Hiveflare, inc.

We've showed and shared with the huddle masses our very best in all thing social community networking; now after several years of working diligently to create a viable and sustainable product, were primed for an initial investment to take our business to the next level.

It's been a long slog to get here, but Social Builder just passed 4000 signups! This has been the result of several efforts, including blogging, social media marketing, press, and podcast appearances.

We were stuck around 2000 signups for a long time, but what really turned the tide for us was press. I emailed 30 different bloggers and journalists this past quarter, and two of them ended up writing articles that drove a lot of traffic and signups. Now I'm just hoping that a lot of them will convert to paying users soon. 🤞

Yesterday we launched Social Buider on Hacker News and got to the front page! Overall it resulted in 6,000 pageviews and almost 100 new signups. Here are three lessons I learned:

Refine your website before launching. There were several typos and errors on my site that I could've fixed beforehand if I'd asked a few friends for their opinions.
Submit multiple times if you have to. This was my third time submitting attempt in two weeks. The first two didn't make it to the front page, but this one did.
Don't pay attention to the haters. There will always be some negative commenters. Ignore them, try not to take it personally, and focus on the positive.
I'm excited for what comes next!

It took several months, but were finally done building the minimum viable product for Social Builder. We worked mostly nights and weekends, and I coded the whole thing in Ruby on Rails since that's that we are most comfortable with while pushing the technology envelope. We're excited to start talking to customers and see what they think about the product so far!

We set out to make Hiveflare even more versatile and accessible by adding a mobile app to complement the web based platform which includes a white label option, fully customizable.

We are one of the only few flexible social communities to offer this feature to it's members.

Social Buider is now making $2000 a month, enough to cover our overhead and expenses!

This is super exciting, because it means that I can theoretically afford to quit my job and go full-time on Social Builder. But I'm not sure if I'll make that jump just yet…

Months of development, we've achieved a milestone by signing up our first paying customer. Our goal for the next few months is to increase our revenue while expanding our product base to include many new features that will ensure continued growth and exposure.

I've read so many times that you should solve your own problem, and so last week both myself and the other co-founder sat down to think about all the problems in my life.

It turned out that I had quite a few problems worth solving, and the most interesting one led me to the idea for Social Builder; that is to reinvent how social networking is done.