Requestly (YC W22)

Another year flew by as quickly as ever and we’re celebrating our sixth anniversary today. Let’s take a look back at the things we did this year:

Feature Releases

• We have implemented a new rule type: Modify Response. Now you can intercept network requests / API calls and return a custom response. This proves to be quite powerful for supercharging your web development. https://requestly.io/blog/introducing-modify-ajax-response-rule/
• You can unlock a free month of our Premium plan using our Unlock feature. https://app.requestly.io/unlock
• On popular request, we released email-based signup. Before that, users could only use social login to sign up. Now we enable you to sign up using email as well.
• We simplified our pricing plans. Now there’s just one Premium plan instead of two.

Improvements

• We rewrote parts of our app in React. When Requestly was started back in 2014, our entire codebase was in Backbone.js. We totally loved the framework. Moving forward, a couple of components were written in Angular back in 2016 and since then we adopted React and now the majority of our codebase is in React.
• We migrated our website to a new domain and gave it a modern look. https://requestly.io/
• We have revamped our documentation. Check out docs.requestly.io for the new experience!

What’s Next?

• Our desktop app is in alpha stage right now. We’ll roll it out soon and you’ll be able to use Requestly on top of your favourite apps like Postman, Slack, Spotify, etc. https://requestly.io/desktop
• We’re working on a brand-new UI.
• Soon you’ll be able to make shared rules public, which will be added to a repository. This will enable sharing of some quite popular rules.

We also have some enterprise customers working with us happily. Their renewals bring us more confidence in the value of Requestly!

Thank you for making it to the end. To celebrate, use the coupon code HAPPY6 to get a sweet discount on our Premium plans. https://app.requestly.io/pricing/plans

We had 6 options for a user to choose from whenever they want to upgrade to one of our paid plans. We had two types of plans based on usage (silver and gold) and three types of subscriptions (monthly, half-yearly and yearly). This led to a lot of cognitive load / decision paradox to a potential premium customer. We also got this feedback when we attended a SaaS conference back in Jan (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/learnings-from-saasboomi-f23bdbff0d).

So we worked on simplifying it. Using data from our current subscriptions, we brought the number of options down from 6 to 2. We now have only one premium plan and two types of subscriptions (monthly and yearly).

In the process, we also took a piece of common advice seen in many of the IH posts - to double our pricing.

We launched this last week and have received payments from one customer for the yearly plan and two customers for monthly plans. The time to convert has also gone down. This makes us believe that the decision of increasing prices was a step in the right direction. Thank you fellow IH'ers for giving us the courage to do so by sharing your stories! 🙌

One thought that we have in mind is that we might lose out on some customers who are price-sensitive and therefore, would not convert on higher pricing. What are your thoughts on this? Did you ever have to lower your prices again after increasing it?

When Requestly was launched, we only provided a sign-in via google option. This was done intentionally to avoid decision paradox. However, we used to get some feedback from our customer support channel from users who didn't want to use social login. Also, this meant enterprises that are not in Google's ecosystem couldn't sign-in and we wanted to open doors for them as well. :)

We finally picked this backlog task in 2020. Using Firebase, we enabled the email/password sign-in method and released a v1 last month (with minimal UI and tests).

In the last 30 days, we have got 100+ sign-ups via this flow without any marketing!
Since our product allows anonymous usage without signing-in, we were also thinking of nudging the user every X days to sign-in. At the same time, we don't want to annoy the user / degrade their experience. How should we go about doing this? Would love to hear any tips for tapping into the enterprise market as well!

I attended a SaaS conference last month. Apart from a lot of learnings (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/learnings-from-saasboomi-f23bdbff0d), I also met a co-founder who recognized our product instantly. Turns out, their whole team loves it!

We were able to get their testimonial (to be put on our website soon!) as well. Here's the verbatim feedback:
"Requestly is one tool which is like magic when you discover the first time. We deal with JS code which needs to run on 15K+ times and served more than billion times a month. Requestly comes in really handy when testing our dev code in third party website."

This brings us immense joy, knowing that we built something useful. Also, there might be more such people out there which we're not able to track right now (since our product does not require signing-in to start using), potentially losing out on (good / bad) feedback. How will you go about solving this problem?

In August 2019, we started giving our Requestly Premium free for 90 days when the user does certain activities like

• Sharing on Twitter
• Following us on Twitter
• Rate on the Chrome Store

We got huge traction and roughly 250 users unlocked premium while helping us gain more new users from their Social Media channels.

We manually entertained those requests and wrote a script to unlock the premium for the given user information. It was a real pain to unlock the premium for the users after every 2-3 days.

This weekend, I coded for straight 5 hours & automated the premium. Now, when the user visits https://app.requestly.in/unlock and submits the form user gets 30 days of premium instantly. No manual intervention.

Huge relief and a pleasure to see the new users unlocking premium with these activities.

Drop-in your questions and I'd love to answer. Or feel free to reach out on contact@requestly.io (yeah we are going to move to requestly.io very soon)

--Sachin, Founder @ Requestly
Committed to make Requestly a world class product

We used to monetize using Carbon ads. Last month, we set out to explore sponsorships and try to get a steady stream of revenue from ads.

Following advice from many of the IH posts, I drafted a template message introducing Requestly (what we do), our target audience, some visitor stats, and a proposal to show their company's ad (replacing the Carbon ad). I then made a list of companies that are mid-sized and who are targeted at web developers as well. On one day, I used to contact around 2-3 companies via Twitter / website chat / email. Since this is a cold process, we didn't get replies from most of them. But having seen a lot of sponsorships on IH, we knew that this takes time and this is typical of a normal sales funnel. After contacting 20+ companies, we got a reply from 2 of them and we closed a deal after 15 days of back-and-forth emails.

Today, we received the payment of our first sponsorship and I'm very excited to share this milestone with all of you! Happy to answer more questions. :)

P.S. I found that finding companies who have a marketing budget to spend right now is not trivial. Would someone else be interested in getting this kind of data? The maintenance of such a list would have to be crowdsourced and there has to be some sort of a quality-control as well.

After launching Unlock Requestly Premium Feature roughly 45 days back, we have got our Twitter followers doubled from roughly 100 to 200.

Here's the information about Unlock Premium Feature - https://twitter.com/RequestlyIO/status/1158343295354806272

This is an excellent "Aha" moment for us as it is giving our users one more chance to get Requestly Premium free and we are able to retain the users and do some free marketing for us.

Here's a summary of what we have achieved in August -

• A total of 400$ in revenue.
• 9 more premium subscribers making a total of 280$s in the month and
• Received 140$ from Carbon Ads.
• 25 Ratings in the Chrome Store (24 are 4-5 stars)
• Unlocked Premium accounts for more than 100 people in the month.

Last week, we introduced a feature to unlock Requestly Premium for 90 days (http://app.requestly.in/unlock) when a user completes a few basic steps. ~25 users have unlocked in less than a week. Users look very delighted with this feature as they get enough chance to play with premium before deciding to upgrade.

Launched Requestly on ProductHunt - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/requestly.

Getting very good feedback there. Also, folks are reaching out directly on the email asking tips on how I managed to promote Requestly to get 100K+ users. Few folks have given great suggestions on the features.

Looking forward to getting more awesome feedback from the community.