Vork
Say goodbye to burnout
It's been a while since I've posted and lots of things have happened.
December 2021 – I applied late to YC Winter 2022 and as predicted I didn't get in, but it was definitely worth a shot. However not all was lost as I found a great cofounder and we got into an accelerator called Antler.
While at Antler we decided to pivot our product. Instead of being a communications tool we decided to switch our focus to meetings. Meetings are one of the biggest sunk costs of businesses and there's not good enough tooling to improve the quality of meetings so we set out to solve it.
January 2022 - March 2022 – Antler was a 10 week intense program that was designed to help us flesh out our idea and potentially get funding. While we neglected to get funding we learned a ton and we built out an MVP with real users using our product. Our product is a Chrome extension that integrates directly into Google Calendar to help you build productive meetings quickly.
April 2022 - Present – We got more users onboarded and they're loving the experience. We decided to make it public for everyone to use and we did our official launch on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vork). If you have some time please check it out!
It's a super late application, I know, but it's better to give yourself a shot rather than no shot at all right?
I've decided to apply simply because I would love to be able to work on Vork full time and I believe the resources allocated to me from YCombinator will enable me to do just that.
It's definitely a long shot, but wish me luck!
During the closed beta I uncovered a few obscure bugs and gave the app an overall facelift. After testing with a few teams I've decided to make the beta an open beta so that I can test at scale :).
Apart from bug fixes I've also added billing to the open beta. This is the first time I'm accepting payment so hopefully I can get a few paying users by the end of the open beta.
It's been a long 9 months of dev, testing, pivoting and repeating, but I've finally reached my first major milestone. I've launched my beta on Product Hunt!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vork-beta
Although it's a small step on a long journey, I've got to say that I feel good that I've made it this far
I launched my Beta on Hacker News this morning and while I got quite a few more clicks than expected, I also didn't get the results I expected. However, I learned a few things in the process.
Lesson 1: Capturing your audience
The link I provided brought users straight to my landing page (https://govork.com), but I quickly noticed that users were spending an average of about 7 secs on my website meaning that the HN title captured their attention, but my landing page didn't retain it so I need to make changes to my landing page to keep users engaged
Lesson 2: Mobile Support
While Vork is mobile friendly, the landing page sure isn't. My features section has videos outlining the features in motion, but they're just way too small on a mobile device. I need a better way to outline the features on mobile
Lesson 3: Call to Action
No user from HN clicked on the "Join the Beta" button on the website which was the main goal of the post. I need to make some adjustments to my marketing campaign as well as my landing page to get users to be intrigued enough to sign up for the beta.
While it's a bit disappointing that I didn't get new beta users, I learned a few things that can be used to improve my product so overall I view it as a success and not a failure :D
Just launched the closed Beta. The focus of the Beta is to test the overall reliability of the platform in real work environments.
We've got a couple companies signed up and looking to add some more. It's been a long 8 months developing this over 8 months so I'm really excited and also somewhat nervous to see how it works in the real world
2 Comments
Upvoted. 😀
Thank you so much! :)