LoveTab

On my request, few of my friends have been using the beta version of LoveTab for more than a week now.

However I just realised that it is nothing like the feeling of somebody you never knew before, trusts your pitch, starts using the product and finds some value with it.

Yes, LoveTab has got its first 3 users who are not the founder's friends or relatives.

I sent the first version of the product pitch to 12 probable users and just one of them responded back. The response I received was a feedback on how I should improve the pitch message. Though it was quite depressing, it turned out to be one of my best learning experience.

Based on the feedback, I improvised the pitch message to make it more personal and say how LoveTab will help them, instead of talking about me and why I developed LoveTab.

With the new version, 4 out of 7 prospects responded back and 3 signed up.

With this experience I learnt how outbound reach is not a number game. Spending time researching about the users and making the pitch personal, fine tuning the message to convey the right value is far more effective.

Have been working on LoveTab on the side to my consulting work.

The basic version including a landing page, Chrome plugin, server module to handle twitter integration and authentication is ready for launch (https://thelovetab.com).

Had asked a few good friends to use the product and provide their feedback. Yay, one of them seems to like the product a lot :)

Two months into consulting engagement, having some free time and thinking about working on something small.

Had started actively using Twitter during the startup days and some of the tweets from other founders resonated what we were going thorough and translated into reinforcement learnings.

Hit by a random thought, what if there was a way to see those tweets often every day ? How about a chrome extension that can show the tweets i liked every time I open a new browser tab ?

First startup did not fly. We had a working product at hand but with no customers. I still feel we did not push through enough on sales and business development.

Co-founder and I agreed we would take a pause and start consulting for others to generate some cash flow and venture back into product development, which never happened.

Lesson: Never loose focus. Once you venture into something else full time, mostly it's a done deal that you are going to loose the momentum and not going to gain it back.