Sponsy
A modern all-in-one sponsorship manager for newsletters.
Our new lead found in Sponsy what he was looking for: an efficient way to manage his sponsorships for his daily newsletters (2!).
His feedback contributed to improve the customer portal, making Sponsy even better than when he found it.
A great product for an amazing customer!
Reached out to him via a Twitter DM, he seems great both as a publisher and as a person.
We had a quick conversation. He seems super interested in Sponsy but wants some tweaks on the customer portal and the automation. That's great!
We gave him 1 month of free trial so he can start using Sponsy while we can build exactly what he's looking for (always taking into consideration our vision).
Customer focus, this is how we do it.
Feedback, build, ship and repeat. That was basically the last few months. Exciting times!
We had 5 concrete leads:
- 2 combined existing tools to create something that works for them
- 2 were more looking for a Sponsy 1 kind of solution with more management features. They were also looking for a different pricing
- 1 was our sponsor. He believed in Sponsy since our first cold email, he immediately got our vision. After months of iteration he got exactly what he was looking for and converted as soon as we enabled payments. He would pay way more, but we decided to start his subscription with a nice deal because it was well deserved.
We are still working together based on their amazing feedback and loving every second of it.
Two months building the MVP mostly based on customer feedback, now is time to show it.
We sent an email in advance to all leads with the full feature set we decided to build. We had to be rigid and make a selection, some wanted a more Sponsy 1 solution but that's not our goal for now.
Sponsorship management is priority number one, keep the eyes on the ball.
No more building from scratch without validation! We spent the last month doing interviews with a Figma prototype.
The response was great, we got price ranges without even asking. That's cool. We decided to build the second version of Sponsy and invite leads to try it out.
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I want to follow this project, but I don't understand what they do
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Thank you for your interest!
In short: we provide a SASS for publishers to manage their sponsorships.
Let's say you have a daily newsletter with 3 sponsorships each day, that's 84 ads per month. Every ad needs customer communication, copy, updates, etc... With Sponsy we provide a system to manage and even automate all that.
These links could be useful:
- https://getsponsy.com/
- https://twitter.com/getsponsy, couple of videos in the timeline
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We had signups without any marketing efforts. Newsletter were coming in and started to sell slots via Sponsy.
Then why pivot?
By talking with established newsletter, we figured out Sponsy was not solving the real problem. It was not getting sponsorships in and getting paid, but actually managing them.
...
Sponsy 2 here we come!
During the last 3 months we were in a closed beta and interviewed a bunch of users and got a lot of nice feedback to improve our app.
Today we opened it every newsletter creator who wants to join and give it a try! And we decided to keep it free while we are in beta, since the cost of maintaining it is super low.
It took a few weeks, but we're finally done building the MVP for Sponsy.
On Friday we invited our first beta testers to try the platform to start getting some feedback. And some of them already start using and making money with their sponsorships. We already got some valuable feedback in and we are planning how to improve it for a bigger launch later this month!
Do you have a newsletter and want to give Sponsy a try? We look forward for awesome feedback from fellow Indie Hackers!
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