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Show HN: Attract more customers by highlighting why people trust you
- sharath39 6y agoHey there HN community I'm Sharath co-founder at Shoutout. This is my first posting a product on HN so I'm pretty stoked at the same time heavily nervous about it! Five months ago, I had this idea of gathering all the shoutouts I get on Twitter under one place, and I thought it would be cool to launch an LP and validate it with everyone. As a no-code maker, I shipped the LP in less than 24hrs, got 120+ signups, and saw people saying we need this! I then shipped a no-code MVP, tested it with few close friends who asked for more features. The signs were so clear that I went ahead and put a bat-signal on Twitter searching for a co-founder. Curtis Cummings from nowhere approached me, and we clicked in our first meeting and started building a fully coded product. We launched our private beta 2 months ago and got the opportunity to onboard some iconic creators like Jack Butcher, Julian Shapiro, Lenny Rachitsky, and startups like On Deck and Knowable. We've iterated on our early believers' feedback and made a product that delivers value to creators and startups! A month ago, we launched Shoutout to the public and on Product Hunt and secured #3 product of the day. We now have 36 paying customers and got Product Maker Grant Recipient award. Today, I'm pumped to announce Shoutout to the Hacker News community! We truly believe creators and startups should leverage the social proof they are getting on Twitter, and our mission is to make it easy for everyone! Shoutout lets you tap into your existing social proof and turn it into a beautiful "Wall of Love" How does it work? Curate and Organize: With an infinite feed that is constantly updating every second, tracking social media shoutouts* is an invaluable task! Shoutout removes the tediousness and spotlights all the high-signal tweets in one place. Customize and Design: We believe in personalization and value the importance of custom branding. Shoutout quickly turns the bunch of tweets into a beautiful wall within minutes. Rearrange these shoutouts according to your need and add custom colors that represent your brand. Showcase and Embed: Share your public wall or embed it directly on your site without any coding. Our embeds are blazing fast, so they won't slow down your site. As you update your wall, your embed will show all of your latest shoutouts, making the experience frictionless. What's next: We are not stopping here, and this is just the beginning of our mission to help creators and startups to leverage the social capital they gain on Twitter! We are excited to launch many more features based on your feedback and look forward to delivering more value to you constantly! If you have any feedback, feel free to comment or say hello to us on Twitter @shoutoutso_!
- aryamaan 6y agoGreat product. Good luck with this.
- sharath39 6y agoThanks and appreciate your time checking it out!
- gibbonsrcool 6y agoWhat does LP mean? From the context it looks like something more basic than an MVP? Would you mind sharing what tech you used for the no-code stages (LP and MVP) of your product?
- sharath39 6y agoLP means landing page. Sure happy to share the stack. For the landing page, I used carrd.co, mailerlite for wait-list signups. For MVP I used bubble.io, Twitter API.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoCongrats on launching!
- sharath39 6y agoThanks Andrew!
- helimn 6y agoLove the idea, and the details on how you validated it! Now just to get some shoutouts on Twitter... :D One question I have is how you drove traffic to your LP initially?
- sharath39 6y agoI build in public. Almost all the traffic is organic and since we do share lessons, highs, lows transparently, people love us.
- runako 6y agoVery interesting product, congratulations on the launch! Some initial feedback/suggestions: 1) Raise pricing, especially on the $15 plan. 2) The $50 plan looks like something agencies will pick up for their clients. So get ahead of that and charge more for that. Limit to N walls per domain or something. Then add agency plans that scale by # of domains where walls are posted. Agency plans probably should start at $99 (maybe for 3 domains) and go up. 3) Auto curation could be cool. Run tweets through some kind of sentiment analysis and email/Slack/SMS candidates to your customers. Let them Y/N each. That way they don't have to log into the app to get results. Good luck!
- sharath39 6y agoLove it. This is some great feedback Ranuko. Definitely going to consider adding domain limitations on walls and adding agency pricing.
- didgeoridoo 6y ago+1 on raising the Pro price. I’d also reconsider the ability to publish a wall from the Free plan — you can get a hell of a lot of value out of this product with a single wall, and pay nothing in return. Two alternate approaches could be: 1) Give away less value. Generate the wall for a proof of concept, but keep it in draft until payment hits. 2) Get something in return. Badge the free wall with a Shoutout link/logo/“what’s this?” that can be removed by paying.
- sharath39 6y agoInteresting ideas. Thanks for these. We will look into it and implement accordingly.
- fbelzile 6y agoI feel like people instinctively suggest to "raise your price" here because that's just what you're supposed to say nowadays. Yes, in most cases, a lot of people undervalue the value of their work, but as someone looking for this type of thing right now, I wouldn't pay more than $5/mo (or a $29 one time fee for something self-hosted). I just don't think adding tweets to my site is worth +$225/yr CAD in perpetuity. OP should consider making a plugin for Shopify/Wix, etc. That would be more their target market anyway.
- trulykp 6y agolove the product - been a fan since the MVP which was built on Bubble :) Wondering if you could send a weekly email with top Shoutouts to my Twitter account?
- sharath39 6y agoThanks KP for being an early believer since day 0 :) Yes, daily/weekly reminders is a feature we already planned. Stay tuned, for it to become live.
- markdown 6y agoAm I understanding right that this is just a testimonials feature with the limitation that it only shows tweets? If so, I don't understand why one would pay $15/month for this when you can just embed tweets in any html page or CMS for free.
- sharath39 6y agoThere are many reasons why people are paying for it: 1. Save time - We find the best shoutouts for you so you don't have to search them in bookmarks and find them. 2. Design beautiful walls - We are offering design layouts(grid view, carousel view) with custom settings like changing colors, dark mode etc. 3. Zero maintenance - Once you setup an embed on your website you are done. All you need to do is add shoutouts to your wall and the embed automatically reloads with news shoutouts. 4. Ultra-fast embeds - Our embeds load ridiculously faster than Twitter embeds. 5. We are not just limiting ourselves to Twitter but will expand it other platforms. So we are here to monopolize the social proof niche.
- amelius 6y agoAlso, you can't just pull tweets from the web and show them as testimonials. You will need to ask the sender for permission. (I would personally hate it if my tweets were pulled out of context and used like this for commercial purposes, without my consent.)
- pedalpete 6y agoBut does Shoutout ask the OP for permission to display the tweet? I've never heard this "you can't just pull tweets from the web.." twitter provides the embed capability, and doesn't mention anything in their terms (from what I can find) about asking for OP permission. This strikes me as something that took longer to build as a service, than it would take an individual to build for their own app.
- sharath39 6y agoWe don't ask for permissions. We believe in positive-sum game. Social proof is given in the first place by people to people whose work or service made a positive impression on them. We focus to showcase that and leave the rest.
- amelius 6y agoSo, selective reviews?
- sharath39 6y agoCan you be more little more specific? The tweets we suggest are high-signal and we believe it will help your product, newsletter or whatever you are selling.
- verdverm 6y agoI believe they mean something like... you're filtering for only positive reviews (best for your customers) rather than unbiased perspectives (so that humans are best served by unfiltered truth) So the company is able to "lie" to potential customers. How companies manipulate Glassdoor is an interesting case study
- tkiolp4 6y agoInteresting. How do you guys filter out not so nice @ mentions? Is it a manual process?
- sharath39 6y agoThanks for checking us out. We have build an algorithm that curates the high-signal mentions and we suggest them to you. We have a mechanism in place to avoid the low-niosy tweets.
- dstik 6y agoVery clever - great idea and execution. Embedding positive tweets is something we've wanted to add to our site for a long time but it's so annoying/tedious to put together on your own, this it awesome. Thanks for creating and sharing!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aaaalex 6y agoWe use Shoutout on our site — very happy with it! How's that for meta social proof?
- sharath39 6y agoSo on point! Thanks Alex :)
- bemicrobrave 6y agoWe're a paying customer and happily so. The product is slick, it works extremely well, and the cost is negligible compared to the value you get from it. For us @bemicrobrave (on Twitter) this was a no-brainer from the moment we saw it.
- sharath39 6y agoThanks guys! Love what you are doing and glad you are our customer!
- okitsjoe 6y agoCongrats on the launch, the product looks great! How did you manage to show the local currencies in the pricing section? Are you using any library or third party service for that?
- sharath39 6y agoWe use Paddle and it takes care of the currency when you enable the feature. Actually my technical co-founder is better to answer this question.
- okitsjoe 6y agoHey thanks! I'll take a look :)
- Jamiehan 6y agoDo you convert the price for each location / currency to a round number, or do you keep it as a straight conversion? E.g. Picking a $15 USD plan in the UK would bill me for £10.80, and fluctuate each month.
- sharath39 6y agoPaddle take care of everything.
- chrisweekly 6y agoCool idea, great post. Minor constructive criticism of your LP: most of the screen is taken up by a meaningless pseudo-lego figure with (at a glance) an ambiguous response to an unknown problem or solution. If I hadn't come to it by way of HN I'd have bounced on 1st impression.
- sharath39 6y agoThanks for the feedback Chris! Will make it better.
- ph2082 6y agoLove the graphic on landing page. Awesome job by designer.
- sharath39 6y agoHaha thanks!
- tommoor 6y agoI built exactly this for Buffer maybe 8 years ago now, and amazingly a version of it still stands today: https://buffer.com/love https://buffer.com/love Definitely a nice page to have on your site, I guess the fact that it's lasted this long (well after I left the company) means it must still be showing value. Quite simple on the backend, it just pulls in tweets that the official Buffer account as fav'd on an hourly basis.
- abinaya_rl 6y agoWe are a proud user of this product. It's been realy fast compared to the Twitter embeds. If you embed more than 10 tweets Twitter script becomes very slow and this product makes it faster. Really appreciate the team.
- sharath39 6y agoThanks for the shoutout Abhinaya! Glad to have you as our user.
- timdaub 6y agoI find the art style of your website quite curious. Regarding the pricing and product: I do understand that some agencies may be willing to pay a few bucks to use your product. But over the long term, I'd expect that someone creates an open source gatsby plugin that outperforms your product. Or Am I missing something?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Speakethics 6y agoSo privacy policy and terms of service in a notion document, are you serious? If I become a user, I have no idea if you are going to change the terms after I have joined it. These makers they build websites, want user data by hiding transparency, user ethics. Its a big joke.