Viyo
Use any device with a browser to create a security camera
A lot has changed in the first 4 months of 2020. We've continued to add useful features to Viyo, like two-way audio, better drop connection error handling, Slack notifications, and a huge upgrade to our security. Things have been slowly progressing.
Me and my partner support ourselves and our families by doing client work. Since the lockdown, we lost almost all of our clients. That was tough.
But, we've tried to make the best of this situation. We're seeing this as an opportunity to really focus on Viyo. The lockdown has created many new remote workers and we've noticed a gradual uptick in organic traffic and new signups every month. Viyo is especially relevant to caregivers that need to work from home and monitor at the same time.
We've partnered with an awesome team at Futureproof (meetfutureproof.com). They seriously get our product. We are refocusing and relaunching a new campaign soon, and I am extremely excited! :)
What an exciting milestone for us!! We are at about 300 free users currently which has been an awesome ride, but seeing that first paid subscription come through was an unreal feeling! It really validated that what we are doing is bringing people value. It also gave us a lot of motivation to continue with our philosophy of product/user first and revenue second, which is why we give away our product for free.
We launched on Product Hunt this weekend! What a fun launch this was. We had a lot of interaction and feedback. But most importantly, we got visitors and signups!
In total we got:
36 upvotes on Product Hunt
697 visitors to our website
43 signups
Not as big as our Hacker News launch, but for a small product like ours, we were pretty happy! We also got a ton of feedback on improving our product, marketing website, and Product Hunt page, which we will be working to improve this week!
You can check out our Product Hunt page here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/viyo
Things had been going really well. We were up to over 200 users and we felt that our product was stable and provided a lot of value. We were really excited about focusing on marketing our product. Then we got the wind knocked out of us. We received an email informing us that UView was trademarked. We considered our options and we decided that the best way to go would be to rebrand. It took almost two full days of brain storming, discussions, and research before we found Viyo. We both loved the name. It was a play off the word "video", the trademark wasn't taken, and the domain was available. We got to work designing the logo keeping a lot of the brand aesthetics that we had established with UView. When we finally stepped back to look at our new logo we were really excited and felt that we had actually taken a step forward.
We launched our product to the public on Hacker News with the title "Show HN: Turn any device with a browser into a security camera" and a link to our app. We didn't have high expectations. We had posted on a few subreddits before and only got a handful of signups. Boy were we wrong! What a response we had! We ended up staying on the front-page for almost 12 hours! The highest that we made it was #15, but that was enough to get us ~6000 unique visitors to our website and 130+ signups. We answered questions and responded to people throughout the day. Hacker News has an amazing community with a lot of intelligent and insightful people. We compiled a list of feedback and discussed/prioritized them the next day. This would bring about one of the biggest changes to our product. We decided to change our business model from free trial to freemium (free forever with optional paid premium).
My partner Jordan also wrote a blog post about what we took away from this experience. You can check it out here: https://medium.com/@jdmcrae8/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-sharing-your-product-on-hacker-news-860d333488d7
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Glad to know it! We are going to launch on Hacker News as well. Hope we have that luck! Thank you.
We signed up roughly 30 people to help us to beta test Viyo. It was a very exciting and motivating process! We received a lot of great initial feedback and we were able to fix a lot of bugs. We were lucky because we had a good mix of technical and non-technical beta testers. All of our beta testers received free premium accounts forever.
Me and Jordan fleshed out the core idea of Viyo (at the time it was called UView) and started working on the MVP. We initially started the project as a fork of another project. As we started learning more about WebRTC and all of the paradigms associated with creating Viyo, we decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. This would allow us to have a deeper understanding of the underlying technology that powered our project and it would also give us the opportunity to learn something new.
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