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Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it
- pestaa 16y agoAmazing to see how the idea itself revealed the way it could be validated - through Twitter of course. Nicely done. Informative post.
- smiler 16y agoThis is great - my only worry is that this is something that Twitter could easily replicate and destroy the revenue
- keeptrying 16y agoGreat story. How did you handle your initial billing? Did you integrate paypal?
- joelg87 16y agoThanks. Yep, just a simple Paypal setup. One of the interesting decisions was not to implement Paypal IPN (automatic upgrading when the payment comes through). My reasoning was that it could have been 4 months before I had the first customer, so I didn't want to implement it until I had validated that the time spent on it was worth it. I could rather spend the time gaining that first customer. So it was a very simple initial integration.
- keeptrying 16y agoCool. So you just added some html and javascript which took the user to paypal? No api integration at all ? Smart!
- joelg87 16y agoExactly. Minimum viable ;)
- keeptrying 16y agoThanks for letting us know this. I've read that this is the right way to go but I've never seen a writeup of someone who was successful doing this. This has seriously pushed me over the edge onto customer development.
- ncavig 16y agoBuilding a service that is dependent on another service is always a risk, but this is a very nice and simple app that a lot of the "social media" sides of companies could utilize. It's a great idea to make some extra revenue and I think has a nice market. Well done.
- chopsueyar 16y agoGood writeup. I really enjoyed your story, particularly your discipline to focus on customer acquisition and resist the temptation to code in a bunch of new features once you got some paying customers.
- joelg87 16y agoThanks. It's definitely something I still have to keep reminding myself of.
- hsuresh 16y agoGreat story. How many users sign up when you had the website put up? Also, were the users still helpful when they realized you don't have the app yet?
- joelg87 16y agoThanks. In around 4-5 weeks of having the landing page and pricing page up without the product existing, I got a total of 120 emails. I sent an email when they gave me theirs explaining a little more about the product and how I needed their help to shape it into something truly useful. They were delighted to be shaping a new product, and were certainly not negative about it not existing yet. One mistake I made was telling people in that email that it would be live in a week :) In the future I won't be telling people time scales!
- hsuresh 16y agoThanks for sharing your story. Congrats
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- cfontes 16y agoGreat post, thanks for sharing. I Am here in Brazil, crazy trying yo start something just the way you did, Twitter here is very hot (2nd place in the world in tweets after USA)I think you should try to market it here a bit, people here doens't pay a lot for online services but with more than 81,3M internet users you should hit some. If you need help, fell free to ask.
- joelg87 16y agoThanks :) That's really great to hear. We want to expand as quickly as we can globally since we think many people will find Buffer very useful, so any help would be hugely appreciated.
- cfontes 16y agohttp://www.hackernewsers.com/users/cfontes.html http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/cfontes.html in case you need info about brazil.
- fourhourstartup 16y agoNice work! I love this quote, "It was a tiny idea. I wanted to take the scheduling feature of many Twitter clients and apps and make that single feature awesome. I believed that single feature was worthy of it’s own application."
- matei 16y agonice job. I'm surprised however that people are willing to pay for this type of service. Makes you wonder if people would be willing to pay in order to use twitter
- bootload 16y ago"... nice job. I'm surprised however that people are willing to pay for this type of service. ..." It appears to be a toy product but if you consider: * As a twitter subscriber, reading multiple posts are a pain to read. This is a real problem for users and their subscribers. * Twitter has a lot of potential users/businesses looking for ways to automate etiquette. * Twitter has a lot of users The real problem for any developer here if I get a product with a lot of users, will Twitter just roll out the same product or will they pay enough?