CronDev
Schedule and manage your cron jobs on the web
Backstory
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
As of now, monadflow - a cronjob scheduling tool, has been live on betalist for more than 5 days.
Useful Backstory
I am a solo developer working on monadflow. I started working on it 2 months ago. I have a full-time job so I spend weekends and, nights building it.
I submitted monadflow to betalist a month after I started working on it.
Betalist Launch Stats:
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Traffic (exclusively from betalist)
Day 1 - 50 unique visitors
Day 2 - 25 uniques
Day 3 - 10 uniques
Day 4 - 5 uniques
For context, the most amount of traffic ever got prior to betalist was 40 visitors in a day. I was averaging 5 unique visitors a day mainly from Twitter.
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Users
Day 1 - 5 sign-ups
I'm gaining 1 sign-up per day after the first day.
Before betalist feature a had 4 users in 20 days; Me, my wife and 2 other random people.
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Usage
5 workflows/jobs created.
1 User actually scheduled their job to run (key metric).
Before betalist, I usage was zero
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Feedback
I've gotten 2 really useful feedback from the sign-ups
Lessons Learned / Thoughts
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I launched too early on betalist
Betalist brings casual users and my product was too early for them. My MVP wasn't even finished before I got featured.
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B2C SaaS would benefit more on betalist
Just a thought but I think products aimed at consumers would really benefit from betalist. The casual user doesn't need a cron job scheduling tool.
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Is it worth getting featured on betalist?
Yes. The numbers aren't impressive but I started from 0.
Closing
I'm looking for beta testers - Help me build monadflow. I'm giving away lifetime deals.
I would really love to hear your feedback on monadflow
I build and share in public at https://twitter.com/AbdulAwalify
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We have launched an app in betalist several months ago. But we didn't get what we expect.
We offered %50 discount life time.
We couldn't collect any e-mail and get only 4-5 users for free plan.
So, probably betalist not like before or we are missing some point to get success.
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Same experience, betalist seems to be full only of sellers, no buyers.
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I'm thinking of launching Glyph (www.glyphleads.com) on Betalist as well, let's see how it goes!
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Go for it. Good luck!
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I checked out your landing page, I was looking for a pricing section, but didn't find any. Personally, I never sign up for a service that I don't know how much will cost me.
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Thanks for the feedback! You have a point
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Interesting name. Where does it come from?
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Long answer :)
Monad in the context of computer science is a design pattern / a way to structure your code such that you wrap a value in a type.
It makes chaining multiple functions together a lot easier to manage when one of the function throws an error or returns null.
Monadflow allows you to easily chain multiple activities together into a single workflow hence the name.
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I agree with the point, B2C SAAS would benefit more from Betalist. In your opinion,
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What features differentiate Betalist from ProductHunt?
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Which platform should benefit a B2B product?
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Betalist
- Allows you to submit just a landing page which can be useful for validation.
- Doesn't have a comment sections. It would be really nice to get feedback and show social proof on the Betalist site.
- Be prepared to wait for at least 4+ weeks (if you don't pay). Also you don't get notified before post goes live.
- Low effort, very quick to submit.
Product Hunt
- The voting system gives you prestige / bragging rights and I would argue it helps with conversion too.
- Comments. I like that you can interact with people
- I don't know how true this is now but many products took off just from a Product Hunt launch.
- Product Hunt offers tools / products to help you from idea to launch.
- People seem to take Product Hunt launches seriously (just an observation)
I would say B2B would benefit much more from product hunt - I would love to hear other peoples experience on this.
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Founder of BetaList here. Just wanted to add we temporarily removed the comment section earlier this month, because we were getting quite a lot of SEO spam. I notice something similar on PH and even here on IH in this very comment thread.
I agree though that when the comments are legit, they can be quite insightful. So I'll probably want to re-enable it at some point, but we'll need a better way to fight the spam.
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Did you have to pay to get featured?
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No. You can pay to skip the queue (4+ weeks).
I think it's worth paying if your product is fully ready.
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This is great to know and super helpful as we were looking to launch on BetaList soon. As a B2B, definitely tough to find the right avenue to get beta testers.
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The little user feedback I got from the Betalist launch was helpful. Definitely worth it.
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Some awesome thoughts Abdulify, thank you for sharing. And good luck moving forward.
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Thanks 🙌
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Maker of BetaList here.
Thanks for sharing your experience with the IH community 🙌
I think your post was written quite well, but there's one thing I'd like to share for future launches. That's to include your unique selling point in your pitch. Right now it's "Schedule and monitor cron jobs" which is descriptive (good!), but doesn't really tell me why it's better than any of the other cron job monitoring tools.
In your longer description you compare it to Zapier and how it's possible to build a multi-step flow. That sounds quite different from the other solutions I've seen so perhaps that's something to focus on for future launches.
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Hey Marc,
BetaList is really amazing and thanks for your hard work.
I completely agree with your assessment here. A lot had changed since I first submitted Monadflow to BetaList. I was in the middle of working on a new landing when I got featured.
Nevertheless the feedback I got from the launch further proved that I need that new landing page.
I wish BetaList would provide advance notice before the feature, even a few hours before would be really helpful.
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I think we should be able to add some heads-up email. Thanks for the suggestion 🙌
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nice result!
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Thanks Dago 🙌
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Thanks for sharing. So I believe most of the founders who have only landing page can start validating their idea on Betalist.
I'm trying to build SaaS version of traditional Marketing Agency, MVP is coming soon but for now, I only finished my landing page (https://www.goingviral.digital). Do you think I should submit it to Betalist?
Love to hear your feedback/suggestion. Cheers!-
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Hey Hieu, I checked out Going Viral and I really love the concept. I know first hand that startups (and pretty much all "small" businesses) are looking for ways to get in the press - it's a big problem to be solved. I also know that PR Newswire is the only real solution to this at the moment and they charge an insane amount of money.
I would love to connect and learn more. I'm happy to share my feedback on the site as well. Let me know if you're open to it!
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Hi, It's more than great if I can hear your valuable feedbacks! I know it will help alot. Can u shoot me a DM please? Thanks
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I think you should, here's why
- It will take at least 4 weeks to get featured, so you can keep working while you wait.
- It's a cheap way to validate
- You can update your post after getting featured.
I hope that helps!
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hey, @abdulify, if you submit Monadflow to SaaSHub, please let me know, and I can get you on the weekly newsletter if you list one or two competitors. Cheers!
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First of all, thanks for sharing!
I wouldn't mind testing and providing feedback. I just created an account and a workflow. It's a good start. Where can I go to find more information, maybe some use cases, or explanation of how you see this working and who your intendend audience is?
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I just gave you a follow on twitter, I share almost everything I'm doing there.
I am working on a new landing page to simplify things a bit.
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47 Comments
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.
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
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.
So true Harsh! I intend to move fast and iterate along the way
All the best man!
I am also making few mistakes that you had done. Thanks for sharing your experience
Thank you for reading
clean redesign, nice and understandable, just the logo is not fiting the well done and clean design in my opinion :)
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah the logo is clashing with the orange background, I need to fix it.
Thanks for sharing. It's going to help me a lot.
I'm glad you found it helpful
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?
Landing page is Nextjs
The app is Reactjs
The backend is Expressjs + Prisma
I have other services on AWS and GCP
Wow, thanks for the detailed info.
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 😊
Thanks Govind of the kind words.
I've learned a lot from this community. I hope I can give back half as much.
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.
Which one is it 👀
Congratz on your relaunch! I think CronDev is a great name of your product.
Thanks Chase, yeah the name is kinda growing on me
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!
Thanks for the feedback Wilgott!
I plan on producing a lot of content on the use-cases and benefits just as you've suggested.
You have done good work with react it looks amazing!
Thanks Bucky!
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?
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.
I literally did that on my last idea. The Idea was to big and too many features to work on to the point that it hindered me from launching it for a long time. Thank you for sharing!
You're welcome
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.
It's not mobile first, as I see after signup
Yeah I need to minimize the sidebar on mobile.
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).
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
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.
"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:
Thanks for sharing your mistakes so we can learn from ! It really helped.
I'm glad you found it useful
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.
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.
Marketing website is looking great now! 😃
This comment was deleted 4 years ago