Sandpiper

Yesterday I saw the first signup from a dealer from a store that's not using our point-of-sale product (https://quailhq.com). Ever since we launched Sandpiper I've been peeking at every user that signs up, and this is the first one I'd noticed who hadn't linked her Quail vendor account. I shot her an email asking why and offering to help, and she replied back with a very confused "what's Quail?"

As it turns out, she's friends with a dealer in a different store (one where they do use Quail!) and her friend found Sandpiper so useful that she's been recommending it to all the other dealers she knows. That's a kind of viral marketing that, as far as I know, you literally can't pay for.

A few more of those and we'll really be in business!

Sandpiper is still adding one or two paying users every week (those $6/month subscriptions stack up!), and by far the most common piece of feedback I've been getting is "I want to use this, but I've got X years of inventory already in a spreadsheet and I'm not going to import it by hand!"

Which is absolutely a legit objection -- I wouldn't re-type a massive spreadsheet, either.

After an short fling with FlatFile (great product, lovely people, deadly-to-indies enterprise pricing) I rolled my own CSV importer and was able to get a pretty slick, relatively low-friction bulk importer that works with the majority of users' spreadsheets that I've seen so far. Last week I ran a bunch of bulk imports in hand-holding mode, but this morning I checked my analytics and it looks like the first new signup completed a bulk import without any input or help from me.

Feature, complete!

Slow growth is still growth -- we're adding 2-3 paying customers every week, and I definitely feel like we've validated our plan to cross-sell apps to users of our different products. Sandpiper is laser-focused on the needs of some of the non-paying users of Quail: antique vendors with booths in stores that use Quail to track their sales and payouts. There's a free vendor portal that we offer them as part of Quail; Sandpiper is essentially the "pro" version of that.

And it's working! 100% of vendors who've started using the free portal since we launched Sandpiper have clicked over to look at it, and over half of those clicked through, linked their accounts, and started a trial. It's definitely a power-user app, though, so while our conversion rate isn't great (~5%) I'm still really pleased that we're successfully getting it in front of the folks who need it. And when those users see it, they're definitely sticking!

One of our first trial users sent us some unsolicited feedback in email today, and asked us make sure her subscription was setup to renew after the trial so she could keep using Sandpiper. I'm not counting our chickens yet -- that's one, and she hasn't actually converted -- but it's starting to feel like a successful launch!

We launched Sandpiper to our audience of Quail vendors by putting a rotating ad on the (free) vendor portal -- and so far it's gone pretty well, with hundreds of clicks on the ad and 20+ users trialing after the first day.

Fingers crossed that those trials convert, and we keep getting signups!