Time passed and the effort we had invested in the past few months diminished (we both had a lot of work at that moment).
Team meeting! We have to agree on next milestones, making sure we're aligned and what we'll do next. No action is the best way to kill a promising project way too early.
We knew it was now time to move from a MVP to a real product, with a clear positioning. Ours was "SIMPLE"... like in SimpleBackups, makes sens right? :-) Our solution has to reflect this and it wasn't the case in its first version, so back to drawing board and focus on how to make website backups easy!
2 weeks later we had a new design, neat, clean, we nailed it and implemented it right way. Version 1.1 was live.
At the same time, we decided to refresh our website and create a specific landing page our agency specific audience.
Now we had an nice looking landing page, with better copy and screenshots of the application.
Let's get back to Digital Marketing and get some visitors data!
Digital Marketing 101
Now that the application was live and our own customers running on it it was time to get a pulse of the market.
How do we get people to know about us?
We started with a short term approach, remember our plan here is still to test if this is a viable project with a market fit.
Easiest way to get people quickly on your website is through ads, so we setup our first Google Adwords as well as Facebook ads.
First results (will be shared in a separate article) where not very encouraging, and we realized the hard work it takes to get ads tailored properly.
In parallel we worked on our landing page (first version) copy as well as basic SEO and setting up all analytics tools (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, hotjar, crisp, ...).
Plan here was to gather some data, and review those to make a decision about what to do next.
Woooohooo we're live!
After 2 months of development, we were ready with our first version of SimpleBackups!
Domain purchased, server setup, git push ... wooohoo.
Our first version was a MVP.
Our goals where:
Prove that we can work together on a side project
Have a simple version allowing us to get our own customers (we are both freelance developers) using it instead of the similar applications we were using before
We've passed this milestones successfully (with a delay of roughly 2 weeks) and were now ready to get some market feedback.
Maintaining backups of your websites, databases and servers is already a full-time job.
Have SimpleBackups take care of all that and worry less.
