TipMarkt
Smart football analytics tool
We have been working hard in the last couple of weeks after our initial launch; we have reached out to some users to collect more direct feedback, contacted some people making a living in the industry, and tried to improve the product. There were 3 main changes we have introduced:
- Revamped dashboard & Top Picks pages to summarize information in a direct way.
- Built a match details page.
- More importantly, we dropped the initial prices from £20 to £5, a big drop.
We were reluctant about dropping the prices, but we wanted to further validate the idea by acquiring paid users as well as giving some people early adapter changes since they would be supporting us from the beginning. Also, we have started running some very small paid marketing campaigns on Facebook for the last 2 days, ~5 euros per day.
I woke up this morning and saw that I had an email from Stripe, saying "Congratulations!". I jumped into the dashboard right after I read the email just to validate that this was correct, and it was correct indeed. I got super happy and sent screenshots to my friends to celebrate.
All in all, I know it is a super small amount of money and it doesn't prove anything about the product or anything, but it doesn't change the fact that something we have built has mode some money, and I am very happy to share this with all you guys.
Thank you for all the feedback and support up to this point, I hope you have a lovely Friday.
Cheers,
Burak
Since we have deployed our MVP on live at the end of November last year, we have been trying to fix bugs here and there and push ourselves to launch our product to a bigger community and to launch paid campaigns to test it out as well. We all live in different countries then we were born in, which means more or less every holiday season is a huge productivity decrease for us as all of us want to spend some time with family and friends back home, that's why the Christmas period was quite calm for us. Though I have to admit, it was great to see friends and family after a long time.
As we have returned from the holidays, it was time to get back up to the speed. This morning, we have finally launched TipMarkt on Product Hunt in order to share it with a bigger community and gather feedback. We are super excited about this launch, and we want to share all of our findings after this launch here as well so that the learnings are shared among all of us indie hackers.
Here is the product page on PH: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tipmarkt
Let us know if you have any feedback.
Cheers!
Burak
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As a Brazilian, respect for calling it Football instead of soccer.
Good luck with the endeavor.-
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As a Turkish, we specifically wanted to call it Football as well, glad to be on the same side! :)
Thank you very much, cheers!
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Nice one. Upvoted! Good luck:
What are chances of winning? Where do you crawl the data?
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This is pretty cool! Signing up. :)
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Best of luck Burak
nice name by the way ;)-
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Thank you very much! <3
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago
We have been working hard for the last 4 weeks and managed to get our MVP live with real data. We have mostly worked on weekends and nights, got together as much as we can, split the work and we have successfully deployed the first live functional version last night.
Here it goes: https://tipmarkt.com
The whole process was an incredible learning opportunity for us, starting from idea to validation to implementation. We have collaborated with many tipsters through Twitter, gathered their feedback on our initial idea, did research about who is using what to gather information regarding games and bets, and we have came up with the feature list of MVP.
One of the hardest parts was to have granular tasks that could be parallelized among us so that no one has to wait for the others. To implement that, we have created separate tickets for each feature we need for the MVP, as well as tasks related to marketing, feature/idea validation, and communication. After we have created a high-level overview of what needs to be done, we started creating subtasks for each discipline, which allowed us to see all the concrete steps we need to take.
There are two Burak's in the team, and both of them are software engineers, and they have took the main responsibility of implementing the user interface as well as the backend functionality to get the product working, and throughout the process, Batikan, a software engineering student, took parts of the website to implement the full functionality. Cem and Sabri are both data scientists, and they have split the load of implementing a service for retrieving, analyzing and prioritizing the data, as well as implementing the initial artificial intelligence algorithms for smart game suggestions.
From the beginning of the project we have decided to spend our time wisely, which meant using the tools we already know for the whole process., as well as not spending our precious time on repetitive tasks. We have had previous projects with the same people, and we already had a tech stack in mind. We have used Laravel as our main backend, with Vue for frontend and Tailwind for CSS. For the AI and predictions, we have used Python with FastAPI in order to serve the suggestions to our main backend. From the infrastructure perspective, we have used Docker images for everything in order to make things as smooth as possible for all of us in the development process, and docker-compose was the main tool for gluing all the services together within this setup. When it came to deployment, we have used DigitalOcean's Managed Kubernetes as it is very easy to operate, basically nothing to do from our perspective, and we have already had Kubernetes & Helm configuration for a very similar setup before, and we already had some other projects running on the same cluster as well, which meant we got up and going with Kubernetes in around 3-5 hours. Also, since we are heavy users of GitLab, we have utilized their amazing CI feature to build ourselves a pipeline that would run the tests, build the images and deploy them to our Kubernetes cluster for every push to our master branch.
Overall, we are quite happy with the result as we have our functional MVP that works as expected, we have a good base that we can build upon with feedback from users and we have managed to achieve all these in 4 weeks, mainly weekends. It has been quite a journey up until now, and we are incredibly excited to see what future will bring us with TipMarkt.
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Great job guys!!!!
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Thanks a ton!!
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Exciting! What are your next steps to get users onboard?
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Hey Rosie,
We have some early-stage Twitter tipsters that we plan to onboard this week, and we will be working with them closely to gather their feedback on the actual product. We are also tailoring some custom features specifically for tipsters to let them share their suggestions easily with their followers, which would drive their community to TipMarkt as well, and hopefully it will evolve into a platform where everyone from hobbyists to professional tipsters will find what the tools to support their flow.
Of course, these are early plans, and we will see whether they work or not in the near future. Let me know if you have any suggestions!
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Fantastic work and thank you for being so transparent on the team delegation approach and tech stack you used. Love the idea. Pretty sure the market validation part was easy. We all know euro football obsessed fans who have a weekly flutter budget. Best of luck.
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Thank you very much for the nice words! We plan to get more detailed regarding how we work and what are our experiences regarding the tech stack as we are trying to get more productive and deliver more value instead of fighting against the tech, so you will see us more and more talking about these!
Let me know if you have any questions!
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Impressive product. I'm wondering, did you find a userbase who would want such a product? If so, how did you find them? Also, were you able to get feedback on which features to add for the best user experience?
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Hey, thank you very much for the feedback!
Regarding the userbase, we have been following the bet community on Twitter for a while and we have been within the community, observing it for a while for ourselves. There are a lot of tipsters building simple algorithms on spreadsheets, and we have contacted some of them to see what we can do for them; most of these people needed support with Excel formulas and they needed a better way of handling these information, as well as keeping it up-to-date; and after helping them, we decided that it might actually be a good product that solves some of those common pain points for them, as well as allowing individuals to have a good understanding of the past data.
As I have said, we have launched only yesterday, therefore we still don't have a "userbase" per se, but we have been in contact with some tipsters, and they have given us valuable feedback about their needs. Of course once we have a userbase we will be sharing all our learnings with the community as we grow the product. :)
Let me know if you have any other questions or feedback!
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Site looks great, well done
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Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback! We built it using one of Cruip's great landing page templates to have a quickstart to the project, check them out here: https://cruip.com/
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Oh wow. That looks amazing. I'll may be try it someday. Good job
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Wow, does it actually work?
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Hey there,
Depends on what do you mean with "does it work", but it works in the sense that the tool is doing what it is supposed to do. :)
The data we serve is real, we also don't claim to serve the most profitable bets by any means, all we do is to gather and transform the data in a way that:
- it consists of facts
- it is easier to review and understand
- it is continuously up-to-date
That is the whole goal of TipMarkt. We don't claim to estimate the winning tips, we are presenting the data in a way that highlights the bets have the best probability statistically. In that sense, yes, the tool works. :)
Let me know if you have more questions or feedback!
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very good Obama, but I would recommend you post a direct link to your project if you want to build that user base and solicit feedback from us.
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Hi there,
I didn't get the Obama part, sorry. :)
I have updated the post to include the link. Let me know if you have any feedback!
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When you mention "AI Based Suggestions", and people have to bet real money on those suggestions I think people will call out bs.
Logically, if your suggestions are really "AI" and superior, you shouldn't be selling it for 19 pounds/mo, that seriously shows a lack of faith in your own product(If you were a good predictor of success like Renaissance trading, you charge a massive premium). Preferably, you should just be betting it yourself and capturing all that value for yourself until the bookkeepers catch up on the inefficiency.
In reality, the reason everyone has complicated excel tables is:
- control over source of information (data that your using it, if your betting real cash you need to know where it came from and how reliable it is.)
- the algorithm used to determine how you came to a decision - if you don't know what this is and don't have control over it your pretty much making uninformed decisions based on trust. And people who successfully bet, don't do it based on trust, they do it based on a scientifically verified hypothesis they came up with.
The best suggestion I can make is to show were your data sources are, allow people to import data, and then have analytical tools for people to build there own models (algorithms) and back test them - maybe even sell strategies they have come up with to each other.
Similar to https://www.portfolio123.com/ except for sports betting. Coming up with rules based algorithm building mechanism like this isn't easy, so start with something really simple, but this is the direction I would go in.forget the AI thing, those days are over. There is less than 100 people on the planet who can rightly use the term "AI" in their work and this project isn't it.
On your landing page - have a video or an interactive thing for the user to play with to see how your product works.
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Thanks a lot for the feedback. As I have said, we are still iterating on the business value, features and pricing, which means the overall product. We don't claim to have the algorithms that will give you tips that will win all the time, and we also don't claim that this is the single bullet in betting. What TipMarkt mainly does is to analyse the past data, combine it with the current game information and give an overview that is easier to digest and work on. Overall, maybe we should make our value proposition clearer in the sense that this is supposed to be an assistive tool, rather than a fully-fledged decision-making mechanism. :)
Apart from that, we have been ideating over the backtesting feature and it seems like a really valuable feature for power users, thanks for confirming this as well, lack of it was also one of the reasons why we started working on TipMarkt.
Overall, thanks a lot for taking the time and providing this feedback, we will definitely build upon this and hopefully shape our product in a better direction.
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21 Comments
Great news, congratulations on this important milestone!
Years ago I worked for an old-school VC-funded startup in a similar space. Five well-paid tech staff and a sales team, it basically burned through cash despite having a large customer base.
The most successful and cheapest customer acquisition channel was through a forum on the company website in which customers discussed trends and matches. Obviously, you can't have a forum with a few members - but once you get your numbers up, you may find you can scale back on paid acquisition and go down this route.
I took a look at your website. Your headline is clear and strong, I understand immediately what you're offering. The graphic is great, and tells me this is a real product. But I was baffled by the "avoid the puddle" line, I'd never heard this phrase. I did a quick check - it's a gaming phrase? Might be something to think about.
Hey! Thank you very much for the beautiful comment, and the feedback regarding community building is amazing. We have been trying to do a similar thing through Twitter by sharing daily tips and suggestions, but so far couldn't succeed. We have already built a very simple bet-sharing feature where users can build lists of games as well as their suggestions and then share this via a quick link that can be viewed by anyone, maybe we can add a similar "comment" feature there too?
Thanks a lot for the feedback, we will also check the copy on the website to make it more understandable for everyone! Let us know if you have more feedback, always happy to hear more.
Cheers!
Congrats.
Love the website, clear CTA and value proposition.
Has your business model changed from what you originally set out to do?
Hey, thanks a lot!
So far nothing has changed, we changed the pricing and added more features, but the pricing strategy is staying the same for now.
Thanks. All the best!
It's a HUGE thing to be validated by the market. Congrats!! 🙌
Jason Lemkin on SaaStr always says, if you can get 1 customer, you can get 10. And then you can 100, 1000 etc.
Keep going! You're on your way.
Hey Anita, thanks a lot for the comment, we hope to get a better understanding of our users' needs and further improve, this is just the beginning.
Thank you so much for the support!
Congrats! And keep it up to get your next hundred users!
Hey, we hope so too, thanks a lot!
Congratulations!!!
Thanks!
Great work! And great proposition :]
Hey, thank you so much, glad to hear!
My pleasure to see this type of posts.
Congrats!! 🎉
It was very exciting for us as well, thanks a lot for the comment!
Wow, seriously what a fantastic product. Great work ! Can see this being huge.
Hey, thank you so much, we hope it'll be a useful and long-standing product!
If you need any reps in London I’m looking for work 💁🏻♂️
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Hey, thanks for reaching out, my email is in my profile, feel free to shoot an email. :)
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Thank you very much! :)
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I have been reading these kinds of milestones with a smile too, and today has been our luck to post a similar milestone! :) Thanks for the nice words, best!