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Launched and got my first customer

I managed to keep my commitment to launching in June and Pegasus is now out in the world!

Even more exciting is that during the prelaunch process I was able to get my very first paying customer for the product.

More here: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/jun-2019/

  1. 2

    Congrats ! By the way I am little confused with your idea. If you find my question reasonable then please answer it. -- Like I am confused that if someone has started a Saas startup then he/she must be a developer then why would they require a template.

    1. 3

      Hey - definitely a reasonable question!

      You're absolutely right that if someone has started a SaaS (and wants to use Django) they likely wouldn't require a template. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that starting from a template isn't a good idea. Here are a few reasons that Pegasus might be a good fit for someone:

      1. They value their time. For example, if your hourly rate is $50 then buying Pegasus at its current price is trading off against two hours of your time. If Pegasus saves you more than two hours getting started then it's worth it. I believe (admitting my bias here) that Pegasus likely saves days - if not weeks - of development time so is definitely worth the investment from that perspective.

      2. They are learning. Another category of person I think really benefits is someone who just getting started with Django. There's lots of decisions you need to make about code structure, libraries to use, front-end setup, etc. and having a functional project with examples to draw from that is done by (again admitting bias) someone with loads of experience can really give confidence and make that process much simpler.

      3. They want the front-end. In my experience the biggest drawback of most starter templates is that they don't look that good. I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to make Pegasus beautiful, responsive, and functional and starting with that UI I think can be a major accelerator for some people.

      Also, this is just the launch/MVP, but my goal - if the project is successful - is to make Pegasus so darn good that it would be silly not to use it. Not sure if I'll succeed but that's my ambition.

      That said - lots of people prefer to learn and do things themselves or would rather hack on something for days than have it "done for them". Pegasus isn't for those people.

      1. 3

        Great question and great answer! I think this is the biggest take away:
        "For example, if your hourly rate is $50 then buying Pegasus at its current price is trading off against two hours of your time. If Pegasus saves you more than two hours getting started then it's worth it."

        It's true for alot more than just this too, as developers we often have a mindset of "well I can do that myself", but when you actually do the math (especially if you work a full-time job) it's crazy not to spend the money and save yourself a lot of upfront time. Money v.s. time is the trade off and knowing which you have more of is very important.

      2. 1

        Great Answer, I got your point on where Pegasus can be used. thanks !

  2. 2

    Very nice landing page and idea. The landing page answered all my questions and I was really interested. Congratulations on the first paying customer! (p.s. the way you priced is great, seems like you didn't fall into the "price too low because I'm bootstrapped" fallacy)

    1. 2

      Thanks James! We'll have to wait and see on the pricing. My last product's pricing started at $1 so this is definitely an improvement! :)

  3. 2

    Not a bad product idea. Not bad at all.

    And congrats on the first customer. Always great to read people's success stories.

  4. 1

    Cool product idea. Do you know if there are SaaS templates for other tech stacks? Any competitors for Django?

    1. 1

      Hey - sorry about the late response. I already answered this on a different comment below but to summarize - there are a bunch for other languages/frameworks (I'm aware of at least one for Laravel, two for Rails, one for Node.js, etc.) but nothing that met my needs for Django.

      There's also been an IH thread on the topic here: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/is-there-a-saas-template-d1d90b8416

  5. 1

    Stoked that you launched Pegasus! I've been following your progress for a while. Really enjoy your retrospective posts.

    Landing page looks great. Answers most questions I would expect to have. I would recommend adding more of the example pages such as: https://www.saaspegasus.com/pricing/ even if they're just screenshots. I personally expect to see a full preview of the platform before I purchase as I assume most of the value Pegasus provides would sit server side anyway.

    Good luck!

    1. 1

      Thanks @matthack! Appreciate the support.

      Did you create an account and poke around? Most of the examples are available to play around with once you sign up and before you buy (I think I can make that a lot clearer on the landing page and also consider removing the restriction).

      My thinking was that anyone serious wouldn't mind at least signing up to look around but maybe that's not right...

      1. 1

        I didn't, wasn't sure that signing up would unlock some kind of preview.
        Might be worth just adding something to make that clearer on your landing page.

        I think this: "My thinking was that anyone serious wouldn't mind at least signing up to look around but maybe that's not right.." is a fairly safe assumption, just need to make it known somewhere

        1. 1

          Might be worth just adding something to make that clearer on your landing page.

          Yeah this is great feedback. Will add to my 30 days of growth backlog. Thanks!

  6. 1

    Congrats on the 1st customer. The first 50 is the hardest, but once you get there it gets easier to grow.

  7. 1

    Great work @czue. Are you planning to support other web frameworks as well?

    1. 2

      Thanks! I have no plans to support other web frameworks anytime soon, though I'm aware of similar products for many. For example, there's https://bullettrain.co/ for Rails by @andrewculver , Laravel Spark https://spark.laravel.com/ etc.

      A big motivator for Pegasus was that nothing like it existed for Python/Django and I thought that was a travesty, since it's my favorite web framework. :)

  8. 1

    As I mentioned on Twitter, I love this idea. Hopefully I'll have a project soon that can make use of this. If so, I'll pick it up for sure. Great work.

  9. 1

    Congratulations! That is great milestone!

  10. 1

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