RocketChart
Get instant insights on your cash flow
This is it. After 3 months of hard work, we finally deployed our cash flow management web app last week and did the first demos! We've on-boarded the first 5 users who signed up among the very first on the waiting list.
Still 144 to on-board 🥵
The first feedbacks are awesome. We are very close to delivering enough value for our users to pay :)
I decided to write a detailed 28min long article about our journey 🔥 The goal is to share our learnings, success, and mistakes.
https://rocketchart.co/en/saas-founders-story
In this quite long post, you will discover:
- How we’ve got the idea of RocketChart — just looking around and solving our own pain point
- How we’ve validated our SaaS idea in 24 hours — a fake screenshot, 2 facebook posts, and 384 leads
- How we’ve understood the problem we wanted to solve — talking with more than 300+ business founders
- How this has ended in 150 Beta signups while we were building the product
- What we’d changed if we had to start again
- What are our 7 key takeaways
I hope it will help some of you when it comes to bootstrap a business and also prevents you from making the same mistakes we made 😊
Cheers ❤️
We are on family holidays in the south of France. It is peaceful and quiet. We have such a great time together. Going to the beach, playing and surfing with my brothers into the waves of Hossegor. So cool and resourceful. But my father is not enjoying at all. On his Excel, he has to update his cash flow spreadsheet. Export data from his bank account, categorize expenses, forecast his future cash flow. The contrast is terrible: we are enjoying it, but he just can't.
Why does he have to spend so much time doing it?
Simply because cash flow is the heart of each business, but it is not automated. There is no simple tool where you can get your expenses and revenues on the same dashboard.
This is the beginning of RocketChart: provide a simple tool where founders can manage their expenses and revenues at the same place. And it strikes me while chilling on the beach...
The next step is clear. I need to validate this idea: are there more people struggling to manage their cash flow?
3 Comments
That's a great story, thanks for sharing your journey in the blog post. It's really inspiring to see how the early adopters respond so well to new products, I've always been very afraid to talk to customers early and work in public. Your story indeed took that fear away.
Also, it's a really smart move to on-board only a few users at a time. This strategy could be the difference between killing or keeping my former product alive - I've on-boarded many paying clients quickly but they asked for a refund because the product was too buggy, and while keeping a full-time job, I was unable to make it stable in enough time.
Congratulations for the launch and for the shape your product is turning! Keep crushing!
Thanks a lot for your message Filipe :)
Talking with our potential users was THE game-changer for us at the beginning. I was very afraid too, but I had to take it away and go for the big jump. Never regret it :)
Ouch! Actually we were afraid to have lot of bugs too. And this the reason why we're onboarding smoothly. Even if our product turned out to be bugs-free after a few demos, we still do it to master the number of feedbacks also.
Cheers man
Another great advice here: "to master the number of feedbacks". Yes, really smart move! :)