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Congrats on launching this! The design looks really slick. This might be tough to hear, but I think you fell into a common indie founder trap. It looks like yo
by mtlynch 2y ago
Congrats on launching this! The design looks really slick.
This might be tough to hear, but I think you fell into a common indie founder trap. It looks like you've let engineering get way ahead of market validation. You have all these features and different plans, but it sounds like they're guesses rather than things that paying customers have asked for.
I did the same thing when I was starting out. I created an API as a service because it was something I wanted, and there weren't good solutions available.[0] But then I spent a few months building it and realized I didn't have a plan for how to find customers. I thought they'd just find me and recognize me as better than the competition, but they didn't.
If I were in your position, I'd think about who would be a good customer for your service. Is there a way to find someone who's doing this now but is paying too much / getting poor results? Can you reach out to them? Even if you have to reach out to people one-by-one at first,[1] that's fine and gives you valuable feedback.
Also, my more opinionated feedback about your product (take with a grain of salt because my feedback is worth way less than someone who's a real prospective customer):
- If I try the example curl command on your landing page, I get HTTP 403
- The landing page could do a better job of showing the result of the curl command or make it easy for user to just push a button and get a result in the browser (for an allowlist of example domains)
- "Powered by AWS Serverless" is meaningless to customers and shouldn't be something you advertise, much less the first thing
- "99% uptime" also doesn't sound very good. Customers for this product likely aren't comparing vendors based on uptime.
- "Offering 30+ Customizable PDF Options" seems like a meaningless claim
I think the product page would benefit from you talking to more customers and including language that they use and lets them know you're solving the problem that they're trying to solve.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/ https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
- mtlynch 2y agoAlso, I'd get rid of the free tier. There's mixed opinion on this, but I think at this stage, you're better off not having freeloaders. You should only be paying attention to customers who want to pay. I'd even get rid of anything below $30/mo unless you live in a place where USD is very high relative to your local currency, as it's hard to make a business work if customers are paying you so little. At $9/mo, you can't really run ads or hire people to help you because you're making so little per customer. I'd do something like $50/mo, $100/mo, and Enterprise (contact us). A free trial is fine, but they should be entering their credit card upfront to show some interest in buying. And then if they sign up at that stage, I'd reach out to each signup and say something like, "Hi! I'm the founder, and I'm a real person typing this message to you. Thanks for trying it out! I'd love to understand how to make the product work better for you, so I'd love to hop on a call, or you can just let me know what you'd like it to do."
- centilco 2y agoThanks for your great feedback! I’ve replaced all the server- or technical-related highlights in the central highlights area with more user-friendly needs. Regarding the free tier — I don’t have many free users at the moment. Since most competitors are offering it, I might consider dropping it when the costs for free users become more significant. I really like your idea of reaching out to each new signup to see what can be improved. I’ll add that to my task list. Thanks again!
- mtlynch 2y agoCool, glad it was helpful! Thanks for following up!