palabra
A no-code tool for your automated emails
So happy to share with this community that today I got my first paying customer. A while ago I started a series of posts where I shared my daily updates with the goal of getting to my first paying customer and today's that day. It's been exactly 112 days since that first post.
I thought I'd share the things I think I learned along the way that got me here:
- Real iterations. This is my third iteration. The app actually looks completely different today than it did back then. I rewrote it from scratch 3 times. This third time I decided to use a component library which made everything much faster on the frontend. It helped me with design (I'm not a designer) and with launching new features faster. I was also able to structure my DB better than before because of what I learned from the iterations.
- I'm building for others, not for me. Of course, I am my first user, but it really got interesting when I started hearing what others needed. I improved things fast watching how my users were using the app. I focused obsessively on the onboarding flow. Another thing that was fundamental this time was the in-app chat (I'm using Crisp). Talking to users and fixing issues as they come up has helped with retention a lot.
- I designed for the new user first. On my previous iterations, when designing the screens I would start with what the app looked like with a lot of contacts/emails sent. The onboarding of a new user was an afterthought. As a result, I think people didn't understand what they needed to do when they first got into the app. I started with the onboarding this time and I kept improving it obsessively until people got to understand the value of the tool faster.
- Deep knowledge of my market. When I started working on this I didn't really know much about the market. Today I know of absolutely every other tool that does something similar, I know what they do wrong and what they don't do at all. That gave me new ideas, I think, about things that could be created that I couldn't have had before because I didn't know enough about the market.
- I know why someone would pay for the upgraded version. The features that came with my upgraded version back then were a bit blurry and I wasn't really sure someone would pay for them. Today the value they get is much clearer: you can remove our footer from the emails and use your own email address to send messages (as well as email more contacts).
Hope these ideas help someone. This is the app I'm building: https://palabra.io
Happy to share with this wonderful community that a friend is joining me as a co-founder. She's an amazing person and has a lot of experience in many things that matter (like talking to people, product, and working like a beast!).
We are also looking to hire our first dev! More on this soon :)
After 6 months of work and 3 pivots (this is actually my last pivot and been working on it for 4 weeks), we are live on Product Hunt!
We are focusing on helping people send sequences of emails easily, automated or not, something that most email mktg tools make very hard to do.
I would really appreciate your upvote!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/palabra
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@keyserfaty Looks great. Upvoted on Product Hunt.
Very happy to share with this community that after a month or so of participating in the pioneer.app tournament we were selected as winners.
That means we get mentorship from some of the wiser people on the industry like Superhuman's founder Rahul Vohra or Daniel Gross himself.
We also get 100k in AWS credits which couldn't come at a better time.
Our app: palabra.io
If you have any questions about Palabra or Pioneer I'm happy to help :)
Wasn't expecting to post it on PH for some days but today we started receiving a lot of signups out of the blue and I realized someone hunted our new product: Forms.
If you tried it would love to hear your thoughts!
This week I launched a new newsletter aimed at Indie Hackers who know nothing about marketing: Marketing for Indie Hackers.
I got 130 subscribers on the first 4 days of sharing it online in a couple of places (mostly here, Hackers News and Reddit). A third of the subscribers came from HN, so that's a good thing to note for the future. I don't usually post things there.
Now it's time to deliver! You can subscribe here if you want.
After reading and listening to all content under the sun on how to market a bootstrapped project I decided to share some of these insights with others.
I'm not a fan of consultants with zero experience telling you how to run a startup so the approach of this newsletter will be to share industry experts' content on the subject.
But like, digested, organized into topics content on the subject.
👉 You can subscribe here if you are interested!
It never feels like its the right time to rewrite a whole app but since I went through a couple of pivots the codebase and the design were all over the place.
I decided to invest a week of dev time rebuilding the frontend from scratch and I think it paid off. I'm using React/Apollo and Evergreen for my components, which made it much faster to do everything and the app has a corporate look I like.
The app is much faster now and loading states/errors are well handled so it gives feedback to the user, which it didn't do before.
Would really appreciate comments from the community :)
App: http://app.palabra.io/ (👈 the one I rewrote)
Website: https://www.palabra.io/?ref=indie
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This looks super clean, very Notion-esque ! A couple of things that might be worth looking at:
- The icons above each of the three horizontal points (List of Users, Connect Data Source, Compose Emails) are very low contrast to the background and not very big. The wording of these points is also inconsistent: noun, action, action.
- The blanking out of e-mail addresses on the "List of Users" looks messy (this is a very personal opinion) - could you provide a mockup with very obviously fake addresses?
- The highlight of "jane@email.com" had me thinking I had somehow highlighted the text
- Your copyright notice in the footer is still 2019
- The contrast on "Getting Started is Easy" is pretty low - with white on cream in some places
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Hi! Thanks for your feedback. Just updated the post to make it more clear that the rewrote was of the app, not the landing page. But thank you very much anyway for your feedback! This is the link of the app in case you want to give it look: http://app.palabra.io/
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🤦♀️
Glad it was useful though
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
After giving it some thought it seemed to me that it was time to refresh the website. The old version didn't explain our most important features clearly enough.
I'm a bit scared that the landing page is now overly promising and the truth is at least 1 or 2 features are still a work in progress. But I thought it would be a good way to validate the roadmap for the next month.
How do you feel about the new landing page?
Do you understand what we do?
Do you need a tool like this?
Website: https://www.palabra.io/?ref=indie
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I don't know what you do, there's a lot of talk about connecting apps but I don't know what benefits are being offered.
I don't think I understand what it is that makes you such a good tool.
There are lots and lots of ways of syncing data between tools, I can almost always go to Zapier if needed.
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Hey, thanks for the feedback. We just updated some of the text on the page. Could you take a look and see if it's more clear now?
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Still miles away.
Try this as an exercise, open up PPT or Google Slides and try to answer these on each slide but you are only allowed ONE image and a limited amount of text per slide, forget the design just focus on answering each question.
- What problem do you solve?
- How do you solve it?
- What makes you bettttter/awweeeesome?
- Other benefits/problems you solve?
- What do I need to do next?
Pet peeve of mine, I'm all on Office 365, I see soo many apps that focus entirely on G Suite and exclude 365 so you are already ruling out a pretty large user base.
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Hey, thank you very much. Your comments have been very useful. Would you mind taking a look again? https://www.palabra.io/?ref=indie
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Your page title needs more text on it :) That's the title you'll have on your Google SERPs, social media shares ... And all it has now is "palabra".
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How do you feel about the new landing page?
Looks pretty standard. The white space is a bit all over the place, feels like nothing is aligned vertically as it should. Also I don't like that the hero text keeps changing, I start reading it and then it suddenly disappears.
Also the stripe/hubspot logos look like buttons, they have a similar flat style to the "create account" button.Do you understand what we do?
Send an email to subscribers who are on a free plan
Not really.
I assume it's an email marketing tool, where you can send emails to specific segments, but I don't understand what's the USP (unique selling point).Do you need a tool like this?
Not yet, I only need to send newsletters when I make updates to my mailing list, I don't understand how palabra helps me more with that than MailChimp already does.-
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Hey, I really appreciate your comments. I made some changes based on some of the feedback. Would you take a look? https://www.palabra.io/?ref=indie
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The above the fold section is pretty barebones and has no visuals, so that could certainly be improved. The CTA is also kinda confusing, maybe go with a more standard one. Also Breffni has a great point, you should try and focus more on what differentiates your service from others.
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Hey, thank you very much. The hero section has a visual actually, I'm wondering if you are seeing the same thing that I am. In any case, we made some big changes on the landing page over the weekend, would you care to take a look? https://www.palabra.io/?ref=indie
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Seems like on medium width you can't see the illustration on the right. The explainers are way better now and i think the whole page communicates information more clearly now.
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After 19 days of development (since last big pivot) the beta version of the app is finally out: https://www.palabra.io/?ref=indie
I decided to make it open to the public, instead of waiting to have more features. I hope that, by watching how the users interact with the app and their feedback, I can adjust the roadmap for what's next.
I sent an email to my list of subscribers (the people who had registered to try the app when it was ready) and 2 registered on the first few hours 🎉
My next milestone is to get my first paying customer 🙂.
In numbers:
- 🕹 558 people visited the landing page
- 📩 17 subscribed to try the beta
- ❤️ 2 users registered to use the beta on the first day
Dev time:
- 94 days since my first commit
- 19 days after pivot
1 Comment
Thank you for this valuable insights!