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38 Comments

First paying customer!

Even though pinger is still in beta, I got first paying customer!

At first this guy provided me very detailed feedback, even including technical stuff. Then, after maybe a week he bought a subscription. And it was kind of surprise because when providing a feedback he told me that it was kind of expensive.

I asked him why did he buy subscription then and he told me in order to support me.

Moreover he's moving from statuscake to my service ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

After then I rushed into coding and fixing stuff, it really motivates me ! :)

  1. 8

    Nice milestone Victor! ๐Ÿ‘ Cool that the customer was willing to give honest feedback aswel. Thatโ€™s true value for growth! ๐Ÿš€

    1. 1

      Thank you!

  2. 2

    Congrats on the milestone! If you don't mind me asking - I have a couple of ideas that always fail at the step "is there already someone doing this & doing this better than I could by myself?". Pinger is in a really tough company, and while you can claim you have better UX or better features at a price point, how do you find the motivation to continue developing this next to the likes of StatusCake which looks nice, has a generous FREE tier & has a whole company working on the literally the same tool? I don't mean this post as a critique, I'm honestly jealous that people like you start working on stuff like this and continue despite the market competition. Good look in the future development of the product!

    1. 2

      Thanks for your comment!

      Yeah, you know, for some reason this is the first time in my life when I don't lose motivation. Imagine that I've been building Pinger for like 800 hours (~9 months).

      I'm motivated because:

      1. I really wanted to make my own product, since the products I do at my full-time job, I cannot affect them, I cannot build them the way I see things.
      2. I want to make more money and I don't know how. I mean, not just another +20% of salary, or a side tasks at freelance job. I need way more money, because...
      3. I have some things that I love and they are expensive. I really want to buy a house for example. Now, you may wonder, how can such a product give me so much money?
      4. I found some open stats from my competitors. Most of them are products built by 1-2 persons. And they have quite good MRR. For me, even getting $1-2k is quite good. Now, $2k * year = $24k. And this is from one product, I'm not going to stop here :)
      5. Even though there are way too much competitors, the market is validated: people use this. And you have like billions of sites. So there are enough customers. Moreover, for example, one of my competitor got 3000$ MRR, mediocre product and he's alright. And yes, this is uptime monitoring service.

      After all, this is interesting, I believe that if I build something good, sooner or later people start to use it.

  3. 2

    Awesome work Victor.

    I am still trying to find an idea to work on. Your story and more stories like this has inspired me to dig deeper.

    I have a client who is constantly asking me to keep an eye on his sites to see if they go offline, so I might point this app to him.

    Cheers

    1. 1

      Oh thank you, your kind words keep my motivation. Right now working on this, even though it's 1 AM :)

      Even though it's still in beta, I'd be glad to get any feedback or some feature requests!

  4. 2

    Kudos to this customer and congrats to you!

  5. 2

    Thatโ€™s awesome, Victor!

    Iโ€™m curious to know more about your beta and feedback process as Iโ€™m at the same stage :)

    Are you onboarding users one at a time and then they gave you this feedback? How does it work?

    1. 1

      Well, I got some of them in telegram, twitter, indiehackers. I just asked them to register and check it out.

      I also posted in PH in discussions topic, and some of them just gave me valuable feedback.

      So generally speaking I only asked people I know, others provided feedback without me asking them

      1. 1

        Thanks for that. So I guess you sent people to your site to sign up asking them for feedback and then one of them ended up paying?

        1. 1

          Yes, exactly :)

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  6. 2

    thats amazing! what was your payment model during beta?

    1. 1

      It's just a regular subscription, I think I'll stick to the plans I chosen but later on I'll increase number of monitors, as soon as I finish some refactoring.

      Since indeed it might be expensive, but the reason I allow such small number of monitors because I have some problems in backend :) As soon as I fix it I'll consider increasing limits, while keeping the same subscription model

  7. 2

    Must be so satisfying and motivating at the same time.

    I am almost getting anxious how will i get my first paying customer.

    Congratulations man. Keep up the good work.

    1. 1

      Thank for your kind words!

      Yesterday I saw a money refund message in email, almost got heart attack, but it was some kind of VAT refunding, not churn :)

      1. 1

        Haha! I can understand the sentiment.

        Cheers Victor!

  8. 2

    ๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿ‘

  9. 2

    Congratulations, that's an inspiring milestone. Keep it up.

  10. 2

    Nice work. And what great validation to have your first customer give you feedback AND pay for your service. They are a keeper. You never forget your first customer. Treat them like Gold and they will be your evangelist too!

  11. 2

    Congrats!

  12. 2

    That's really inspiring Victor. Hell ya!!! I'm working on something with the dream of getting a customer in the next 2 months as I'm almost about to finish my alpha version mvp. Just like that person motivated you, I'm feeling the same way reading this.

  13. 2

    Congrats! So happy for you! IMO Thereโ€™s nothing more amazing as a creator than knowing someone is willing to do business with you.

  14. 2

    Congratulations, Victor! ๐Ÿ™Œ Thatโ€™s amazing to hear, and itโ€™s wonderful that youโ€™re actively talking to your users and learning from them. Theyโ€™re a great source of external motivation.

    Keep up the great work, and excited to hear how things go with Pinger!

    1. 2

      Thank you Amy for your kind words :)

      Woah, I've just checked your milestones in ProfitKit, this is how one should write them!

      1. 1

        No problem, and thank you! Lately Iโ€™ve been thinking of our milestones as mini blog posts haha. Iโ€™ve been trying to explain the milestone, how it happened, the struggles we faced, and what we learned ๐Ÿ˜€

        But for what itโ€™s worth, I donโ€™t think thereโ€™s any set way to write a milestone!

  15. 2

    Wow this is incredible. It is a very powerful motivation when people:

    • give detailed feedback
    • and then actually buy

    I started focusing exclusively on customer reach from this week. I spent last 40 ish days building groundwork. But I got lots of advice to more to validation, discovery, etc even though the product is a slightly hard sell (B2B). Great to see you getting customers, true inspiration.

  16. 2

    Great news! Well done

  17. 2

    Very nice. I tried Pinger and it is very smooth and elegant.
    Congratulations.

    1. 2

      Happy to see you here! :)

  18. 2

    Your landing page is very nice, very useable easy to understand. What did you use to build it.

    Where did you get your first paying customer from.

    1. 1

      I made it on my own, from scratch.

      I get the customer from product hunt's topic of weekly support =)

  19. 2

    Great news! Iโ€™m not surprised youโ€™ve got motivation boost ๐Ÿš€

    1. 1

      Thank you!

  20. 2

    That is great. Instant product validation right there!

    May I ask, what is your USP as there are a load of services out there.

    1. 2

      I'll make a page related to the USP, since it's a big topic, I'll share it with you as soon as I have it :)

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

        1. 1

          Agreed. I'll think about it

          But you know, some products tend to have a page where they compare their product with alternatives. I meant I want to have something like this.

  21. 1

    Amazing! Congratulation on the milestone.

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