Simple Estimate

Simple Estimate has been around for awhile now. It's been on the backburner a number of times. I've thought about shutting it down, but then someone will contact me and tell me how helpful of a tool it was for them, or maybe that they just need one more feature to make it work for them.

When I created the tool 7 years ago I didn't even know what Product Hunt was. When I did learn about it, I immediately thought I should try launching Simple Estimate on there. But I was super intimidated, and never did! Since then, I've launched another product on there that got #5 spot for the day.

Over the last few months I finished redesigning and redeveloping Simple Estimate and adding some of the necessary features that I missed the first time around. And I swore to myself that I would get up the nerve to actually launch it this time around... and then I waited for a month...

So anyway, here goes. I'm finally doing it. It's out on Product Hunt. Even if it doesn't get a thousand upvotes I know it will be good for SEO in the long run.

Wish me luck and support the product if you are willing!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/simple-estimate

I sat down and wrote 3 blog posts over the last week that I believe should help give some additional SEO credibility to the site because they are about keywords that get searched decently often.

https://simplestimate.com/blog

I also am leveraging a few of my other older sites with some articles that point back to the tool and am hoping that starts to make a difference with the SEO traffic as well.

During my research I found a number of other competitors. The tricky thing is that many of them fit into 2 categories:

1. Free estimating tools
2. Really expensive enterprise-level agency tools

My product is somewhere in between, so we'll see how that goes.

It was May 2019 when I said I was going to rebuild my old Simple Estimate tool in Laravel and Vue. Since then I've lost interest and circled back several times. It had finally reached a point where it had to be a decision to replace the site, or take it offline.

I finally finished up the updated version and replaced the old site with it. Phew!

Here were some of my goals in rebuilding:

1. Fix the name of the product. I'm not referring to it as "Simple Estimate" rather than "simplestimate". Duh, I guess.
2. Use modern technology I could be more adept at building with
3. Add some missing features that really should have been there in the first place, things like fixed line items, and excel exports should have been there in the first place.
4. Make the system more reliable and bug free.
5. Up my search engine game, with the name change and adding in important headlines and keywords that people are actually searching for!
6. Change the pricing model. The tool is no longer free, instead you can get a 2 week free trial, and then the price went from $15/month to $45/month.

I'm also pushing my marketing for this a lot more. I will post about that next.

The technology I used to build it in the first place is outdated and annoying to develop new features in. I started writing a script to export the database into a new format and redo it in Laravel. The question is how much to leave in place and how much to redo entirely. Work in progress.

Someone from a popular project management blog reached out interested in buying the tool. We met but once they found out it was earning a whopping $30/month, they cooled off a lot. We are still talking about working together somehow, but I also haven't heard back from him lately. Not sure whether to pursue this more.

One of my users used my feedback form to deliver me a continuous stream of great feedback over the period of 2-3 days. Super valuable stuff.

I had almost given up hope on the project, when out of the blue I got a Stripe email that said I had gotten $15. At first I was trying to remember which of my projects even charged $15. I was surprised to see that it was from simplestimate. This was exciting, but one paying customer doesn't make a business.

Unbeknownst to me, another reviewer looked at my tool, but I didn't see the review until almost a year later. This one was not so nice.

https://louderthanten.com/coax/simplestimate

After months of watching a number of people try out the tool and leave quickly. I decided to make most of the premium features of the tool free. My thought was that if Excel spreadsheets were the "competition", then with an Excel spreadsheet you could already do most of the premium functionality, like templates, PDF exports, and versioning. The only feature I left as a premium one was the ability to have multiple people share a company account.

I just decided that this was necessary and if the tool caught on then I'd have to develop more premium features.

I asked a popular project management blogger to review the tool and eventually she obliged. She said some nice things about the tool, but also was aware of its shortcomings.

https://www.girlsguidetopm.com/software-review-simplestimate-2016/