Reviewdrop
Automatically collect and display business reviews.
In just one week we managed to migrate our recent September redesign over to Tailwind CSS and away from Laravel Spark.
A lot of coffee was had to get this done but will pave the way for a solid foundation as we push ahead with client requests.
We recently started using Tailwind CSS at our web agency and couldn't face going back to Bootstrap. With PurgeCSS/Tailwind CSS we are seeing super tiny stylesheets and consistent design. It is awesome!
Take a look - https://reviewdrop.io
- Moving away from Laravel Spark
This was something I had been thinking about for the last couple of months. While Spark is great at cutting down weeks of boilerplate code, it doesn't always work great for everyone's use case.
For example, we really wanted to start offering custom plans for individual users. For this, we ended up moving plans to database level so we can control things easier.
We also heavily modified the template structure of Spark to suit our needs. When there is a major update to Spark it's a major pain in the neck to work through existing files.
Now we are 100% on our own system it feels great to have the freedom to build exactly as we want. Spark is still great for quickly getting your SaaS app up and running, but for us, it became too restrictive.
Have any other Indie Hackers faced the same hurdle?
We are now live on Product Hunt and already sitting at 3rd place and a couple paid signups from it :)
It's such an exciting and stressful day hearing feedback from potential customers but has become such a valuable tool for promoting SaaS-based products.
Onwards and upwards!
We have been hard at work polishing our latest update to Reviewdrop before we launch on Product Hunt. My last app Tag (which is now offline) had great success on PH but sadly didn't gain much long term traction.
For Reviewdrop we have been running since January 2019 and already have a good amount of paying customers. We are hoping that our latest set of features - Automated email invitations, 50 free invitations and refined dashboard will help showcase our product well on PH.
Any feedback would be much appreciated!
Scott
Today I launched a huge update to https://reviewdrop.io
We launched back in January 2019 as our first dive into the SaaS market. Working full time at a web agency we found our clients getting upset at the rising cost of review systems when they are just starting out.
Reviewdrop has now matured into a tool that will automatically email customers after ordering on platforms such as Shopify, Bigcommerce and Woocommerce. We also have private support now for Zapier to connect up to thousands of CRM systems and others. All that's needed is the customers email and date to send out.
Our website widget allows customers to view reviews on any page via a pop-up at the bottom left or right of your screen. Business owners can select what reviews they want to appear on the widget, while all reviews will appear on the company profile.
Lastly, we have support to manually send customer invitations and send them a coupon code after submissions as incentive.
My goal now is to focus on marketing and speaking with businesses who we think would benefit. Pages have been setup for different use cases and I aim to document these out more over time.
We also setup a compare page to find our latest feature set - https://reviewdrop.io/compare
Onwards and upwards!
-Scott
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Scott, may I ask how did you launch and was the launch successful?
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Hi Jaakko,
We had a soft launch back in December by contacting our own clients (we run a web agency). From there we fixed out some bugs and feature requests. The launch went fairly well but I am hoping to push marketing with the new features :)
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Time is hard working full time on top of your side projects. This weekend I have been ironing out the last bugs, writing documentation and making sure billing is all solid before sending out sign-ups to our client list.
Coming this close to Christmas we might well be looking at early Jan before people return from holidays!
The first wave of beta testers will be happening this week with our own clients at Xtensive. We have roughly 400+ clients meaning we should hopefully see some uptake from the newsletter being sent out.
Exciting times ahead!
The past few months I have been working outside my main job to build a new review system for our clients. We noticed a trend that smaller businesses couldn't afford the larger review systems to justify monthly expenditure and wanted a quick way to either add reviews they received from another medium or capture them without manually updating code on their site.
We use BigCommerce primarily as our e-commerce package and found it very time consuming to manually update new store reviews on the clients homepage. With Reviewdrop - we are able to drop in the widget and reviews are pulled from the system - with click-through into the shops profile/submissions page.
In October, I came up with a rough working version in a week on WordPress. Now, at this point I had no clue how to work with Laravel, but was always something I wanted to do with a SaaS.
The http://laracasts.com guys have an amazing course on Laravel and after a few hours I felt like I knew everything! It just clicked. Sure, there was some crossover with PHP on WordPress, but I would be nowhere near launch without it. Best of all, the course is free!!
Over the past few weeks I've been refining the app and think I'm finally in a place to pull in my first customers.
Since I'm still working at my main job full-time. I decided to join partnership with my boss to use the system with our clients. We have over 400+ clients so it was a no-brainer! It also leaves me to pick up support requests during normal hours and still have a social life ;)
The past months have been an experience. Yes, very long hours coding and on-top of my already busy job. There have been times of wanting to abandon, but I've pushed through and now just want to get it into the wild and start selling!
I will be starting beta tests in the next month. If you have read this far and still interested, I have a "Register your Interest" sign-up on the plans page 😉
Here's to the next step. Launch 🚀
3 Comments
Hey Scott, perfect timing with the post.
My team and I just came across Tailwind a few weeks back and have planned to implement it for a project we are starting this week! Previously we were using bootstrap which was a real pain. The main reason for the shift is to be able to create our own library and use the components for future projects too. For example, 70% of components in a dashboard are used commonly so our aim is to create these whenever during a project and use it for future projects too.
I am looking forward to experimenting with Tailwind. It's great that you have given a positive review based on your experience.
On a different note, for static websites it might be worth looking into Webflow. My team and I have been using Webflow for the five years to do static sites.
Hey Nakkeeran, Tailwind is hands down the best CSS framework I've used since Bootstrap. I would suggest taking a look at some of the third party plugins such as CSS Grid - https://github.com/chrisrowe/tailwindcss-grid - Throwing grid into the mix just makes things super clean and means you don't have to worry about margin/gutter spacing on columns for different devices.
Tailwind makes use of colours really well. For example,
bg-blue-500ortext-blue-500meaning you can set those palettes in your config file and keep designs really consistent. If you have a button, for example, you can set them to only add the class on the selector and make use of@ apply bg-blue-400 hover:bg-blue-500on the CSS = less repetition on HTML.If you use Atom code editor, I highly suggest this addon to reduce looking back on the docs - https://atom.io/packages/autocomplete-tailwind
I've tried Webflow before, but honestly, as a web designer, I'm happier coding things to my specification!
Hey Scott, thanks alot for the links to the third party tools. Certainly going to make using Tailwind CSS a little easier and fun. I'm very optimistic and looking forward to using Tailwind.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago