Tellspin

I've started to narrow down on the market I'm targeting with Tellspin. Raising prices has helped me cater my messaging for who it's meant for.

It's too soon to tell, but on the surface it looks like the people upgrading now are the ones I built it for in the first place. I think that means they'll be happier with the product in the long run.

I worked for awhile to polish my landing page. I've been trying to focus more on benefits and adding testimonials. I reached out to a number of my users and they were happy to provide me with some positives about my app.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The next thing I'm going to work on is creating more SEO friendly articles :)

Still getting a few signups a week. My hunch is they're mostly from people googling "slack on call rotation", which I recently reached the number 2 spot!

I'm above other apps like Pagerduty and TeamChores. Tellspin is a great alternative to these because it simply offers a rotation schedule directly in Slack

It's been a crazy ride since launching a few months ago. I burned the midnight oil and worked weekends to fix-up my onboarding, add feature requests that kept piling in, and of course squish bugs.

A large portion of my time up til now has been gathering feedback from users and helping them solve their specific need. I made special one-off schedules for some customers / made small tweaks for others.

After I solved their pain point, some of the features I added as a one-off became part of the main product. The support requests have died down a bit as the product stabilizes. I'm just getting started though, excited to add a bunch more features and repeat the above process.

Here's to hoping I can work on this full-time some day. It's getting closer everyday! :-)

Tellspin has been growing slowly but I've had quite a few users settle in and start using it. Most keep their usage under the free tier I provide. Today, however, the trial for someone who exceeded the limits expired.
I knew their day was coming up so I threw some code in over the weekend to make so when the trial expired (while I was in the hospital with my wife and new born child), it'd be a nice experience and not just seem like something broke.
My efforts paid off! I got my first paying customer! I'm super happy to reach this milestone, it has refreshed my desire to keep burning the midnight oil on Tellspin.

Tellspin got a tweet from IndieHackers! I didn't actually notice because I disabled twitter notifications, but I noticed this morning when I checked my analytics 🙂. Thanks for the shout out!

A week after publishing on the Slack app store, I now have a dozen users on Tellspin! The largest number of users came in on Tuesday (beginning of the work week I guess?). It'll be interesting to see what happens on Monday. My guess is people hold their team meetings at the beginning of the week and look for solutions then. Or they don't and I have no theory for the influx on Tuesday, haha.

I asked a few how they discovered me and they were simply were looking for a solution to their problem that day. I'm still getting positive feedback from users that it solves a pain point for them. No paying customers yet though, cross fingers it happens next week!

I received feedback back from Slack shortly after my last milestone. They had just a bit of feedback for making my app help users on the Slack free plan work better.

I spent some long nights during the week and most of my weekend fixing it up. Instead of just saying it didn't work for free slack users, I made it work with @Tellspin. I'm pretty excited with how it turned out. I re-submitted, and Slack's turnaround this time was much faster, only took one day for it to be approved!

I also had a great email back and forth with a potential customer. They initially just wanted to disable rotation on weekends, but then they had some great feedback on how to improve the app. It was extremely helpful for me. Most notably I think was the ability to use user groups as a source for the users on rotation. I think it has really improved how useful of a service it can be.

Their request involved a lot more work. So I spent another 2 weeks working nights and weekends getting it all working well. I also threw in overrides because at my previous jobs, that was something we always used.

I neglected to add one endpoint, so I'm waiting for the app to be re-approved. I'm hoping it'll be done by Tuesday (Monday is a holiday). Once they approve the changes, I'll be ready to email my potential customer back. Hopefully I've got most of what they need.

I setup a landing page with an "Add to Slack" button. I had made the proof of concept with a lot of hard coded stuff in a weekend. However, the button didn't even install the app, which I found out later by my two initial users.

To make it even more interesting, I mistakingly didn't have a way to contact me on my landing page. Luckily both users found alternative ways to contact me, within the space of a week (the timing is crazy, I have no idea how it happened). One found pushback and contacted me through that support channel.

They both ran into a problem where the slack app couldn't install. Since it was a proof of concept, it was pretty fragile. I guess it had just broken over time or I hadn't tested it well enough.

After they said it was broken, I got a rush of motivation to build it. I raced over the weekend to fix the install issue. I responded and asked them to try again. They were happy it was working. Success!

I wanted to know more about how they discovered Tellspin to try and further validate the idea, so I asked follow up question. They both said promising things:

"I found it while looking through Slack's apps for a solution for this exact problem."

"I found out about Tellspin by just googling "slack group rotation", "slack mention rotation" and similar phrases"

Another continued and said, "This is exactly what we were looking for in our company."

That was enough validation for me to turn the proof of concept into a full product. I spent a few nights for a week or so finishing all the features promised on the landing page. My initial users also asked for things I didn't really expect such as weekly rotation and multiple user groups, so I threw those in as well.

So far they've been openly communicating with me which is great. I said I'd waive the fee because they're early adopters. I have no idea if it'll be something people are willing to pay for yet, but it does seems promising. I went ahead and added a pricing with stripe with my best guess on what is reasonable. In the meantime, I'm hoping I can iterate with my initial users to make it a great product.

To increase installs, I submitted the app to the slack app store. I'm still waiting for it to be approved. It's almost been a month, but they said the 2 weeks for Christmas they wouldn't be looking at apps, so I suppose it makes sense it's taking so long.

I'm really happy that I sought validation before spending a lot of time upfront building something. I was rather busy at the time, so I didn't really expect anything to come from it. I think just letting things simmer while google picks you up can be a valid strategy, haha. I imagine you can boost initial validation with sharing the landing page with others. I didn't share it with anyone besides indie hackers.

The main advantage I see is my initial users will now guide what features I add. Who knows I might had spent 8 months building something people didn't want instead of waiting for these initial users.

I'm building Tellspin completely opposite to what I did for Pushback (my other product). I'm starting with the marketing first. I have a tendency to build like crazy or keep adding features without even validating the idea. I'm hoping to avoid that trap this time around by starting with the landing page. So far so good!