Planzer.io
A planning app for individuals. Plan your tasks in one view.
The first user finally converted and opted in for my yearly plan.
After applying multiple features, I've been fighting to convert my first user into a paying user. Listening to the feedback I've received, it finally happened.
Even though it's nothing compared to what I hope to end up with, this is a massive milestone for me. It's the first time someone has paid for a SaaS I've built, and I'm super stoked!
Now it's time to continue to build features people are looking for and keep putting Planzer out there to gain more users.
I'm working on converting my trial into a free forever plan with limitations after getting it recommended by a couple of Indiehackers. Really exciting plans ahead 🙌
Thank you for your support and feedback in here!
I had a goal in August of getting my first paying user, but unfortunately it didn't happen.
But then 2 days ago, I got the first sign up for a yearly plan, and I was stoked.
It's a user who has brought a lot of feedback, and a lot of relevant and great suggestions so I just offered the best service possible, developed fast the features I agreed on, the rest I added to the voting board.
It all ended up with him signing up as the first paying user, I am so excited. Finally things are going a little bit my way. Now on to the next!
I've been building on Planzer.io for soon 2 months. Functionality wise I've not been building a lot lately. I've primarily been focused on attracting users and, more importantly, paying users.
Now it's a bit dangerous that I have built this much without a paying user, I'm aware, as a paying user shows product market fit.
That said, I've reached 200 users, and I'm super excited. My goal for August is, however, 1 paying customer, so still, a long way to go. Here is how I've done so far:
First, before I released my MVP, I had a simple landing page where people could sign up pre-launch. Here I managed to assemble around 80 emails. These 80 emails came from paid Ads. I tried it all:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Reddit Ads
- Twitter Ads
- Quora Ads
Ultimately it was Google and Facebook ads that drove the conversions.
After my launch, I kept my ads on, I changed them, of course, because now I had launched, but I had a steady stream of a couple of sign-ups a day.
After some weeks, I turned off the ads, there were no paying customers, and people didn't use the product on a daily/weekly basis.
I built some more integrations, as that's what Planzer.io is all about, and then I started on cold outreach.
I started being active on Twitter. Helping everywhere I could and simply being as helpful a resource as possible.
The next step was to start cold outreach. I then wrote to 20 different Freelancers in the hope of creating a focus group of people who would help me build up the product.
I got some replies, but people didn't have time. It was my first time doing cold outreach, so I learned a lot. I will do it again, but with a different approach.
Being helpful and active on Twitter and other social media has brought in most of my sign-ups. Super interesting.
But the big problem. People are still not paying. I know this is not a simple problem that we can just point the finger on and say that is the reason. There are multiple elements in it.
Right now, except for doing outreach, I'm listening to what the users/customers are saying and then making a list of things.
But I would love to hear your approach. Have you been at this point, and if so, what did you change to get people to stick to your product and make them want to pay for it?
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thanks for sharing your learning @phillipstemann.
"and people didn't use the product on a daily/weekly basis." seems to be the most concerning to me rather than getting paid customer. What kind of time they are spending on your app? ideally they should be spending atleast 2-3 hours daily in your app as the data from all the other apps is integrated in your app. My suggestion would be to dig deeper into this if they are not spending time in your app than where are they spending time on? and integrate that app data to planzer.io. Or may be they are not that busy at all that they need the app? if that is the case than it looks like a wrong segment of customers. my suggestion is to investigate this bit more and not worry much about getting paid customer if your customer is using the app daily and it is sticky something can be found out to get them converting to paid user.
Can you elaborate more on your cold out reach learning what you did and what you would do differently?
also which sm channel worked best for you? twitter?(non ad based) -
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That's a pickle. Your main issue seems to be conversion and possible root cause is this, as already identified by pdyc:
people didn't use the product on a daily/weekly basis
You have to understand why that is. If people are not using a productivity tool like this on a daily basis, that (possibly) means that they are not getting value out of it.
But I am a bit fixated on this:
The next step was to start cold outreach. I then wrote to 20 different Freelancers in the hope of creating a focus group of people who would help me build up the product.
I got some replies, but people didn't have time. It was my first time doing cold outreach, so I learned a lot. I will do it again, but with a different approach.
Are you making cold outreach to people who are not using your product? If so, please stop there and reach out to people who have initiated a free trial and understand why they don't use and engage with the product. You have to solve that first, before trying to get more people on board. Either your product or funnel is broken and you won't get any new conversions with just generating new leads at this point.
Meet with these trial users (over zoom, over a coffee, whatever) and try to understand:
- What do they think this product does when they saw the ads,
- What do they think this product does when they sign up,
- Why didn't they continue to use it,
- What was their experience while onboarding or using it,
- What seems to be the "gap" between what they think it does and their actual experience?
These are the questions for you which should somehow let you understand the peripherals of the root cause. Practically, those questions are for you and you need to practically ask a lot of "why" to the trial users to understand their experience and their lack of engagement.
I assume your problem is mainly about customer success. But this might not be the case and you might have a lead quality/unalignment problem.
You also have a lot of marketing related issues around your product, visible from your website. But that is a later problem.
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Thank you, this was super helpful! I'll definitely start trying to manually reach out to some of my trial users.
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I've curated an Airtable of different growth strategies from Indie founders.
I believe you can find some strategies unde "Pre-sales" and "Monetization" from other indie hackers to help you with converting free users to paid.
You can download it for free. Cheers and all the best!
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I feel you. I was building for roughly a year (part-time though) before I got my first paying customer. I am also doing lots of similar things like you (lots of focus on paid ads e.g.) so I definitely can relate.
What I realised after a while is that my targeting was off. Initially I was targeting too small companies (< 15 people, startups). The interests were good (e.g. interest in new solutions, SaaS-affinity and early adopters), but the budget was not. Small companies simply did not buy.
When I managed to finetune my targeting to larger companies this changed and I started getting better conversions. I still attract and have companies with < 15 people, but the ones that are very likely to convert are those with ca. 30-50 employees.
Additionally my recommendation would be that you test out different locations: I had zero success with my Google Ads in DE and the DACH region, even other EU countries. But in the US and other English-speaking countries the situation is different (e.g. much more open to try out new SaaS). I now have customers on 4 continents, most of them in the US and still 0 in Germany. Maybe your case is similar?
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Really interesting, thanks for sharing your experience. May I ask what your product is? I recently launched a new company and want to make sure we are targeting the appropriate markets.
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I am building Daito (https://www.daito.io/), a web-based 2FA Authenticator for small and large teams. Securely and easily manage and share 2FA tokens with others. No phone needed.
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Really interesting. I have thought about changing the target group to only target freelancers. Planzer.io is not for teams, but for individuals at the moment. Maybe I should try that 🤔
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I did not check the site or the product in detail, but my initial impression was that this is a SaaS targeted at teams and companies. I don't know any freelancer that has the issue of multiple apps & planning systems, but I know and heard of lots of companies where each team has their own tool and thus managers are constantly switching between tools. (Just an idea though)
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Had a look at your product.
There is no way that I could truly evaluate your product in 14 days, sorry, I'm busy everyday building product. Some times I take weeks to reply to emails, nevermind getting a baseline on a new app/ product. Any productivity gains / losses from your app would only show up after a while of usage.Also, I use ipados notes or paper as my primary task manager, as I don't trust 3rd party apps. Then I switch to some third party app to build tickets etc. for the teams.
So the TLDR, 14 days it too short, and does your app give benefits to people who alreay have their own ways of doing things.?
Cheers
Jacques (Jaaki)-
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Interesting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
At the moment I don't feel it brings enough value, I'm working on this though.
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Try add a sandbox demo to the landing page? I'd love to try what Planzer is before signing up. That probably leads to more sign up and more chance of getting paid users.
By the way, curious what channels you used to attract uers?
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Yea, I have this as an idea also. I'll see if it makes sense.
I've mainly used Twitter and Facebook/Google Ads to attract users. -
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I thought about this too but since the issue is not the sign ups but rather converting to paid users, I am guessing this is a non-issue, at least, for the moment. A sandbox demo might reduce the number of sign ups to possibly only to people who are really interested in the tool. Which has its own benefit but not exactly the problem OP is trying to solve right now.
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As I understand, you have a 14 day trial before Planzer forces an upgrade.
Have you thought about converting to a freemium model or increasing the trail time? Maybe this would help bind users more effectively as they have accustomed to using the product and too invested more time and effort in setting it up. Having users locked in, they have a greater motivation to upgrade.
Take note taking apps like Notion as an example: After users have curated a good amount of notes, they are virtually locked into the product. They customarily are based on freemium models because reaching lock in effect takes time. If they would use a short trial, they created only few assets with little effort, hence are much more likely to leave.
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This could be interesting. To maybe lock the number of tasks they could add, and maybe some features as well, and then when they're invested in the product, they feel the need to upgrade. I'll think about this. Thank you for sharing your opinion.
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Indeed! The only hard part is balancing it right so that users can enjoy freemium for a long enough time but naturally hit the boundaries which leads to conversion.
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Your answer is likely something I was reading from Trends.vc .
Freemium and then locking some functionality which clients have to upgrade to unlock.-
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Very much possible. You can read about Freemium on a lot of channels as it's a common business model.
There are even more approaches like Freemium with advertisement, selling user data or leverage a Freemium product as promotion for other paid services of you portfolio.
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Hey Phillip, thank you for sharing your journey! I'm amazed you build the product only within 2 months, and the concept reminds me of Acapela(https://acapela.com/).
I tried signing up with your product and noticed that the onboarding workflow doesn't include the integration with other apps. So, the first view after the onboarding looks like a regular to-do app. I think this can lead to bouncing users after onboarding.
So, I suggest updating the onboarding and integrating the apps during the onboarding process.
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This is an excellent point, Hiro. Thank you so much! I need to implement this right away. Thank you for sharing Acapela. I was not aware of that product.
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Really great reflections, thanks for sharing. I was able to overcome this experience at my first startup, Easy EMDR (https://www.easy-emdr.com/). We were in the same situation as you, hundreds of free users but very few (close to zero) paying. In our case, we talked to our users to ask them what they wanted to see, and then build out those specific requests. Eventually our platform became more attractive as a result, and started spreading by word of mouth. Now we have hundreds of paying users and aquire more fairly regularly. It took about 8 months to start really gaining some traction.
I am in the process of trying to do this with my new company, Collab Spot. We'll see how it goes! How long ago did you start planzer?
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Ad others said, try to figure out why the 200 users did not sign up to premium. What did they expect, what did they get? And how many of those 200 logged in let's say at least five times?
Maybe try a lifetime deal only on your website. Raise the monthly price again to 8$ and offer a 49$ ltd. Maybe the fear of missing out FOMO brings some first active and paying users?
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You should watch YC startup school content, they advise against trials
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I feel your pain. I am not a big fan of the trial period offer and opted to go with the freemium business model for fabform.io .
Our problem now is trying to get the users to convert to paid users. The struggle is real!
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Yea, this is so true. Please let me know how it goes with the freemium model. I would love to hear it.
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I'd like to try this out, but have been unable to signup with G Suite. Once I perform the social authentication, I'm back at the signup page. Could you look into it?
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I was not aware of this. Can you do me a big favour, and make a recording of it and email me? ps@planzer.io
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How was your experience with Quora ads?
Can you say more about it?-
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I feel I didn't explore it enough but based on my exploration, you can get cheap clicks, and you have great targeting options. I did get 2 conversions, and I spent around USD 30.
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Can you track functionalities trust are most frequently used? If so make them premium so existing free users will be pushed to start paying.
I have a similar problem with my app: 2k free users and 67 paying users. I don’t track their activities but based on comments and emails I got, I realized that I have too many free functions in the app. So in the next update I will start making some of those free functions into premium. See if that boosts conversions.
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No, I can't. Do you have software that does this? Or a method to build it myself? I would love to!
That's super interesting, thank you for sharing.
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I posted on various subreddits and FB forums related to my app asking for feedback. People commented and 2 functions were mentioned the most. This is how I think, I can identify which free functions to convert to premium. I haven’t released latest app update so don’t know if this is the way to go.
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That's awesome, I need to get on Reddit, it seems. Thank you for sharing.
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Exact same point as you working on ruby on rails jobs. Let's keep pushing
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Yea, just keep on going, at one point it will hopefully turn 🚀
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Probably needs more integrations. Monday, Jira, Redmine, ...
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I have Monday.com - But I think you're right. I have some requests on ClickUp and Jira.
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Are they active users? Your landing pages don't really show your product, so I could see people signing up just to find out what your product looks like, then bouncing.
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ice
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Landing page looks great. How did you build it?
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Thanks a lot. I used Webflow for it. The first time, I just bought a theme and customised it to my style.
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I don't see how it's any better than Calendar/Google which I've been using happily for over a decade.
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Hello great write up.
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Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.
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Thanks for bringing this post up. I just launched a bootstrapped product a few days ago - https://hire.win
It's an Applicant Tracking System with Flat Pricing (Unlimited Jobs & Unlimited Users).
Can anyone let me know where I should focus my paid Ad Campaigns as I am really tight on budget.
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Do you have a free Plan that they still use this? On the Website i see just the Pro Variant. Or are they maybe all still on the Free Trial?
For me it was a bit another Situation since i had already 2000-3000 active Weekly users when i started to charge for a Premium Version. But i had also a free Trial of 7 Days so they just started for Paying after it.
From the Price Point i see you make a really good offer for just 3$ a Month so i don't think this is the Problem.
Are the users who make an Account leaving it after the 14 days Trial? Do you gather such statistics?
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I actually disagree with the price point being good. I look at this and think, if it's only valued at $3 it's probably crap. $5-$8 even feels better imo.
Keep up the good work, dude
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I have a 14-day free trial. And then the product locks after that.
Yes, I recently lowered the price until I start to get some traction with paid users.
I don't know when in the period of the 14 days the leave no.
I tried to implement a daily email that overviews of yesterday's solved tasks and tasks to tackle today. To try and get them back into the platform.
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What was your first price?
Well you should use some tracking to see what they are doing a bit. I have a Tracking to see when they Start and Stop a Swipe so i know a bit if they use my Product.
So you can then also create some charts if they leave your service after some time.
And somehow to gather infos why they leave. I also try to get this now with a feedback form when they Uninstall my Extension. You could do this when you notice that they are not active after x Days.
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My price before was USD 8 and USD 10.
What software do you use for this? Or did you build it yourself?I have tried to setup an email flow, but the response rate is low.
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For the Stats i use mixpanel.com where i am still on the free plan :) and for the Feedback i use now jotform.com. I wanted to use Typeform but it's so expensive... so i can't really afford it for my Extension.
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That's awesome, thank you for sharing. I'll check out Mixpanel.
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I just launched my first website built in Webflow for Planzer.io
I would love to get some feedback from you, both the copywriting makes sense and explains the product well.
But also the overall UX of the website, is it easy to navigate around?
Thank you so much in advance, I really appreciate it.
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Its looks great but I feel you could benefit from screenshots of the product or a video using it. I personally really like how https://conjure.so/ did it.
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Thank you so much for the suggestion, it's duly noted :-)
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Thank you! I I’m James, the guy building https://conjure.so and a fellow indie hacker. I poured far too much time into recording and editing that video, particularly the iPhone overlay part :)
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Hi.., the website looks great ...however, I do have a few observations..
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It's a tad too long a scroll.
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The hero section looks slightly less worked upon design wise. A slight pattern or may be some element to accentuate the hero section might help in keeping 0.000something percent of people clued till the next section
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A rhetoric question like "Want to make your life simpler by planning your tasks and managing your projects?" in the hero section may help you connect the user's problem with your solution.
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Also maybe you may consider the floating menu which will keep you CTA in view. Or alternatively keep the CTA in between the spread as well
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Your 'Features' and 'Use Cases' have different hover action. Is it intended ?
These are some of the things that I could quickly summarize. Just my opinion though.
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Thank you so much Kaus. Very useful, and I truly do appreciate it.
Thank you for taking your time. I'll make these changes. :-)
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Hey Philipp, great work here, love the aesthetic overall.
Only on my cell rn, so can’t check things with dev tools. One thing I noticed is the width on the goal module section seems to be off for mobile.
I agree with Kaus2122 about the floating menu, seems like a more user-friendly approach in this case.
Keep it up, tons of good feedback here!
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Thank you so much for this. I need to get that fixed.
Have a wonderful Sunday.
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Bad: websites built with Webflow are very slow, so I'll ignore this issue for now.
There are a few things I can suggest you add to your blog posts.
Table of Content (TOC)
Subscribe Us Section
Breadcrumbs
I personally really like how https://princemodapk.com/ did it.-
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Thank you so much for the suggestion, I really agree with the table of content part 🙌
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Hi Phillip,
You have created an astonishing website.
I must say, it is impressive. The website speed is nice.
There are a few things I can suggest you add to your blog posts.
- Breadcrumbs
- Table of Content (TOC)
- Subscribe Us Section
By the way, one thing I need to know, Is Webflow better than WordPress?
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I really agree with the Table of Content. Thank you for mentioning this!
Webflow is not better than WordPress yet, in my opinion.
WordPress has many great plugins, which are much more optimised than Webflow at this point. Though Webflow is slowly getting closer and closer, there is still a long way to go both UX-wise and optimisation-wise.
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Love it! Very simple, which is a plus.
Maybe speed up the animations when you scroll, they're a bit slow for my taste :)GL tho!
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Hey Philip, I made a quick screen share for you. Hope this helps. https://a.cl.ly/12uLnDjO
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Wow, Jason, I feel so honoured that you spent time making a video for me. 🙏
Super helpful tips you've come up with. It's so awesome. I've realised I need to work a lot on my copy.
Thank you so much for highlighting the issues and taking the time.
I do have a Monday.com integration, and I just had to pull it back because of some issues. It'll be live again very soon.
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It looks same as i saw it yesterday? Visually it looks good.
Who is your audience? is it the people who are deciding between which planning app to use? or the people who are already using several apps and need one stop app to get data from your services.
Your copy as it stands today is catering to the first categary of people. I think your app is really valuable to second categary of people however although it is shown in the diagram that multiple services are present as integrations that is not coming out as a central message right now to me. I am not a copywriter and i don't know how to make it such that both the points are highlighted.
Also add video to demonstrate the app.
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It is yes, I just didn't share it publicly in a post, I thought today was the day 😅
My audience which I'm focusing on right now are freelancers. I've worked as a freelancer myself and I know what a hurdle it is when every client is using different project management tools.
And as there aren't team functionality in it, that's why I'm focusing on building a planning app for individuals here and now.
You're absolutely right I need to work on my copywriting.
The video demonstration app is duly noted.
Thank you so so much for your feedback!
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Hi,
I liked your website, Very neat and clean design.
Easy to understand contents.Suggestion:
Reduce empty space between sections. (Lots of blank space)
An explainer video is also missing - (there are lots of people like me who prefer to watch videos)
Add testimonials-
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Thank you for your feedback. I need to take a look at the whitespace.
Explainer video I completely agree.For the testimonials I would love to, but I don't have any paying customers at the moment, so no one to ask yet. But hopefully soon! :-)
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Hey Phillip! Great idea I must admit;) Happy to leave my 5 cents here:
- I am not sure if it's to do with my screen's resolution, but I have quite a few large gaps between the blocks, which take up almost half of the screen: between 'plan your work' button and 'track your progress' block, between 'track your progress' and 'integrations' blocks, and between 'goal module' and 'articles' blocks (unfortunately cannot attach screenshots here). It just looks like A LOT of white/blank space to me. It's very subjective though!
- You have two CTAs in the hero block, which are 'Get Started' and 'Start planning your day', and the only time I see any mention about '14 days free trial' is a small button in the very very end of the landing page. I would personally change 'Start planning your day now' to 'Start your 14 days free trial now' --> people want to see that right-away, imho.
- The very first sentence that pops in front of my eyes is the main catch-phrase 'Best planning app for individuals'. I am no copy-writing guru, but I am not sure if there is a need to put emphasis on the words 'for individuals'. I would probably leave it as 'Your best planning app', or I would use words that describe value added by your product, such as 'All in one planning app', 'Tasks aggregator', etc. Something that would make me realize right away that your app enables me to connect/integrate my other apps, such as notion, trello, outlook.
Hope it helps! Best of luck!:)
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Thank you, and thank you so much for your feedback.
The whitespacing I've hear some times now, so I definitely need to change that.
Thank you for the CTA suggestion. I need to try and A/B test that, you might be very right!
Yes again you're right. Copywriting is not one of my strengths, I need to find someone to help me here.
Thank you so so much, it's very valuable!
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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Thank you so much.
And thank you for the feedback. The reason for Planzer.io is because Planzer has a patent on the name as far as I'm aware.
I couldn't agree more about the copywriting. It's definitely something I need to improve drastically.
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After working as a Freelancer for many years, I've tried numerous project management software. There are a lot of great ones, and I often found one I liked, my problem though was that my clients all used different project management software.
I wanted to have one view where I could see all my clients tasks for me, and then be able to plan it all in one view so I just had to focus on one app instead of 10 different ones.
This was the reason why I built Planzer.io back then, and continues to improve it and make it the best planning app for individuals.
6 Comments
Congratulations, I hope you'll be more successful, more earn, and get more achievements also I've inspected your product, and it looks really good but maybe you should increase the upload quota, that's looking a little restrictive. I liked your pricing as simple and easily understandable, maybe you should add one more package like an increased upload quota.
Good luck !
Thank you for the feedback, I'll take this into consideration 🙌
Congrats
Thank you so much 🙌
Congratulations Phillip. You'll never forget this moment, so make sure you enjoy it well enough!
Thank you Bart, you're absolutely right 🙌