StorePreviewer

Currently reading the 10231th article on how to deal with big enterprise customers...

Just got off the call with one of them. They are unusually big and I love what they are doing as a company. I am actually a customer myself.

There are a lot of things to consider for me in order to evaluate if I will be able to work with them or not. They really want to use StorePreviewer and it seems like that the usage fits into one of their top business goals. I can't say too much right now. Just that I haven't been in this kind of a situation before and I need to evaluate a lot of things.

So basically what happened is that one of the very early customers of StorePreviewer (when pricing was as low as 10$/month) churned a while ago. They then reached out via email, told me that they churned because they had no use case anymore for the time being but wanted to sign up again. Their company has grown and is definitely in need of StorePreviewer again. I told them that the pricing 6x since from what they paid initially but offered them a little discount. They happily accepted and have been using the app with great satisfaction.

What a great feeling!

Just saw in my Slack that today at 3am StorePreviewer has received the first paying customer with the new pricing plan. 🥳

They went with the middle tier of 49$/month.

I was also quite shocked about the company that subscribed – sadly can't say too much about it right now 🤯

I want to give you a little update on StorePreviewer's progress so far. First of all, it is such a great feeling seeing your app getting used and providing real value to customers. Over 50 app projects have been already created.

It has been two months since the last post and in terms of MRR nothing has changed. That said, the customers did change. Three people churned and three new subscribed. Some sign up and canceled immediately and some have been customers for more than 2 months now.

In total SP has seen 24 customers. This clearly shows me that the churn is too high and SP is still in its pre-product-market fit phase.

Due to my full time Masters I have very limited time capacity to fully work on SP, so having eight customers without spending a second on marketing is actually pretty nice.

One more month of exams and the largest portion is finally done. Then I'll have some months to write my thesis aka time to fully focus on product. I don't regret my choice of choosing a second degree but running multiple products + a full time master is hard 🙇‍♂️

I have used the past few weeks to reach out to my customers and analyse the user data to find out what my users really need. I found out that there are some features that are considered "must-haves" and I am working hard right now to implement them.

Next steps:

🛠️Finish feature requests (new devices iPad & Apple TV, Versioning, ...)
🏷 Adjust pricing #chargemore
🎨 Update landing page
🚀 Launch new version and finally start marketing

StorePreviewer 2.0, a tool that helps developers and agencies to preview and optimize their app store presence (also my first SaaS), has been live for three months now and I would like to give you a little update on what has happened so far and how two days last week felt like a constant roller coaster ride 🎢 (the "please let me out of here" and not the funny type of roller coaster ride).

The stats

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 8 Customers

🔁 3 Annual Plans

💰 $35 MRR | $171 Total Revenue

📲 36+ App Store Previews created

Overall, I am really satisfied with the results so far. Just a couple of weeks ago, StorePreviewer reached customer numero three and now seeing that I am approaching the 10th customer is truly amazing. There is a lot of work ahead but this gives me enough validation to continue and be motivated. The journey so far has been anything but easy, but I am enjoying the ride. I will certainly talk more about the mental aspects of bootstrapping products in the future as I think it gets often neglected or not enough talked about.

Let's talk about stress

Speaking of mental aspects. Let's talk a bit about stress and the before-mentioned roller coast ride.

Monday = Churnday?

I hope this day of the week doesn't really exist and it was just a coincidence that after a week of zero transactions, Monday before last proved that things can change very rapidly. We start with nine total customers and me hoping that the next slack message will definitely be the 10th customer. Well, that didn't happen. Someone canceled. The second churn. I have always read about other Indiehackers and their painful first churns experience but due to excitement, it never crossed my mind that it could also very likely happen to me soon. It happened. It's real and it feels terrible. What I great Monday morning, I thought. Well, until 30min later, another customer canceled his/her subscription 🤯 I started the doubt the whole existence of the universe at that moment. It was a stressful day at University for me, so I couldn't focus too much on the things that were going on. There wasn't much I could do anyway. Three hours later, my phone rang, and I saw a new customer subscribed with a yearly commitment. The day started to feel brighter again until 2 hours after the next customer churned. 30 min later, another one signed up.

What a Monday!

You probably ask yourself what could have been the potential reason for this, but unfortunately, I have to tell you that I have no real clue why. Initially, I thought that there might have been a bug or outage that caused some problems but everything ran smoothly. Well, until seven days later...

A great Sunday morning

Usually, when we talk about a great Sunday morning ☀️, you might think about a nice chilled-out brunch, a good cup of joe ☕ and a calm, relaxed mind 💆‍♂️ that helps you recharge for the upcoming week. Yep, that definitely wasn't my Sunday.

I woke up, brushed my teeth, unlocked my phone and saw a Sentry error message that was very unusual. Essentially, the database connection to my backend server broke off – crashing the backend. This was the first time that a "critical" error happened in production and let me tell you: My heart rate went from chill to Usain Bolt real quick. I checked the logs and it looked like the app hasn't been used that morning but still – there are eight customers and I don't want to let them down. Not even on a Sunday morning. It took me about two hours and two coffees to finally fix it. The rest of the day was chill.

Since the last update, StorePreviewer gained two – almost three – additional customers. I say "almost three" because 10 minutes after a new monthly signup and me having a dopamine rush, the customer already canceled. I know the strategy and even use it myself sometimes where I just want to check out the product or use it for a month and then don't need it anymore.

Still, you might agree that this doesn't feel great. It also shows me that I have to implement a proper cancellation flow with a smart way of asking my churned customers for the cancellation reason.

That said, I haven't appropriately started marketing StorePreviewer, so I am delighted with the first five customers. The next step is to try to get enough feedback to improve it before launching it big officially on ProductHunt.

I can't tell you how good this feels—what a weekend.

Here is what happened 👇

It has been more than a month since I soft-launched StorePreviewer 2.0 and nobody seemed to be interested at first. I reached out to about 80 emails I received through the first Product Hunt launch last February. Nobody responded.

I started with a three-tier pricing plan (Monthly + Annual), segmenting users based on the value metric of having an X amount of projects.

After two weeks or so, I realized that the pricing should be more straightforward initially, so I stripped away the three tiers. I ended up with just one monthly/annual subscription.

Besides the emails, I didn't have the time to start marketing it (I am pursuing a full-time master's). Nevertheless, two weeks passed and I was upset that none of the 80 people neither responded nor subscribed.

Then this weekend happened. On Friday, StorePreviewer got its first customer 🎊. It was one of the 80 companies that I have reached out to. They even signed up for the annual plan, which is an indicator of trust and confidence. Then I go to bed, wake up the next day and voilà the second customer signed up for a monthly plan. I was so excited because:

a) this customer wasn't part of the list and
b) both of my billing integrations actually work 🤑.

Then, I go to bed, wake up the next day and... it's Groundhog Day. Another new customer 🤯.

StorePreviewer is my first full-fledged SaaS, and seeing people valuing it makes me happy. Perseverance is key. I have worked on this project for three months and waited for more than one to get my first customer. I believed the day would come, but I couldn't tell you when.

I am excited for the future and curious to see how starting the marketing engine will help StorePreviewer grow 💪.

Thank you for reading! If you are curious follow me on twitter, where I tweet about my journey designing and building StorePreviewer as well as my other projects.

Hey fellow Indiehackers 👋

As you have maybe noticed the time between my last post about StorePreviewer's first launch in March and this one you are currently reading spans over 8 months. Quite a long time, huh? It is.

I am super excited to announce that StorePreviewer PRO (Version 2.0), my first full-fledged SaaS, soft-launched yesterday 🚀

So why did it take so long to launch? Let me explain 🤓

I initially created StorePreviewer because I was working on some mobile apps and always had this repeating and very annoying problem that there is no way for me to preview how my app’s copy and screenshots will look like on the app store. So I built the first MVP, added this newsletter popup that was disguised as the PRO version signup page and launched on Product Hunt, Hacker News and everywhere else. The feedback was amazing, people really seemed to love it and it got featured on Product Hunt as the #5 Product of the day.

People from app-related startups and especially digital agencies reached out to give me feedback and so I was eager to start working on those pro features and launch asap. Around 70 people entered their email addresses and I thought to myself that this could potentially be the first idea I could morph into a SaaS.

At this point, I have not yet realized the amount of work that you have to put into making a SaaS product production-ready. Also, feature creep is real. It really is. The sales and marketing part aside, I am a self-taught developer and have created some frontend applications before but I was completely new to the backend world. Well, let me tell you that building a subscription-based SaaS that allows users to upload images and videos in realtime might not have been the smartest idea to start your backend journey with.

As I found out very early, handling subscriptions is always a PITA, let alone handling EU VAT. Luckily service like Paddle drastically help makers with this problem. That being said it still took ages to get comfortable with the subscription flow, edge cases and their API. A lot of emails were sent back and forth for mostly very basic and important information that I just could not find in their documentation. I then got quite comfortable with the basic authentication flow and CRUD REST operations but struggled with handling images and videos and also was not sure where and how to host it. In addition, I also had to learn about continuous delivery and web security. Oh, and transactional emails of course. Oh, and yeah traditionally servers don't update clients - so WebSockets to the rescue for real-time operations. Oh, and I had the once in a lifetime opportunity to learn about and experience a memory leak - first hand. (Thanks @jnnksbrt for helping me through this 💪)

If you are curious the stack I used is:

💻Nuxt in the frontend - hosted on Netlify
🎒Strapi (node.js) in the backend - hosted on Heroku
🖼️Cloudinary for media hosting
💰Paddle for handling subscription billing and VAT
📧 Sendgrid for transactional emails
🚫Sentry for error logging
📝LogDNA for logging

The more I got comfortable with the backend the more I enjoyed learning more advanced concepts and I am excited to dig even deeper. That being said, can you spot my little issue?

I love solving technical problems. I really do, but as Rob Walling always says - you have to adjust your time to 50% coding and 50% selling/marketing if you want to have a real business. As of now, my main focus was targeted way more towards the coding side. So this is what I have to work on now.

While acquiring all of this knowledge and building StorePreviewer I was simultaneously getting depressed by the cold temperature and darkness of Austria, finishing my bachelor's degree, maintaining my other products, moving to Lisbon, starting my master's degree and balancing uni, StorePreviewer and social life. Incorporating a company and having the opportunity to launch multiple products while still studying should be considered a blessing and one of the best things you can do but it has some rarely mentioned caveats that strongly affected my life and I will definitely write more about this part in the future.

Even though the launch of StorePreviewer Pro took much longer than I have expected, I am super happy that I persevered, managed to get this thing from idea to production. Furthermore, I feel 10x happier here in Lisbon, the weather is great almost throughout the whole year, the next surf spot is 20min away, I already met a bunch of cool digital nomads and even got the chance to become friends with this fairly unknown lama Pieter Levels.

StorePreviewer is now soft-launching on http://new.storepreviewer.com (Soon storepreviewer.com) and I am on the hunt for its first customer. I am very excited about StorePreviewer's future and will keep you updated as the journey continues.

P.S I will also try to be more active on Twitter from now on so if you would like to hear more about my journey consider following me on there: https://twitter.com/sobedominik

Here are some things I have learned after the launch of StorePreviewer:

🎓 Find a dedicated Hunter for your launch on Product Hunt

Even though the significance for it decreased over time, it seems to me be that products that were hunted by Hunters with a big following tend to perform better on upvotes and engagement.

Apart from StorePreviewer, which I hunted on my own, all of the other Top 5 products on that day were hunted by a hunter. Interestingly, even though it ranked #5, it got the fourth spot on the newsletter. 🎊

🎓 Hacker News reach is huge and its feedback is very valuable

Some hours after launching on Product Hunt, I wanted to let HN know about StorePreviewer but to my surprise, someone has already published it. And it does not stop there. It already ranked #3 on the front page which got me super stoked. I received some harsh but super valuable feedback.

I was also astonished by the fact that more than a third of the traffic was/is coming from HN.

🎓 Keeping track of your product's mentions is immensely crucial

Especially on launch day, your engine is running on 110%, your thoughts are everywhere and you have so much todo.

Knowing exactly where and when someone tweeted, posted or commented on your product can help you engage faster in discussions and answer possible open questions. All resulting in more satisfied users.

I am using a tool called mention.com which has a very generous free plan. Furthermore, I have some simple Zapier workflows set up that send me instant notifications on Slack.

🎓 A launch day is demanding - physically and mentally

A launch day is tough. Who would have thought? Especially when you are just a one-man/women show.

Lack of sleep, dealing with different times zones, high alertness on all possible events, promoting, engaging with communities and answering feedback are just a small selection of things you are working with.

You are exposing your product to people around the world. Hence, posting your pitch on forums, groups, etc. at the local peak times makes sense. For example, I currently live in Austria which is 9 hours ahead of San Francisco's PST time zone. This means launching at 9 am in the morning is a breeze for me. However, engaging with people who get off of work at 5-6 pm in California leads to dealing with the thought of whether I should or should not get the next cup of ☕at 2-3 am for me.

It is definitely doable. Just be prepared for it 💪.

➡️ Next steps

First of all, I am going to improve some low-hanging minor UI bugs and other improvement opportunities.

Then, I want to work on monetization possibilities and the newsletter conversion rate. I will try to interview the people who are already interested in the Pro version and find out what would provide them enough value to pay money for it 💰.

Super excited for what's next!

❓What have your experiences been with launching a new product? Anything you did not expect in the first place? Let me know!

Five days after the launch, I would like to give you a recap on what happened. I am really happy with the results and excited to share it with you! 🎉

🏆 StorePreviewer got featured as #5 Product of the Day on Product Hunt with 440+ Upvotes

💪 Reached Hacker News Front Page and ranked in the top three threads for some hours

🔼 250+ Upvotes on Reddit. On one thread someone also gave it the Rocket Like Award

👍Almost entirely positive feedback. "Extremely helpful and very easy to use. Exactly what I have needed for a while." The funniest feedback being: "Not all heroes wear capes." 🦸‍♂️

📊 The site has seen 6,976 users and 7,425 sessions

📩 10 people signed up for the newsletter, two of them were interested in the Pro version. I also received two emails from people who were kind of interested and needed more information.