Qenu

My aim for 2022 was to try do something regularly for my side hustles.

Today I published Qenu on ProductHunt and the feedback has been really positive 😃.

I'm hoping this will increase the exposure and ultimately get people talking about the product via word of mouth.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/qenu

I've received great feedback today for my first ever product post on Indie Hackers and managed to get onto the 'Popular' page 😃.

I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to leave comments and upvote the product. Your comments go along way, and give me motivation to continue hacking and make improvements 🙌.

After being live for a while, I've finally got round to building my web presence. Today I added Qenu to Indie Hackers.

I have been following Indie Hackers from the shadows for sometime, and always aspired to one day have a product on here!
Hopefully it's the first of many products to come, but for now I'm happy with Qenu. I love the UI and UX of Indie Hackers and the transparency provided by being able to connect to Stripe directly 🤯.

The upside of my initial marketing efforts was that I actually acquired my second paying subscriber (outside of my family 😅) on July 11 2021 😃.

I was surprised since the customer was from the US, since I had only ran my Google Ad in the UK and not really optimised my SEO yet 🤷‍♂️.

Naturally my sister was going to be my first paying customer 😅.
Either way it was nice to be rewarded for all my efforts up until this point.

I wasn't expecting any other subscribers since I did zero marketing until I finalised the last menu type to complete the product offerings.

I decided to start marketing on Google Ads. I thought (wrongfully) since I've got a free credit of £120, I might as well use it.

Little did I know, you have to spend X before you get the "free" credit. I naively spent up until £120 thinking it was free 🙈.

Google Support clarified the issue, and I did get £120 credit applied to my account in the end.

I decided to pause my current campaign until I had time to finally finish off the third menu type i.e. custom menus.

I launched the initial MVP on May 14th 2021.

I launched with 2 of the 3 menu types I had planned i.e. redirect (to customers own URL) and upload (hosted on Qenu). Once launched I focused on finishing the last menu type i.e. Dynamic (create custom menus directly on Qenu).

My sister created her first menu on May 18th 😃.

She instantly fell in love with the product and its ease of use. Since then she's added both her businesses on Qenu, and has so far updated her 2 menus 22 times in total!

I came up with the idea for Qenu when I saw my sister having trouble with keeping her QR menus updated.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic QR code menus became a popular solution to minimise contact with surfaces.

QR code generators aren't new, and there are loads available. However, they are usually generic and not targeted at any particular niche.

I saw there was room for improvement and decided to focus my efforts on making a tailored solution for food businesses e.g. cafés, restaurants, takeaways etc. After having a chat with my sister, I had my basic criteria for the product.

Qenu needed to be easy to use from anywhere including desktop and mobile. It needed to be easy to create QR codes and also update menus attached to existing codes. I decided to focus heavily on the UX and aimed to make it as frictionless as possible.