Screenjar (acquired)

The idea of selling Screenjar crossed my mind, so I thought I'd list it on Microacquire.com to see what happens. If it didn't sell, I'd be happy to keep running it.

I was mainly interested in selling because I didn't have any solid ideas for how to grow it or where to take it next.

The listing got a lot of interest - way more than I expected. I quickly came to an agreement with a company that's experienced in buying and growing similar products.

The sale process was fairly smooth and I'm happy with the result. This was my first SaaS sale and it's given me more confidence to experiment with building more tiny SaaS products.

Almost a year after getting the first paying customer, Screenjar now has 3 paying customers.

After a solid few months trying to figure our who Screenjar could be most useful for and how I could reach them, I become somewhat discouraged when the people who I thought would be a great fit were not interested.

I couldn't convince myself to spend more time on Screenjar while my other projects were less of an uphill battle. It was a bit of a fun project that I didn't really research or think through before building, so I didn't feel too bad about putting it on the back burner.

I tend to switch my focus between projects and recently I decided to spend some time on Screenjar again to see if I could have more luck trying to grow it this time around.

The first change I made was to add a hard ending to the free trial. Until now, people were nudged to upgrade when their trial expired, but they could ignore those nudges and continue as normal. A few days after adding a proper paywall, one of the companies who has been trialing for a while upgraded.

There are another couple of companies who have been ignoring the upgrade nudges for a while and I'm hoping one or two of them also upgrade.

Next up, I need to figure out how to get more trials! The plan is to start working on integrations with help desk/customer support platforms like Zendesk, Helpscout etc.

Based on the usage of Screenjar from early customers, I was feeling quite disheartened. A high % of video requests go unanswered. I assumed this meant the current state of the product was a complete failure.

I emailed customers asking for feedback and looking for ways Screenjar could add more value and to my surprise I learned that even with the current low response rate, Screenjar is still providing some value. One customer (Ward from MemberSpace) even responded with a testimonial I could use.

While there are still tonnes of improvements to make and plenty to figure out, the testimonial (which is now live on screenjar.com) and feedback gives me more motivation to keep trying.

My current challenges are increasing that response rate and figuring out a way to find more potential customers.

My main aim with this update is making it clear what Screenjar actually does. Does this help you understand what Screenjar does? http://screenjar.com/

With only a tiny number of customers and very little traffic, I don't think the landing page is super important, but after posting a link to this thread (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/post-your-landing-page-and-let-others-describe-what-your-project-does-d97f6caf3f?commentId=-MAaYY7LH61e7hTGZZv_) and seeing that people had no idea what Screenjar actually did, I couldn't help but put some time into improving that.

I followed this awesome guide from Julian Shapiro (https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages) which I highly recommend checking out

In the long run, I'm planning on building integrations with customer support software for Screenjar (so people can request screen recordings right from within support software)

I'm putting this off until I can prove that Screenjar is actually useful so I don't end up spending weeks building integrations that no one ends up using.

Our one any only paying customer suggested that a simple Chrome extension that lets you create screen recording request links would provide 90% of the benefits that custom integrations would.

This totally made sense to me, so I built and shipped the extension this week. A few people trying Screenjar out have installed it, so I'll know whether it's made a positive impact on usage in a week or so 🤞🏼

Last night, one of the companies trialing Screenjar became the first paying customers and signed up to the $60 per month plan.

It took more than a month to get here and a few promising trial customers didn't end up converting, but I'm happy at least one company sees enough value to start paying.

They've been very supportive and have provided such helpful feedback already, so I couldn't have asked for a better first customer.

There's a lot of work to do, but I'm super excited to keep working on this and see where it goes 😊