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My first thought when I was going through the page: HN will not see much value in this given it's a highly technical crowd. I urge you NOT to get discouraged,

My first thought when I was going through the page: HN will not see much value in this given it's a highly technical crowd. I urge you NOT to get discouraged, and to chat with non-technical online small business builders: you'd find many who market primarily on Instagram, who are just figuring out how to get a nice website for their brand. I see a lot of value if you position your service as a way for them to offer a tiered loyalty program for their customers: i.e. "log-in via loginland, buy on our site and rack up points that you can redeem later!". Not sure what the integration would look like with their existing website builder stack, but could be fruitful to look into this. Also, there are MANY brands looking to spin up their first online store for their brand - may even make sense to offer a very basic product listing that lets them sell products and manage loyalty programs easily with their customers. Just a few suggestions that stemmed from recent conversations with founders of these kinds of small scale Insta-marketed brands.

benzguo 6y ago
Thanks for this comment, it was really encouraging! Do you know if there’s a community where these Insta founders hang out? I’d love to chat with you more if you’re open to it, I’m @benzguo on twitter!
- koopuluri 6y ago
  Hey Ben, yes I'm down to chat (email in bio). TLDR: Our company's target audience is small brands that market primarily on Insta & Tik tok w/out websites yet - in India. So far, it's been a very manual process to build a list of them. After every conversation we have, we ask them for referrals (interestingly, Insta-based small business owners seem to be well connected in India). There are also event organizers that have insta profiles where they showcase brands that present at their events. Happy to chat in greater detail, & all the best!
yodon 6y ago
Following up on @kupuluri's note, focus heavily on a very simple very clear tutorial/walkthrough. If you can't make the tutorial simple, keep iterating on the product until you can. Okta and Auth0 and Cognito are big established competitors but their products are complicated. If you've never done auth before it's not easy to figure out which of the many approaches and examples those services offer is the right one to use, and it's a big job to puzzle through and get them to work. Handle the 80% case incredibly well with an incredibly simple tutorial. Leave everything that won't fit into the incredibly simple tutorial for later.

benzguo 6y ago

Thanks for this comment, it was really encouraging! Do you know if there’s a community where these Insta founders hang out? I’d love to chat with you more if you’re open to it, I’m @benzguo on twitter!

koopuluri 6y ago
Hey Ben, yes I'm down to chat (email in bio). TLDR: Our company's target audience is small brands that market primarily on Insta & Tik tok w/out websites yet - in India. So far, it's been a very manual process to build a list of them. After every conversation we have, we ask them for referrals (interestingly, Insta-based small business owners seem to be well connected in India). There are also event organizers that have insta profiles where they showcase brands that present at their events. Happy to chat in greater detail, & all the best!

yodon 6y ago

Following up on @kupuluri's note, focus heavily on a very simple very clear tutorial/walkthrough. If you can't make the tutorial simple, keep iterating on the product until you can. Okta and Auth0 and Cognito are big established competitors but their products are complicated. If you've never done auth before it's not easy to figure out which of the many approaches and examples those services offer is the right one to use, and it's a big job to puzzle through and get them to work. Handle the 80% case incredibly well with an incredibly simple tutorial. Leave everything that won't fit into the incredibly simple tutorial for later.