour et 40 minutes long Intellifox demonstration.
Out of 120 persons, 35 subscribed the same day to participate to the PAID beta version. 15 followed the next day, and it's not over.
With one evening, Intellifox News jumped from 0 subscribers to 125, and it's not over.
We're now out of the blur of whether our product can be perceived as useful or not. We're on track to make it profitable really fast. This is an amazing feeling.
Next step is to manually onboard a selection of 10-15 people and continue from here.
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Although I understand french, maybe for other Indie Hackers I would suggest you do an english version.
Another point would be to have a real live demo that you could play with before sign-up + define the pitch a bit better - not sure if it's just me, maybe try hotjar to see what people are doing on the page?
Good luck!-
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Hey MissAna,
Thank you for feedback! You're 100 percent right and this will definitely be a priority for me very soon.I have a very good reason for the tool to only be in French now. I'm just starting and everything is meant to change in the next few weeks, from wording to visuals, depending on my beta feedback. Having an English version right now would be a huge time stealer, where I would have to think twice for each pieces of word.
In the past I made the mistake of focusing on English while reducing the impact of the words on my own people, the ones I can reach in my native tongue!
Weirdly my goal right now is not to attract more customers. It's to create close relationships with my beta users and deepen my understanding of the challenges they face.
The Live Demo I love it! That's a goal I'm looking forward to accomplish once the private beta is over. And I'm already using Hotjar which is a goldmine.
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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We spent three hours building a new version of the landing page:
- Use the current state of Intellifox for screenshots
- Align marketing language to match the language used by my exclusive distributor
We've also been using Hotjar to record visitors actions on the website, which led to quick optimizations in the next day after reviewing the recordings after the change.
We finished creating a completely functional version of Intellifox and set a launch date for the Beta version with by exclusive distributor.
Work to be done before launching:
- Refresh the website to fit current state of Intellifox
- Integrate two functionalities that will help showcase Intellifox's strengths
- Integrate payment processing with Paddle
- Write down onboarding strategy for Beta users
Intellifox private launch is set on April 24th 2020. The goal is to get 10 paying beta customers.
We will be presenting it with our distributor on a live webinar in order to reach this goal. Exciting!
After a lot of tweaking and changing the UI and a bit of the API, we had another discussion with our soon-to-be distribution partner.
We're really close to a fully functional version of the MVP:
- Onboarding is properly working, with product import from the Amazon account, even though it's quite minimalist
- Everything is easier to understand by most people and provided value is made more obvious
Next step: rethink and simplify image edition.
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Hi! I had to translate the front page to English to understand what it's about. Since it's all about Amazon (is it?) you could make it more obvious. Also, you could make a video example (I expected something like this clicking on Demo button). I'm not your potential client, though.
Looks very nice, btw :)
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Hey Dimmi! You're an early reviewer!! :D Thank you!
The current landing page is just here to fill the void while I'm still working on the beta version. Cant' wait to internationalize it though!
You're 100% right about the video example, that'll be my first step in this area.
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