OKZest

We haven't gone 'all out' looking for customers as we decided to get some real feedback from fresh eyes first.

One of the first people to reply to us said that our base plan wouldn't be enough so I spent a few days coding a feature that we had planned anyway.

In hindsight I could have manually got around the problem for now and spent the time looking for more customers instead (especially since we haven't heard from them since!).

We also knew that the site needed documentation and without it people may be put off. We added https://docs.okzest.com and added links to it within the UI.

Our registration flow also needed improving so we now redirect to a useful information page rather than abandoning the user on the homepage.

We've had around 40 signup but only a handful of those actually created a design, despite authenticating their accounts.

We had someone give great feedback, there was a bug that was not reproducible on my test account due to the nature of the bug!

The user on-boarding has greatly improved since our last post so we are far more confident to push for more users now.

The site has been usable for the last couple of months but mostly because we know what buttons to press and how to use it. We knew we had to keep iterating on the UI and processes before being usable by the masses.

We are now at that stage, even though we will continue to iterate.

We will now start to actively get paying customers!

We have so many features to work through on our storyboard but also want to be guided by our customers on what to prioritise / add features we never thought we needed.

We really wanted to get the MVP out the door within a month. On all our other products we made the classic mistake of hiding away for too long, waiting on 'just 1 more feature' before launching.

Well, it's taken 4 months! We did lose a month for various reasons though.

So what have we been up to?

1. Choosing a domain name is HARD. We wanted to get this sorted first so that we can claim all relevant accounts on Twitter/Facebook etc and also start the Google juice flowing.

It was a week long process, we came up with plenty of names but you find they are all taken by domain name squatters or the Twitter/Facebook username is taken.

Our site is all about creating dynamic images but we didn't want to limit ourselves in the future by including either of those words in the URL so went with something short and abstract.

2. The logo was a painless process, we used https://www.fiverr.com/ playing on the zest part of the domain name.

3. We started with a proof of concept. Take a specific image, hard code some text onto it and display it from a URL, returning an image.

It turned out that the proof of concept took a lot longer to achieve than we first thought.

We then replaced all the hard coded parts with a simple form and then set to work on the online editor.

At each stage we hit roadblocks and unexpected issues. We just kept breaking the tasks down into smaller, achievable pieces.

We had built various websites over the years and this time knew we wanted to build something for B2B.

We have always read the Indie Hackers newsletter and one day ended up on https://www.indiehackers.com/products

We just started scrolling to see if anything in particular grabbed our attention. Once we had a list of ideas, we looked into the competitors in each space.

This helped us rule some ideas out. We then looked at how long the remaining ideas would take. We really wanted an MVP as soon as possible to start getting feedback.

We also thought about related products that we could expand into / offer to our customers.