Niche Mates

We met for a hackathon weekend in Hanover, as that's somewhere in the middle between where Stefan (Amsterdam) lives and the other team members (Berlin)

The goal was to scope out the deliverable for the very first product, to test the waters with a new project.

We want to help people get their documentation and processes under control and enable Solopreneurs and Indie Hackers to run their business more efficiently and sell them at a premium (if they want to 🤔).

Delegating and Automating require well-thought-out processes that are usually developed over time.

Start with a minimum viable process, make it better and scale the shit out of it so to speak.

While we work on the product, we're also compiling a bunch of best practice templates for Notion that help people make their own processes better.

This will be our first PH launch for this project 🚀

After launching subscriptions for our YouTube Transcription tool in February we recently got the first subscriber on the unlimited plan for $29.99 and are on our way to $100 MRR.

Reaching $100 MRR was the goal for April and we're now at $70 so the extra $30 just gave us a nice boost.

One more and we're good to go 🚀

Our niche tool to create Transcripts on YouTube got its first paying subscriber.

We recently introduced subscriptions and are super happy that we got our first paying customer within a week of launching subscriptions.

Just couple weeks before that we did a relaunch of the tool on Product Hunt.

We launched our small side-project that lists a bunch of stoic quotes and some personal reflections on them.

We use Stoicism as a basis for our decision-making within Niche Mates to bootstrap niche Products and we're determined to make it a bit easier to pick up by looking at ancient quotes in a new light.

Here's a link to the PH post, any love/feedback is appreciated. 🙏

What

We just published the 2.0 of our niche product to transcribe your YouTube videos to the Chrome Web Store.

You can now transcribe your videos directly from YouTube Studio instead of having to remember to use our service, we simply insert a button next to where you usually add subtitles to your video already anyway.

Check the pic below 👇 for a showcase and to see my balding progress 😎

This changed a flow from:

1. Remember to go to our website
2. Click around 5-6 times
3. Visit 2 different websites (YouTube and ours)

to just:

1. One-click in YouTube studio

And the "trigger" for the action being right where you expect it is "unbeatable" as the friction is super low.

Why?

We did this for 2 main reasons:

In short:

Retention and carving out our USP

Long story 👇

1. Make it super easy for recurring customers to get their job done efficiently (we have a handful of customers that come back multiple times per week, despite our old solution being super clunky)

2. We're a niche solution that's just for YouTube videos, this allows us to build a feature set that's tightly integrated with YouTube and now having to worry about being a general-purpose transcription product (there's a bunch of those already), this enables us to stand out between other competitors that are casting a wider net and is one of the main advantages of niching down.

Learnings

Building Chrome extensions is a bi*ch, especially interacting between the different parts of the app that run either within the context of the website you're trying to add elements to (Content script) or the main UI elements of your app (Popup).

Now we had close to zero experience building a chrome extension before and I'd definitely either be sure to: Know what I'm doing or be very certain that the extra effort is worth it. As a comparison it took us:

• 1 day to build the initial MVP on Web
• 2-3 months (part-time) to build out the chrome extension

Now granted a lot of the time was also spent integrating Google login and YouTube API but those were known time-drags (deep integrations are usually costly in terms of time) we definitely underestimated the amount of work that goes into the extension itself.

Next steps

• Launch 2.0 on Product Hunt
• Link building outreach (SEO)
• Content creation (SEO)
• Cash-out
• Bro down

Plugs

If you use YouTube as a channel for building your audience, feel free to check out the extension in the Chrome Web Store or click the next link if you're unsure why you should be adding transcripts

What?

We thought our blog for our YouTube Transcript product could use a revamp and some more internal links as this has been an area we have neglected so far.

I also took some time and wrote another article that compares different methods how to get a transcript for a YouTube video in case you want to save some money or want to get the transcript of a video that's not yours.

Why?

• Increase the internal linking profile strength
• We needed some more content for google
• For SEO one of our first goals is to rank the first page for YouTube transcripts and we're on our way there. (Currently avg. 20) but we need all the help we can get :p

What

We build a chrome extension that lets you transcribe your YouTube videos without ever leaving YouTube Studio.

It's a much smoother experience than our 1.0 that was cobbled together in a weekend hack but it did take a considerable amount of effort, especially because we haven't made a chrome extension before.

Why?

We have customers for our Web version that lets you transcribe YouTube videos online and good retention but 0.1 is lacking a solid USP over other solutions out there.

By solely focusing on YouTube we can build a much better flow that directly integrates with YouTube Studio and puts one of the most important parts for our Retention, the "Trigger" to transcribe a video, right where it needs to be.

What's next?

• Set some launch goals
• Launch on PH
• Link building outreach
• Content generation

Let me know if you're interested in taking it for a test drive, otherwise, I'll keep you posted how that goes 😛👍

You can also check out our latest blog posts on how to rank a video fast and three different ways to transcribe YouTube videos

What?

Doubling down on our YouTube Transcripts product.

Why?

We have 4 Stages of a Product that we try to stick to when building and launching and those are:

1. Launch (Day 0-Day 30) -> Launch and Ads + build some backlinks, write articles, begin SEO efforts, fix bugs

2. Growth (Day 30-Day 90) -> Continue Link building and SEO, Outreach + Marketing

3. Improve & Automate (Day 90-Day 180) -> Improve the product, automate where possible

4. Growth 2.0 (Day 180-Day x) -> Grow and let the product run more or less on autopilot

We have goals for each of those stages in terms of either: Audience (Traffic, Email List) or Revenue that we want to hit, and only if we do or feel confident that we will with a bit more work, we will continue

Our Transcript tool for YouTube has now entered the Automation stage, we have a couple of core customers that use the tool very frequently even tho in the current state it's a lot of work.

Our first goal is to make it as easy as possible for them (save their payment method, auto-populate forms), etc. to use it and we're also working on a much more streamlined solution in form of a chrome extension so that the whole flow gets reduced from around 1-2 minutes per video to 1 click 🤯

We will relaunch the extension on PH and will continue some more serious outreach after that because we don't have a strong enough USP as of right now.

I'll keep you posted if that hypothesis checks out. 🤙

What

A tool to submit a link to any public video and see: Title, Keywords, Description with highlighted keywords, and more stats at a glance.

Why?

When looking for inspiration you can use this to analyze what other people in your niche are trying to rank for, how they optimize their SEO, and what Keyword density they have.

Next steps

After this we want to look at the numbers a bit, so we're gonna put this project on hold and wait for some stats.

So far recurring usage has been looking a bit bleak and we've lost our content lead for this project and are not super interested in this specific niche/audience anymore but we already had this tool developed and thought we should launch it nonetheless 🚀

We think it would be a waste not to 🚢

What?

We launched a site to get inspiring stoic quotes and segmented them into different categories to help you easily find stoic quotes for a specific use case.

Why?

At Niche Mates we all practice Stoicism and made it the core of our company manifesto, yet we feel that getting started with Stoicism can be tough.
 We also haven’t found a good collection of quotes that are easy to navigate by category or the exact thing you might be struggling with, so we made our own 💪😁

Long term play

This is the first product we want to build in this niche and we're building them because

• We care
• We want to make stoicism more accessible by creating more free content
• We have plans for monetizable premium products that make this a sustainable niche to be in for us

You?

Any feedback is appreciated and we’d love for you to submit your favorite quotes over at beststoicquotes.com ❤️