OTPfy
Securing Applications
📣 It's official, we're launching our Discord server so you can ask any questions and have real-time support from our team, and also share feedback with us so we can always improve and get better each day!
Don't be shy, come say hello 👋
#ios #iphone #mobile #application #startup #android #ipad #development #google #apple #javascript #reactnative #startuplife #security #onetimepassword #otp #auth #2fa #buildinpublic
✨ We also have other great news! We are incredibly happy to announce that we have released our latest and more performant and optimized website and web application!
We have taken it to the next level thanks to Vercel and Nextjs 13 🔥 Thanks to the new app folder, we have introduced the benefits of ReactJS Server Components and made the development process so delightful and the migration was almost effortless. Now we have everything structured in a way that's meaningful and efficient ⚡
Our lighthouse score has blown away expectations with all these new features: Image, Font, and many other components that are now even better than before!
Go check our newly launched website and let us know what are your thoughts, we really appreciate your feedback!
#ios #iphone #mobile #app #application #startup #android #ipad #development #google #apple #javascript #reactnative #startuplife #security #onetimepassword #otp #auth #2fa #twofactorauthentication
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It looks great, Alex! Very professional and edgy. I'm going to check out OTPfy for a few businesses ...
But hey, if you ever get to the point where you think you'd benefit by having a partner help you with this or other products, I'm currently building MicroPartners - a marketplace where product creators can find and partner with skilled professionals to help turn products into recurring revenue.
I've abandoned more than one product myself, in the past, so I'm trying to help others break the vicious cycle!
Good luck!
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Thank you so much for your words! We will keep an eye on MicroPartners 👀
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Great news from OTPfy! We're utterly happy to announce that we have launched to the market our OTPfy Android application 🥳
This is a fascinating moment as we're reaching a point where we have both applications on the market and we're making it real ✨
With the OTPfy application, your end-users will be able to swiftly and quickly set up the 🔑 Two Factor Authentication for your application. It works seamlessly across iPhone and iPad and your user can switch devices without having to worry about synchronization; only scan your QR again and it works 👌
The best part of it is that this is completely free of charge for you, our client, and also for your clients 😎 As you already know, we only charge for the verifications that you actually perform, so, no need to worry about it.
You, as our client, and your developers (maybe it's just you!) can download the OTPfy application and make use of it to test your 2FA flows by using the Development QR that's available in your OTPfy Dashboard and it will generate One Time Passwords that are free for you to verify without any limits🧑💻 And you will have the close-to-real experience that your users will have using the OTPfy application ✨
Nonetheless, we would like to thank our users and clients who support OTPfy and are making this possible!
If you need help or have any questions related to OTPfy, how it works, or how to implement it in your company/startup, please, reach out to us at any time, don't be shy, we're here to help you 😊
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.otpfy.app
#ios #iphone #mobile #app #application #startup #android #ipad #development #google #apple #javascript #reactnative #startuplife #security #onetimepassword #otp #auth #2fa #twofactorauthentication
At OTPfy we're so happy to announce that we have concluded our TestFlight phase and we have launched to the marked our OTPfy iOS application 🥳
This is a very exciting moment as we're reaching a point that we have dreamed about for so long and we're making it real ✨
With the OTPfy application, your end-users will be able to swiftly and easily set up the 🔑 Two Factor Authentication for your application. It works seamlessly across iPhone and iPad and your user can switch devices without having to worry about synchronization; only scan your QR again and it works 👌
The best part of it is that this is completely free of charge for you, our client, and also for your clients 😎 As you already know, we only charge for the verifications that you actually perform, so, no need to worry about it.
You, as our client, and your developers (maybe it's just you!) can download the OTPfy application and make use of it to test your 2FA flows by using the Development QR that's available in your OTPfy Dashboard and it will generate One Time Passwords that are free for you to verify without any limits🧑💻 And you will have the close-to-real experience that your users will have using the OTPfy application ✨
Nonetheless, we, again, would like to thank our users and clients that support OTPfy and are making this possible!
If you need help or have any questions related to OTPfy, how it works, or how to implement it in your company/startup, please, reach out to us at any time, don't be shy, we're here to help you 😊
PS: The Android application is coming to Google Play soon!
https://apps.apple.com/app/otpfy/id6443760646?platform=iphone
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Read your post.
Still don't know what OTPfy does.
Is it for devs? for businesses? For individual users?
Helps to make that super clear when you are doing content marketing like the above.
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Hello Josh,
Thank you for your words, it’s true that if you read this post as it is, it might not tell you much about what OTPfy does for you.
It’s a SaaS Startup that helps other businesses and/or developers setup 2FA without having to deal with BE and cryptography. The only thing that you need to do is share a QR code that we provide to your end users, they will scan it with OTPfy iOS/Android app and they will be already generating one time passwords that you can later verify with a REST call to our service :)
We will work on better content writting and tweaks to our page so that is clear right away! Thank you!!
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After the launch we were struggling with getting our first subscribing users, we tried to push our marketing investment, and we tried to close lifetime deals as part of the launch campaign no matter how far and hard we tried, we could say that we had successfully failed our initial launch and plans so we went down the hard road and terminate our services after the first year. Let me say that it was so depressing and painful to see all that time and effort go away with just a few clicks, it was heartbreaking and I was about even to quit programming and move into a completely different area and become a Spanish philologist; something hit me hard inside and I didn't feel like I wanted to do this anymore.
But I accepted a new job opportunity in one of the biggest companies that you could possibly work at and I felt back the joy of programming. And after half a year of not thinking about OTPfy, I started thinking about it a lot, and I thought about everything that went wrong in the first place. And the first thing that came to my mind was the monetization and pricing, we did a very bad job in that specific area. Lately, I come to think about it and nobody would ever have paid a flat fee license type of subscription with a monthly commitment if you don't even know if it's going to work for them. We have to think about it more carefully and we came to a conclusion, it's a more friendly approach not having to make our users commit to a subscription, a flat fee, or a monthly commitment; that's when we thought about "pay as you go" with a development environment that's free for you to try and test before switching production.
We invested some time conducting market research about pricing and "pay as you go" sounded like the better approach that we could take for the company, especially if you allow your clients to try it for free in a development environment without any costs.
We also had to reconsider our previous infrastructure, it was too complex for something that should have been simple and straightforward, we wanted to offer One Time Passwords and Two Step Verifications, and that's what we should have offered, but we offered way more than that and allowing users set a huge amount of settings, adjustments and that was way out of scope.
We wanted to keep things simple and straightforward, so we have developed a mobile app for iOS and Android that will allow our clients' end users to scan a QR and then generate One Time Passwords on the fly that later on, our clients could use a simple call to our REST endpoint with their secret token and verify if it's a valid one or not. Everything is encrypted and secured, of course.
As we have stated before, we have created a development environment for our clients so they can test everything before moving to production, and the best part is that everything that you do in this environment is completely free and it works exactly the same as in the production environment, the only difference is the secret token that you will use to generate and verify One Time Passwords. Prior to this we used email to send the One Time Passwords to our clients' end users and this was ok but not that secure as generating them encrypted on our clients' end users devices, plus we didn't have a development environment for testing for free.
We also simplified the accounts system, previously, you'd need to create an account and then you'd be able to add team members that would be able to join and also manage settings. This flow was complex, and we ended up simplifying it to the maximum, right now, there's only one account for everything, this is something that we've seen that is a common thing in many different companies and applications.
Going back to our main pain point of the failure, pricing. We have revamped the pricing model to "pay as you go", and have thought about rewarding commitment so we tiered usage and give a generous discount if our clients reach certain thresholds. Prior to this, we had 3 different licenses that offered different usage limits and prices, but this was not ideal, as we have stated before, nobody wants to commit to a flat fee and not maximizing the usage. Our new pricing starts from 0.08€ per verification, as we only bill verifications and not generations. Our commitment rewards will take down pricing to 0.06€, 0.04€ and 0.02€ respectively per verification, and this sounds much more better and appealing for our clients to commit to a usage volume, or maybe not, you will just pay for what you actually consume, and we're proud of this pricing model that we have setup and we are sure that you'd find it very appealing.
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Thanks for sharing! Could you please add little bit more on how you conducted market research on pricing? What questions you asked and how you validated the answers. I find pricing related MR to be the most challenging part.
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Hey 👋 Sure thing! We searched LinkedIn for potential customers and performed some cold emails/DMs. We asked how they felt about paying a flat fee for a service and if they found these pricing models interesting based on their needs. Most of the time the answer was almost a "no go" for flat fees, the reasoning was that they didn't know if the money invested monthly on the product would be worth it and if they will or will not be able to consume at least 90% of the quota offered by the subscription. I like to think of this as if it was Netflix: will you pay a Netflix subscription if you're only going to consume 1 movie per week? Will you pay for Spotify if you only consume it a few hours a week? Will you pay PlayStation Plus if you're not going to play online?
People that run companies, especially startups, we're not a FAANG that can literally burn money if they wish, want their money well invested, and maximize the cost/value, so, we ended up determining that "pay as you go" is a more efficient cost/value pricing model as you will pay for what you actually consume and not hit a wall reaching any limit or not squishing every value that the flat fee has to offer.
You also have to consider that with this "pay as you go" model, you have to have "cheap" prices but stay competitive and also you should reward your users' commitment by giving them volume discounts. An example for this could be: imagine a Netflix that instead of a flat fee per month, is "pay as you watch", you charge like $1 per each movie that you watch, but the more you user watch, the more you lower the price for that user, you start with $1 per movie but every 10 movies that you watch it will put down the price $0.20 to a minimum of $0.20 per movie. People will actually end up consuming a lot more than with a flat fee, you will have all your users, the ones that consume a lot and the ones that consume little, happy :)
Hope that this could help you 😊
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This is very helpful. Thanks for the detailed answer!
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Nice project you have. I am with you on "pay-as-you-go" pricing model, but as far as I can tell it also depends on the product's nature. We have implemented both "Subscription" and "pay-as-you-go" to test which would be the best performer.
Thanks for your story, it's really motivating 👍
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I'm 100% with you on that!
I'm also very curious about how did you manage to implement both "subscription" and "pay-as-you-go" in the same product, what are the key differences that would make the user switch from "pay-as-you-go" to "subscription"? Is somehow "pay-as-you-go" limiting the user? Does subscription make the pricing cheaper to your end-user compared to the "pay-as-you-go"? Really curious about this!
Looking forward for news about your product!
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Loved the story! Many times, distancing yourself from a problem is needed to go beyond the emotional clouds and see things with clarity.
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Thank you! And indeed it is what it takes, time and distance for and from the problen, always :)
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Really motivating story I have checked out your business and I really love the landing page nice working on the pricing side,
The thing is that you gave yourself time to identify the real problem and worked on it!
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Thank you for your kind words 😊
Time is what most of the things need, you just need to give it for yourself and allow to accept that there’s a problem and you can either work on it to overcome it, or move to other things, the solution will come by itself :)
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Valuable story. It's a story about learning and growing. It's not just a story of failing, but also a story of standing up after failing. It 's a story that teaches everyone about not accepting failure. Thanks for sharing your story.
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Thank you for your words 😊
I think there’s always a positive side when it comes to failing, and it is that you have learned a lesson and you will be able to overcome it easily next time if you give yourself the time that’s needed to recover. Deep inside of me I’ve never accepted that this failure was the end of OTPfy, that I should do something about it but couldn’t find the strength until time have passed and my mind was cleared and ready. I know that it’s going to be hard, but life is not a walk in the park :)
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Thanks for sharing your product experience, really useful for me
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Thank you for your words 😊 I’m glad that I could be helping people out, hard times could knock on your door at any time, but always look at the lessons learned :)
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alex, thanks for sharing. Quick question: did your model include a free tier? or were all plans paid?
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We included a limited free plan and 14 day trial for all other paid plans.
Now we have decided that it’s better to have a completely free development environment that’s fully featured along with the “pay as you go”.
It seems like paid monthly/annual licenses is not a good idea for this kind of SaaS Startups, we learned it the hard way :)
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what a great story! Pay as you go defintely seems like a big improvement. Did you get any customers with it already, or did you speak with some potential customers, and were they happy about it?
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Thank you for your words Dylan! We’re looking for customers and we’re going to be starting with our marketing campaigns and cold emails/DMs (I hope we won’t annoy many people 😅) to reach out for potential customers, and we’re planning to launch the Mobile App later next week but the product is fully working using our REST endpoints available :)
Everyone that we’ve reached out gave us positive feedback about moving from licensing subscriptions to “pay as you go” :)
We’re also looking for our early customers that would like to be the first ones and give feedback and of course have the early founding clients discount!
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It was time to start launching marketing campaigns and I've always loved how ProductHunt works and how it looks and how many awesome products are launched there so I decided that ProductHunt was the platform I wanted to launch at first. After creating all of the media images and introductory article about the product and how it worked, we successfully launched in ProductHunt 🎉 And we currently have 72 upvoters and we're very thankful to every single one of them! 😍
After 3 months of paperwork and going back and forth from government facilities and calls and emails and signatures and banking stuff I finally made it, they took so much time to process all the papers requested by them for the government's approval that I was starting to get very frustrated. And after 3 months, they gave me all the approvals so I can started working as a full business here in Spain 🎉
It was December 2020 when I finished working on the MVP of OTPfy. It was 3 months of full-time non-stop (even weekends! 😱) hard work to develop the entire platform, the OTPs and Magic Links systems, all the security around them and the parts of the application.
I decided that it was ready to see the light but then a more unpleasant and painful task came... bureaucracy! 😰
I had to start registering the company, the idea, the logotype, getting my VAT and Tax IDs and many more stuff that was harder than what I thought initially...
During many years of development for small startups and huge companies there was one task that was repeated over and over and over again, and that was securing application flows with One Time Passwords or authentication with Magic Links.
Securing flows it's always a hard task, you have to consider many options, variables, thinking ahead of time about future product enhancements and all of that it's very exhausting and time consuming. There was no out-of-the-box tool that could help me achieve this and that's why I thought about creating a service that could help many other developers out there to secure their flows with just a few clicks and a few lines of code, so I started thinking and writing and tinkering around with the idea that will later on ended being OTPfy.
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