Why I rebuilt my startup from scratch
by AbdulifyBackstory
Two months ago, I launched the first MVP of CronDev (previously monadflow). I wasn't expecting much, but the feedback I received was incredible. A couple of days into the launch, I got featured on BetaList, which brought in around ~25 users.
Here's why I decided to pivot after a lot of feedback
The landing page sucked
- The message wasn't clear.
- No product screenshot.
- No pricing page. <-- number 1 feedback
- Listed a ton of unavailable features.
- The loading speed was too slow.
The product felt empty/unfinished
- I had too many 'coming soon' features in the product.
- I had separate pages for each feature which made it difficult to navigate.
- It often took seconds to load.
- Too much white space.
- No clear sign of how things worked.
What's different now?
The landing page
- I made the language and description simple and straight to the point.
- I removed most of the buzzwords.
- The landing page is a separate project now, which helps with the page loading speed.
- Added a pricing page.
The product
- I kept every core feature at a maximum of two clicks away
- I removed all unfinished features to only focus on the core ones.
- I added onboarding to keep users engaged and educate them. You can't use the product if you don't go through the onboarding flow.
- Kept the design and visuals consistent.
Domain name change
- I still don't know whether changing the domain name was a good idea.
- People kept asking me why I named it "monadflow"
- My initial idea doesn't apply anymore, so I changed the name.
- I hope changing the name to CronDev would at least give people an idea of what the product is about.
I hope you find this helpful
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Allow signup using GitHub/Google accounts and I think you will get much more people trying the product. Requiring to create a user/password just for testing out something is a lot of friction and you will convert much less in my opinion.
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I've debated this with myself for awhile now. I can enable it with a click of a button and maybe I should. Thanks for the feedback Manuel
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User feedback is a way to understand your product's shortcomings. Often, founders are slow to implement changes and end up losing customers.
Every launch is an opportunity for learning. It's great that you're sharing this with the community.
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I am also making few mistakes that you had done. Thanks for sharing your experience
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Thank you for reading
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clean redesign, nice and understandable, just the logo is not fiting the well done and clean design in my opinion :)
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Thanks for the feedback. Yeah the logo is clashing with the orange background, I need to fix it.
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Thanks for sharing. It's going to help me a lot.
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I'm glad you found it helpful
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Thanks for sharing your learnings! Never thought Pricing details would be the number 1 feedback. Btw, care to show what you used to build your website?
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This post can be used as a pre-launching guide, It is more valuable than generic checklist as it is brought by practical and experience. Thank you 😊
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Thanks Govind of the kind words.
I've learned a lot from this community. I hope I can give back half as much.
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Sir, you must be kidding me 🤣 I went to your website in order to find out whether my product could be of use for you and what do I see on the main screenshot there? The name of my product!
Congrats on the relaunch! CronDev is cool, will definitely be useful for containerized environments.
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Which one is it 👀
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Congratz on your relaunch! I think CronDev is a great name of your product.
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Thanks Chase, yeah the name is kinda growing on me
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Great work Abdulify. I can understand that it can feel rough to get feedback, just because of all the effort you have already put into your product. Everything is about iterating, getting it out there, iterate, iterate. The changes you have done makes a lot of sense.
Now you just need to find a way to make this visible for your potential target group. If you already have customers I would advise you to write a use-case about it and how much money/time they saved by using your service.
I hope this was helpful. Thanks for sharing!
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Thanks for the feedback Wilgott!
I plan on producing a lot of content on the use-cases and benefits just as you've suggested.
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You have done good work with react it looks amazing!
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Thanks Bucky!
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Thank you for sharing your experience. If I may ask, how long does it take for you to finally decide to rebuild instead of continuing your previous app? was there a major trigger, or it was the accumulation of all these factors?
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I kind of knew I wanted to rebuild before I even finished building. I quickly realized that my idea was too big and it was going to take awhile to finish.
None of the core features in the MVP was completely done.2 weeks after launch, I became convinced with having only one core feature initially instead of half completed ones.
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It's interesting to see how user feedback helped Abdulify pivot their business and improve their product.
Changing the domain name can also be a good idea if the original name no longer fits the product idea.
It's important to pay attention to user feedback and be willing to make changes accordingly to improve the product.
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It's not mobile first, as I see after signup
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Yeah I need to minimize the sidebar on mobile.
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I like the name more than your previous one and the landing page looks good. But I don't think your pricing makes much sense and is too high. Imo it should be pay as you go pricing (e.g. €1 per X requests) as that is what I'm used to from something like Qstash ($1 per 100K requests).
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My ultimate goal for CronDev is to build a serverless platform for running any code periodically.
I have a prototype built where you can upload and schedule your JS or Python code directly in the platform.
You will be able to invoke your job through a webhook or on a schedule.
As time goes on, I will be adding integrations such as Zapier and others.The third core feature is to add job monitoring capabilities. You will get notify if you background job stops working or it doesn't run on time.
It would be difficult to price per request because that's not the only thing you will be able to do. I intend to keep the free version forever to make it more accessible
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I wish you the best of luck with it, as I'd love using a platform like that. Problem for me is that I have a lot of jobs that run every minute (24 * 60 * 30 = 43k requests per month) and just having a server with a cron job is much less expensive than any of the services currently out there.
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"I still don't know whether changing the domain name was a good idea."
I would love to hear your follow-up on this. Just some questions that come to mind:
- Did you lose your previous users?
- Do you maintain the old domain, any case of any leads?
- Do people understand CronDev better?
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- Usage eventually dropped off for the previous MVP. So it was okay to start from scratch.
- Yes, I redirect from the old domain to the new one.
- So far yes. People seem to at least know what I'm talking about.
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Thanks for sharing your mistakes so we can learn from ! It really helped.
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I'm glad you found it useful
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Thank you for sharing. I also think it's better to change the domain name because users can know what it does from the name and it's easier to remember and spread.
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Yep, we ended up re-building http://fileapproved.com/ since our first version was built on Adalo and then we moved everything over to Bubble, so we could actually do updates and improve things.
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Marketing website is looking great now! 😃
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.