11
20 Comments

50k in development expenses reached

We're one week await from the first release of kitfluence 🎉 It's been some months since we started working on the project, which means we put some serious hours in.

Yesterday I was just too curious about how much of money we technically invested by working on kitfluence instead of working on client's projects of Fasky. We know what we usually charge for an hour at Fasky, so we just multiplied it by the total number of hours since we started coding and working on kitfluence.

To our surprise we just hit the 50k in developer's costs, which is a huge number, considering that this a side project. We are very happy that the release is coming sooner than later and we finally are ready to show what we've worked on.

What do you think of this number? Does it matter at all?

If you don't know but wanna know what kitfluence is stands for and does for you, check out the landing page at https://kitfluence.com and sign up for the mailing list to get a reminder email on the release day.

  1. 4

    @sutefan hitting 50k is no such a big deal if its worth it, hope you've already validated the idea and have some users ready to test it out. Influencer marketing is a great market with great profits and i guess you've already many competitors. What are your key features?

    1. 2

      The upcoming week will be the testing week with some chosen influencers. We do have competitors and some of them are huge, but they go in a slightly different direction.

      Our key feature and USP at the moment is the fully automatically generated media kit which is linked to your social media stats. In terms of getting brand deals, this saves you a lot of time updating your stats constantly and additionally, you get a fully responsive website designed and hosted by kitfluence.

  2. 3

    Cool idea, good luck on the launch! Will keep an eye out for it.

    1. 1

      Thanks, we'll keep this updated and are happy for feedback at any time!

  3. 3

    This is cool! What’s the scope of the influencers? I.e. a few thousand followers, hundred thousand followers, millions?

    And what about the brands? Are they large or could they be startups that want to advertise to a specific niche?

    Could this potentially work for travel bloggers with a good amount of followers?

    Sorry for all the questions!

    1. 2

      Thanks for that!

      It starts with a few hundred up to a hundred thousand. The main reason for that is the variety of domains and the background of the individual influencer in particular. In that case, setting up a personal page/media kit/landing page can an easy task for tech influencer but it might be hard work for a beauty influencer for example.

      Why I don't think influencers with millions of users are potential clients is the amount of money the usually can invest in marketing. They just delegate this task to someone else. (But who knows, I'm just assuming right now)

      There is a feature planned to connect influencer with brands/companies directly in kitfluence, but at the moment this is not available. So we serve and support influencers in the process of personal brand creation. If this doesn't answer your question please don't hesitate to ask again ;-)

      The media kit works for everybody who creates content for their followers on Instagram or Youtube. As a travel blogger there are so many opportunities to get brand deals and sponsors, are you in that space?

      1. 2

        Super helpful! And yes all of my questions were answered :)

        My girlfriend and I will be doing the PanAmerican trip (assuming I get approval from work) for a span of about 2 years throughout North and South America starting in July, and we really want to start a travel blog and an Instagram so that we can help show others how they can travel on the road while working remotely (we haven't quite really figured out our niche yet). It's mostly for our entertainment since we love photography and writing, but it'd be cool to make a small profit off of it.

        I signed up for the mailing list; we may not be able to start using it until later this year but I definitely want to keep in touch with its progress. Again, really neat idea!

        1. 2

          That sounds great, I hope you get the approval ;-)

          Also, thanks for the feedback, love to hear that motivates me even more!

          This is definitely possible and if you share what you like then others will engage with it, trust me.

          One extra note I wanna get rid of is, start sooner than later. Once you get the approval start putting content on the platform of your choice and start building an audience. Take your followers with you, not only from the starting point but also from now. What do you have to consider, what do you have to plan, how do you prepare for certain scenarios, all that stuff is so valuable for people with the same idea out there and would appreciate getting some advice from your side!

          1. 2

            This is really good advice, and one that I hadn't thought of! We're kinda flying blind with this travel blog/Instagram concept so this definitely helps us out a lot. Thank you!

            1. 1

              You're welcome and good luck with your upcoming adventure!

  4. 2

    Have you figured out your business model?

    From the landing page I can't quite understand what features you are offering, is it influencer website builder with live metrics or a directory of influencers?

    1. 1

      First of all thanks for your feedback :-)

      Actually there are two possible directions we haven't decided on yet regarding the business model. One is offering a directory for companies and brands to find the perfect fit in terms of promoting their products or service. The other one is to add features on the influencer side additionally to the media kit and organically grow to an influencer utility set/influencer marketing tool.

      Concerning the landing page, we clearly wanna stress the media kit part only. So your first mention was right, we provide an influencer website builder/generator with live metrics.

      I'm really interested in how you come up with the second description, what part of the landing page gave you this misleading information? We wanna make sure that this point is absolutely clear!

      Looking forward to getting further feedback!

  5. 2

    It seems high to me for if it's for an unvalidated idea in an ideal world. I look back on some of my unvalidated MVPs where I have essentially invested $30k-40k's worth of hours, and feel that I could have mitigated risk better by thinking of a smaller-scope MVP, but I reckon that's sort of just how it goes and that everyone has to "find their sea legs" in that area. For upcoming projects I want to try to limit myself to something like <$7k for an MVP and then invest more time once I have my first customers, but we'll see how doable that ends up being... Either way, I think you're in good company, and I hope everything goes well with you for the launch :)

    1. 3

      Hey zach thanks for your straight and honest feedback, really appreciate it.

      Indeed the number surprised me as well don't get me wrong, but this is more or less the MVP. We'll provide Instagram and Youtube from day one and only one of those platforms would save us time definitely, but we believe that the combination boosts the level of benefit in using our saas to a much higher level.

      One thing we definitely did right two months ago was setting this hard deadline on 31th of January. We are already overengineering stuff because we want to make it perfect because we have the time for it. I can't imagine where this would end up if we didn't come up with a deadline!

      For me, a time limit makes much more sense than a limit in "effort/time" I'm allowed to put in. Why did you come up with that (I guess arbitrarily) number of 7k worth of hours instead of a deadline? Maybe we can adapt your way of thinking in that case to improve our way to go :-)

      1. 2

        I can definitely relate, with regards to feeling like there is a certain amount of required baseline features, and I am definitely not saying you're wrong to think that. When I did the app for the table tennis startup that's in my profile on here, I couldn't think of a more bare-bones set of functionality than what I shipped that took about 250 hrs. But then in hindsight, I was able to see that I could have just had my CMO try to scale to a few more leagues with their previous excel spreadsheet + whatsapp group combo to see if they could effectively grow and market the thing before I invested all those hours into an elegantly-built piece of software that only like 30 people would ever use, lol. I was so in-the-weeds as a developer that I didn't put enough thought into how the development process might be able to be delayed, due in large part to my co-founder being more or less insistent that the lack of an app is what was preventing him from setting up new leagues.

        Confining yourself to a deadline sounds smart. :) I've been very lax with my current side project and would have done well to set a hard ship date.

        The $7k is an arbitrary way of saying that it'd be nice to try to validate ideas with ~40 hrs or less of work on my part. I have been really intrigued by the no-code approach that @csallen has a few episodes about as a means to rapidly prototype an MVP without getting too caught-up in infrastructure when I'm not even sure if people are interested in my idea yet. 40 hours is not a lot, especially when you consider the baseline time commitment of even doing the basics, like setting up a landing page, autoresponder, etc., so we'll see how doable it is. But this ~40 hr benchmark is sort of under the assumption that I am partnered with a co-founder who would be taking care of the marketing side, and the 40 hrs would be strictly oriented towards a "just good enough to work alright" prototype.

        But again, I have yet to successfully implement this framework, so talk to me again in a year and see if it's worked out for me. :P

        1. 1

          I definitely got you, we, the founders, came up with the minimal set of features without taking potential client's feedback into consideration. Maybe we should have. This is for sure one of the main lessons I 've learned in this first real side project.

          I thought about your approach further yesterday and it's a good way to let down the dev behavior of immediately showing you're capable of doing whatever is needed. You're kinda forced into coming up with the minimal effort to reach out to costumers. Thank for that enlightenment, I will use it for my next project for sure ;-)

          Sure, I will be here and waiting for your update ;-)

          1. 1

            Haha sounds good. Let's both cross our fingers and see if we're able to make it happen. Have you explored the no-code options yet? I've been wanting to look at https://www.makerpad.co/ since hearing about it on one of the podcast episodes

            1. 2

              Perfect let's do that. I keep an eye on your profile and poke you after a while if nothing happened just to remember you about you big plans ;-)
              Not yet but I will check this stuff out asap kitfluence V1 is out there !!

  6. 1

    Cool idea! It will be very cool if there is a direct connect to potential sponsors. The English major in me suggests you have a copy editor scrub your content before going live. Grammar and punctuation errors definitely affect credibility. Most people will not let you know they noticed the errors. Potential users will just think the site is not legitimate and move on. I hope your efforts are richly rewarded.

    1. 1

      Thanks for your advice :-) Do you mean in general we should pay attention to grammar and punctuations or did our landing page give the incentive to tell us about it? :-P

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments