How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20k users in 14 months Entrepreneur |
- How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20k users in 14 months
- Elevator Pitch, But For Dating
- The 4-Word Startup
- I made an affiliates program for my website?
- Where can I rent space on weekends to film videos and do work?
- A curated method for Indie Entrepreneurs to get consistent feedback from their like-minded peers
- Is it okay to pay sales person 100% in commissions?
- Landing Page Tips That Helped Me Do +$600 in Pre-Launch Sales
- American business importing from Mexico, or Mexican business exporting to the US?
- (App) There is a problem, but is there any problem solvers for it?
- My two friends and I started a new business, what should we put as job titles on our business card?
- How are services like DomainAgents able to get in contact with domain owners that have privacy, but no privacy email?
- Hey r/Entrepreneur, what is your opinion on business incubators?
- Email mining for a web design business
- How to successfully relaunch on ProductHunt and why I'm still feeling stuck
- Selling a Small Business
- Guest posts and major publication posts
- App Ideas And What To Do With Them
- When do you know if it’s your product, ads, or website design?
- Where to print product instruction sheets?
- iOS app. Almost finished the app. Next step?
- Potential Solution to this Sub's general rubbish-ness
- Can I be successful with stocks at age 15 ?
- CPA Strategy in 2020
| How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20k users in 14 months Posted: 04 Jul 2020 05:18 AM PDT 14 months ago, my co-founder Sankalp and I set out to build a business that can sustain our livelihood while allowing us the freedom to live life on our terms. When we started, we each had roughly 12 months of savings to survive on, assuming we made $0. Hence our minimum goal was to make $1,500/mo and the case where we would be celebrating with champagne was set to $3,000/mo. We launched our app on April 24, 2019. The first paid plan was launched on June 4, 2019. Around the same time, we got featured by Shopify. 14 months later, we grew past $25,000 in MRR while remaining a 2 person team. I'm so proud of what we have built here. If life is a video game, and there's 100 levels to it, I feel like we have finally crossed level 1. Here's what we've been up to in the 14 months since launch:
We did a lot of things right, but we also messed up here and there. I've tried to capture an honest and accurate account of our journey so far. 11 key learnings and mistakes from our journey 1- Learning: Always keep moving the needle Running your own business and having 100% freedom and flexibility is a gift or a curse, depending on how you use it. It's easy to get lost in building, polishing, bringing your ideas to life. But remember, the only things that matter are what move the needle. For every decision related to your business, you should always run it through a set of questions that help you filter out whether your idea is aligned to your business goals.
Ultimately, you want to keep making decisions that move the needle for your business - by bringing you more customers and revenue, or making it easier and less time consuming to run the business (if that's one of your goals, it is for us). 2- Learning: Help users realise value as soon as possible From our research, we learnt that Shopify merchants are mostly solopreneurs or teams of 2-10. They are always time and resource crunched. We wanted to enable our users to start using the app with the least amount of setup time or steps. This reflects in in the user experience of the app. For example, when a first time user enters their phone number and hits the "Save" button, at this time the user is looking to test our app and see if it fits their needs. We speed that up by automatically enabling the chat button on first save, along with the best default configuration for all chat button related settings. Another example, when a user wants to start sending automated messages, all they have to do is click on the "Enable" button. All the app's default configuration is automatically applied and the user can start seeing value immediately. 3- Learning: Care about your users, they can feel it Users are on a mission to achieve their goals. They typically need your help when there's something that stops them from getting there. From day 1, we were clear on providing the best possible support. Our users would be thrilled to see bug fixes deployed in 15 minutes, WhatsApp & email replies in 5 minutes, and so on. We were fast, we were responsive. This worked in our favour - users showered us with positive reviews which is how we managed 500+ reviews while staying 5.0 star rated. But customer support isn't only about getting reviews. We've had users who prefer using our app instead of competitors because A- We reply quickly B- We proactively provide information beyond the immediate premise of the query Your users can feel when you genuinely care about them 4- Learning: Be smart about managing and reducing support ticket volume The downside of trying to be a customer support hero is, you only have finite hours in the day, and you don't want to spend most of it replying to customers. We took 3 specific initiatives to reduce support tickets. 1- Embed FAQs within the product We found that users would have FAQs around specific features, and they wouldn't really go to the help center and reference it. To them, it's simpler to ask for help. To solve this problem, we embedded FAQs inside the product itself. Here are a few examples where we included the most commonly asked question beside the feature configuration. The results were always immediately noticeable. Where we would get 10 questions a week about X, would drop to 1-2, thereby freeing us up from answering repetitive support questions. 2- Fix repetitive bugs If a bug appears more than thrice in a span of days, the third time is when we go ahead and permanently fix it. Why thrice? That way we don't overwhelm ourselves with trying to fix every single bug, but only the ones that appear repeatedly and take up support time. 3- Remove WhatsApp chat support and go with Email only During initial days, we found it useful to let our users contact us on WhatsApp. It lead to tons of conversations which shaped our understanding of the user's needs and how we can better solve them. But having WhatsApp as a support channel had 3 issues: 1- With time, we discovered that people find dropping a message on WhatsApp to be very low barrier. Which means they wouldn't take a moment to look around, be patient enough to find out how the issue that they are about to describe has already been solved inside the app. It's just easier to WhatsApp us. 2- We also discovered that users had an unrealistic expectation of quick replies and quick resolutions on WhatsApp. Granted, we would be quick whenever possible. But if it's 11pm at night and the user asks if a bug is fixed 10 minutes later, it can get a bit annoying. 3- I started dreading picking up my phone, seeing it full of support tickets every morning. To solve this, we removed the WhatsApp chat button from our own app, and replaced it with an Email support button instead. All 3 problems listed above got resolved to a great degree. We also made numerous smaller tweaks to optimise our support flow. One of the tiny but powerful tweaks was to automatically populate the email subject line with the user's Shopify store url. That made it so much faster for us to look up the specific user instead of a meaningless back and forth of "what's your store url". Our efforts have paid off. Unless we're building new features, we spend only about 15-30 minutes per day on customer support. 5- Learning: Say No, often Users ask for all sorts of functionality. It doesn't mean you should build them. Whenever we get feature requests, we add a card in our internal Notion board and judge the card against 3 factors 1- how many times do we receive the same request 2- does the feature align with the rest of our product 3- does the feature add core value to the user Many times, we found users requesting features that would save them the hassle of using another app. Now, if that functionality enhances the rest of our app, it's the right feature to add. But if it doesn't, then we politely decline. There are 2 types of responses we give to customers regarding feature requests: 1- Tell them that this feature isn't requested by other users that much, and since we are a small team with limited resources, we may not be prioritising this feature in the near future. 2- Tell them that this feature is already part of our roadmap, and that we will reach out to them whenever it's ready. I generally avoid giving timelines, to account for "life happens, plans change". This learning extends beyond just feature requests. In the past year, we have received tons of business proposals, partnerships, integration requests, collaborative marketing invitations etc. Saying No allowed us to remain focused on what's really important. 6 - Mistake: Optimise top of the funnel I was under the impression that during build phase, we shouldn't focus too much on optimisation. After all, you don't want to get busy squeezing another 10% when the potential is to 10x. In most cases, I think I made the right call. One place I made the wrong call was the user onboarding flow. Until March 2020, users would install the app and directly land on the chat settings page, which is the starting point of the user's journey. We were getting a steady flow of 10-15 paid trials initiated per day. Adding a step of friction before this would be counterintuitive, right? It couldn't possibly increase trials, right? Sigh. When we added one screen which asked the user upfront whether they want to continue with the Free plan, or start a trial for the Paid plan, daily paid trials DOUBLED overnight, while trial-to-paid conversion rate remained steady at 50%. The experiment took us a day to build, and after a week we concluded what was clearly the winner. I normally advocate for focusing on building vs optimising in the early stages, but in this case I didn't know that optimisation was waiting to unlock 100% increase in trials. My takeaway here is - always keep your eyes open for bottlenecks at the top of funnel. If there's copy on your website, or a specific sign up flow that might be holding you back from getting 2x the users, you need to unblock it early and realise compounded gains over time. 7- Mistake: Competition will copy, don't completely ignore them In the past year, we've seen competitors copy our app interface, in-app descriptions, button designs, app listing text word-for-word in many cases. Initially we were furious, but instead we kept our head down and focused on customer's needs. Eventually we started ignoring our competitors, which was a mistake. While we were not looking, competitors gained ground on the huge lead that we had built up. While I recommend entrepreneurs to not pay too much attention to competitors, I don't recommend ignoring them entirely. If you had to split your attention, give 95% to your users and 5% to competition. You want to remain informed about your competitor's moves, whether that's them copying you, building new features you haven't yet implemented, or changing their pricing. In today's competitive landscape and low barrier to tech, all tech can get copied. Hence, build your moats beyond just your product. I now understand better the value of building a brand. 8- Mistake: Charge according to customer value I think we really struggled with charging correctly. Based on a few conversations with other app developers, we assumed that the right approach was to straight up raise prices. We raised our top plan from $14.99 to $19.99 to $29.99. Our paying user base kept growing, albeit very slowly. Where did the other customers go? To our competitors who were busy catching up. The vast majority of our users are small merchants who barely have a few hundred orders a month. By becoming more expensive, we were alienating the 90% of potential paying users coming our app. After realising this, we dropped subscription pricing to $10/mo. We make a healthy margin on messages and thus larger customers end up paying us more. We also moved all chat button features to the Free plan, and combined all other paid plans into one plan. This greatly simplified things for the customer, for whom there were only 2 choices to be made in the pricing page. 9- Mistake: Don't get complacent What do you think happened in that flat part of the graph? Ecstatic about our initial success, we took the foot off the pedal for a few months where we pretty much allowed things to run on autopilot. It was a great time, I thoroughly enjoyed earning money while I ate, slept, read, watched, and relaxed. But during the same time, our competitors were hard at work copying our app features. They incorporated many of our basic paid features in their free plan, which slowed down our user growth. We were happy with the revenue we were making, which had already surpassed all our expectations before the slowdown, but we started flatlining around January-February of 2020. That's when we decided to take back charge of the situation. We made rapid changes to the product and more importantly pricing, which I've covered in previous points. This helped us retake merchants, get back to growth, and plug the leaky bucket. 10- Mistake: Expand your distribution channels If we had to go back in time, one thing we would do differently is go beyond Shopify. At the very least, we should have diversified into the Wordpress and WooCommerce ecosystem. Initially we thought our rating and reviews volume would be enough to keep the #1 spot. Alas, we were mistaken. There are many ways to game reviews, one is by forcing your users to leave a review. Unfortunately, the Shopify app ecosystem is riddled with more such apps everyday, and one of them set their sights on us and overtook our ranking in less than 3 months. Thankfully, the effect we had on trials initiated barely registered. We are mostly losing users seeking a "completely free" solution to our competitor. But it can get worse in the future as competition continues cloning our app (down to our code snippets). My takeaway from this is - depending on 1 distribution channel can be dangerous, especially if that channel is an app marketplace which you don't own. 11- Learning: Keep your expectations low, and keep surpassing them Sankalp and I kept enjoying everything this app gave us because it would always surpass our expectations. For example - we expected to hit $3k MRR by end of 2019, but we crossed $8k by then. This kept happening time and again. And while there's a risk of setting the bar too low, as long as you're aware that you're not doing that, it's far more enjoyable than setting the bar too high. Ultimately, we didn't quit our jobs and start a business to lead stressful lives. We want the businesses we build to work around our lives, enabling us to live more freely and be more happy. For the most part, I think we have achieved that. -- If you enjoyed this post, do share your thoughts with me on Twitter. You can find the full original post with images and video over here on my blog. I sincerely hope this post will help new entrepreneurs who are building a Shopify app, or a micro-SaaS product to grow their business. And also give ideas to help entrepreneurs who like us are somewhere in the messy middle. EDIT: Many of you have DM'd to ask about how I discovered the idea to pursue. I researched every damn Shopify app and tried to find an opportunity where there's not too much competition and where the existing apps leave room for significant improvements. Here's the app ideas spreadsheet from my research, if it helps - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hnpcl1VAlPC9MuFvvsl2UsU0yu1iM6aKR-iK30VtbwA/edit?usp=sharing [link] [comments]  |
| Elevator Pitch, But For Dating Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:33 AM PDT I have an idea for a startup, it's like an elevator pitch; you and an investor get on an elevator together and you have the length of an elevator ride to pitch your startup idea. In my case, it's for dating, you have 60 seconds to impress someone (through text) you admire online, after that 60 seconds, you won't be able to text them and they would have the option to either give you their phone number or reject you entirely. What do you all think of this? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Jul 2020 08:08 AM PDT Person A: "So what does your startup do?" Person B: "Oh we use AI, machine learning and neural networks to gather data so we can form synergistic B2B solutions to the autobot messenger problem by creating great biohacking communities and disrupting the massive B2C platforms, in the cloud of course. We're also planning to add scooters and a delivery service around this idea." Person A: Confused look and silence Person A: "Oh... Right..." This scenario is often the case for new founders, including myself. It's demoralising when you tell someone what your startup does... Only to get a completely confused stare in return. If you're anything like me, this has happened to you a few times at least... And you've probably seen other founders going through it too. Our first instinct is to blame other people - but it's our fault. When you're starting out, it's hard to differentiate a good idea from a confusingly bad idea. But unfortunately, you need to feel this embarrassing process over and over, to learn what a good idea actually is. It's what led me to find the 'The 4-Word Startup' method. I've personally gone through it more than a few times... Sharing an idea with people, only to get demoralised after seeing nothing but looks of confusion on people's faces. I'm sure you know the look I'm talking about! The truth is you need to get punched in the face over and over again (proverbially speaking!) until you finally wake up to your mistakes and find a better way forward. For me, that was 'The 4-Word Startup' method which I want to share with you today... So how did I go from blank, confused stares on peoples when I told them about my ideas... To consistently receiving that comforting "Aha, I get it! That's very cool." look that we so deeply crave? Well... The weird thing I realised is that the best startups (and even big businesses) are quite simple. So simple, in fact, that they can usually be summed up in 4 words or less. Here's how it works. Your startup solves a problem... But what you need to do is describe the solution, in 4 words or less. Let's look at some popular examples, to see what I mean...
And you can keep practising this method by describing other companies or ideas this way. Of course, you can do this with your own ideas too. One of the best ways to remember and describe this process is through a Peter Thiel quote from Zero to One: "A superior solution, to a specific problem." From the examples above, you can see that each startup solved a specific problem. But you can describe their superior solutions in 4 words or less. So as you get used to practicing this method, you'll notice yourself noticing specific problems around you... And you should then try to describe the superior solution in 4 words or less. Suddenly, you'll notice when you share ideas with people - they have that pleasant look of "I get it!" on their faces. Anyway... I wanted to share this method so some of you can learn from my many mistakes... And avoid the many embarrassing moments I experienced! Thanks for reading. P.S. if you enjoyed this mini-hack, subscribe to my free newsletter to get a couple of these 'Copywriting for Startups' hacks delivered to your inbox every week! [link] [comments]  |
| I made an affiliates program for my website? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:34 AM PDT Hi. I sell novelty items on Shopify and it's gaming themed. Things were going pretty slow, I'd only sell about 1 item a week. I saw a lot of people who run their stores always had a discount code running 24/7, it would just be something simple like "10OFF for 10% off" and I wanted to try that. But I thought of an idea that would push better and wanted to post here so I can take a step back if I'm leading myself into something hurtful/stupid. Idea: affiliates program Last week, I introduced an affiliates program. I saw that in the gaming (competitive/esports) community a ton of people have the dream of being "sponsored" as that basically means they're pro and that's what the top gamers had. So I started getting word around that ANYONE no matter how big or small their following is, can sign up for my affiliates program. They would get their own discount code (for example "use code MYNAME for 10% off), free stuff, and earn 10% commission for each item sold using their code. Commission isn't earned until you sell at least 10 items. Majority of those who signed up for the affiliates program have almost no following and nobody knows them, therefore they'd get a few good sales and most likely never reach the 10 sales. This results in giving me some small quick advertising, and a few people in their circle to buy one of my items at a discounted price. I got about 40 sign ups and I approved of around 15 of them. They all are ver happy and telling all their friends that they are "sponsored". I've been putting a lot of emphasis that this is an affiliate program but whatever. I got a good boost in social media engagement and sales picked up a lot. I went from getting 1 sale a week to 2-3 sales a day. So here's where I'm at now. - I still have the remaining 30+ applications waiting to be approved. If I approve them all, I'll obviously get a large sales boost and things will be great, but I feel like this is short term quick cash thinking. Should I keep approving everyone and keep up the affiliates program? It just feels unnatural. [link] [comments]  |
| Where can I rent space on weekends to film videos and do work? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:10 AM PDT I live at home with my parents and I just don't feel comfortable filming videos at home. It's a small place and I just don't have a good headspace there. Is there a way I can rent a small space to film videos for social media, as well as do work on my online business? I would primarily be using it on weekends. I don't live in a huge city, btw. Do you have any ideas? [link] [comments]  |
| A curated method for Indie Entrepreneurs to get consistent feedback from their like-minded peers Posted: 04 Jul 2020 01:35 PM PDT Hey fellow Redditors, So my co-founder and I recently launched Facet - a peer groups system where we match you up with like-minded folks to give you periodic feedback and support. We are building this for the indie entrepreneur - that means e-commerce folks, coaches, consultants, content creators, and other online business owners! For our beta version, it is free and we want to invite you all to apply. Groups will fill up at 60 initial applicants though so check them out soon if this sounds interesting to you! [link] [comments]  |
| Is it okay to pay sales person 100% in commissions? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 09:35 AM PDT So I am rolling out a B2B SAAS in next few weeks, which involves a pay as use model. And I was thinking for paying the sales guys only in commissions from the sales they make. The commission percentage is a 100% on the first transaction with the customer and then something like 10% for subsequent transactions till the customer uses the service. The sales conversion time should be small since it mainly targets small to medium size shop owners. So the salesman could make multiple sales in a day. What are the things I should keep in mind while implementing this ? [link] [comments]  |
| Landing Page Tips That Helped Me Do +$600 in Pre-Launch Sales Posted: 04 Jul 2020 07:40 AM PDT Hey guys, I released my pre-launch landing page two weeks ago after a month of developing and testing it across a variety of devices and I just wanted to share some things I've learnt from the process! This will be my first real business, so if you have any feedback to give or recommendations, I would love to hear it!
1. Make sure your landing page is clearUse a landing page structure that's been proven time and time again to work. Creativity is all good, but the thing about art is that it's subjective. You're going for mass-appeal not gold at an art contest. I had to find this out the hard way, I designed an overly complicated landing page which was a nightmare to develop and a horror show to test across thousands of different devices. 2. Experiment (A/B)Starting out, I didn't know what would work/what wouldn't so I made sure I just tested everything and recorded the user response. I picked the best response, created something similar to it, rinse and repeated! It makes sense to be honest, this is how humankind has been testing and improving things for 100's of years so why would it be any different here. 3. Speed it up!Time is everyone's most valuable asset, so if your landing page takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, you can be sure that a great portion of your potential customers will drop off. If your landing page takes too long to load because of fancy JS libraries, high quality videos and uncompressed images. Your viewers will already have liked and commented "LOL" on their friends new Instagram post by the time your website has loaded. 4. Safe And SecureUsers who don't feel safe when viewing your landing page will definitely not enter their credit card information. Seemingly little things like adding a "supported payment options" section near your checkout, can make a big difference in converting a viewer into a customer. Basic but it should be mentioned ;if you don't have a SSL certificate and don't redirect to your https domain, don't expect your users to purchase anything. 5. Gather FeedbackI can't stress enough how important it is to gather feedback from the people that actually matter! Too many people ask their friends would you buy this? How much would you pay for this? This is a terrible way of finding out! Instead ask the people who are on your site, who are interested in what you have to offer, who are willing to put in their credit card details to find out! Something we also tried and have found to be very successful, is asking for feedback after a user cancels his/her checkout. This is the most important step, and therefore it's the most important piece of information we need to acquire; why couldn't we win your business! 6. Test EverythingiPhones alone, there are 24 different ones! It's a blessing and a curse, but nowadays, there are 1000's of devices and models that a user could be trying to access your landing page from. You need to make sure that your landing page is consistent throughout ALL of the devices you can support. I've condensed everything into this infographic (imgur) If you're about to start out, and thinking about creating a landing page, it might help to keep these things in mind; because they worked for us! I've written a medium post on this which goes into further details on the tools I used to test my landing page and also what A/B tests I ran. But I really don't want to get banned. If you are interested, just send me a DM. I think that should be fine. [link] [comments]  |
| American business importing from Mexico, or Mexican business exporting to the US? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 12:37 PM PDT So, I have a business idea that involves selling Mexican art in the US. I live in a border city in Mexico, I plan on having the items in a warehouse in Mexico and driving them myself and ship from the US. I'm a double US/MX citizen, so registering a business won't be a problem. What are the pros and cons of each scenario? I talked to a relative that's an accountant in Mexico and he said he can't answer this because he isn't familiarized with doing business in the US, an accountant in the US might tell me the inverse. [link] [comments]  |
| (App) There is a problem, but is there any problem solvers for it? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 12:20 PM PDT Hello entrepreneurs, I'm studying the possibility of developing a real estate app, something like Zillow. Let me first put you in the picture. I live in a small country, the amount of sold properties equals a neighborhood in the US, checking the statistics it's around 200 peace of land or houses per month, sold apartments are more but still very small compared to other countries. There are two popular platforms for real estate and both of them are poorly developed they have a huge populary though due to them being the first in this industry. (Both are 15+ years old). Now this being said, based on my talk to a real estate agent the following are the problems that he is facing, in my opinion if I get a way to solve it there is a good chance for my app to attract customers. The first problem is that over here -I think it's everywhere else too - most of real estate owners and buyers are old folks. They are not up to date with technology and will not bother to download the app and try it, so they hand it over to an agent. The second problem, which I believe where the real money is, when you find a listed properties and you contact the agent, you find out that there is a chain of 5-6 let's call them FAKE AGENTS between you and the owner, which I find hilarious given there is small amount of properties and customers in the first place!! Basically there are more agents than properties and buyers combined!! And this problem where the two apps I mentioned earlier fail! If you call any listed number 100% of the time how's going to answer is someone that the property owner doesn't even know! How can I fix these problems? How can I approach senior citizens and also make sure that who is listing is either the owner or the first real estate agent. These are some solutions that I thought about: 1)for the old folks I'll make the app interaction as simple as possible, finding what you want will take two clicks and contacting the seller takes three. 2) although the two existing apps are for free to list the property I will charge for my service, it will be a minimal fee but it should scare some of the fake agents away. I won't write more because I think this post became a bit lengthy but I think you get the idea. Please excuse any spelling/grammar mistakes or if my writing is a bit boring... English isn't my first language. what are some good ideas for such problems? your input is highly appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| My two friends and I started a new business, what should we put as job titles on our business card? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 12:18 PM PDT I wanted all of us to put Co-Founder or Partner, would that be ok? We all handle everything and we really don't have a designated "jobs" yet. Everyone is involved in everything. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Jul 2020 12:11 PM PDT Bought a lot of domains like this. Must be something obvious they do? [link] [comments]  |
| Hey r/Entrepreneur, what is your opinion on business incubators? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 12:14 AM PDT Hey r/Entrepreneur, I have recently been evaluating the feasibility of joining a business incubator vs going solo. My research is still in progress, but so far I don't see any reason to join an incubator other than networking opportunities - considering that your (and your team's) skillset suffices. I understand that not all business incubators are the same. It differs on the model and on the incubator itself. But I would want to know if any of you guys tried it out, or know anyone who did. What do you think of it? Why or why not would you pursue incubation? [link] [comments]  |
| Email mining for a web design business Posted: 04 Jul 2020 11:22 AM PDT Hi all, I am a web designer looking to expand my business and recently read the words "email mining" from a person here. What they do is get for free or buy hundreds of email addresses of business owners so you can offer them web design services. My question is: does someone here have experience with this? Did it worked well enough to gain back what you invested? To who did you buy the emails? Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| How to successfully relaunch on ProductHunt and why I'm still feeling stuck Posted: 04 Jul 2020 07:36 AM PDT After my initial ProductHunt launch failed miserably with just 10 upvotes and not getting featured, I gave it another try. How it all startedTo validate my idea as early as possible, I just created a simple list and added a submission form (Vue.js website hosted on Netlify with an Airtable database). My hypothesis: It's hard to find and research durable and sustainable products. People always spend a lot of time reading reviews and blogs before deciding which product to buy. However, most articles are biased or sponsored. That's why we need an IMDB for products, a trustworthy source before buying a long-lasting product. I posted it on Reddit and got over 2k upvotes and a lot of motivating feedback. So I continued working on this idea. How to relaunch on PHI initially launched the same simple list on PH that I posted on Reddit before. Probably because it was still a very basic MVP, it never got featured and reached only 10 upvotes. I deliberately collected all the feedback from Reddit and started to continuously improve the site. What started out as a simple list where people could add brands that manufacture durable products, has now evolved into a full platform with an up/downvote system, product reviews, discussions, and a credibility rating for each user. About three months later, I resubmitted it on Producthunt and got 300 upvotes, reached 1k signups and even got mentioned on a big Spanish tech blog. If your product doesn't get featured the first time, you should iteratively improve the product based on customer feedback and resubmit it after a few months. Why I'm still feeling stuckAfter the initial spike in traffic was gone, I'm not sure what to focus on and whether or not I should stop wasting my time with this site. Do you know that feeling too? What kept you going? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Jul 2020 04:26 AM PDT I'm been running a digital media business for over ten years and want to consider selling. How do I find an advisor that can help navigate the process? [link] [comments]  |
| Guest posts and major publication posts Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:16 AM PDT I'd like to start guest posting to help build my email lists and following. I've taken a couple of webinars and read articles talking about how to reach out. I was wondering, if anyone could impart any wisdom about what helped gain guest posts through blogs, major media, etc. [link] [comments]  |
| App Ideas And What To Do With Them Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:14 AM PDT So I have had a lot of ideas for apps/services... most of them trash. Most of them that were not trash could be easily countered by existing players. But that still leaves me with a couple of ideas I truly believe in and want to see made manifest. I've tried a few times to get into Swift and I get the gist. I understand the basics and know I could be proficient if I had actual time to dedicate to learning and practicing. My question is: should I? Is it better for me to try to learn how to develop these things on my own, or partner with someone who already has these skills? How does one do that without sacrificing control of the idea/execution? How do you keep it "yours" once you involve someone else? Is the marketplace too crowded already? I know I have a ton of questions but I'm... kinda tired of waiting. I want to get moving but I don't know how. Thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| When do you know if it’s your product, ads, or website design? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:12 AM PDT Hey everyone! I started selling e-commerce about a year ago. My most recent venture is using POD within a certain niche. I've never really had consistent success with POD. I used to sell a POD shirt that would do 1k in sales one day then no sales for the next few weeks. I'm not using POD for t-shirts on this store. I'm starting to advertise through Instagram, but I don't want to dump a bunch of money into influencers if either my ads suck or website design. I believe my products are quality and I would buy them myself (without any bias). So, when I pay for my first influencer what should I look for in order to tell if it's my ad or my website? Would I look at the number of likes and comments the ad gets to tell if my ad is good? Is it how many people click the link? If they do click the link and they just search around and leave, is that the website design. I'm just curious if there is a typical "formula" for this. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Where to print product instruction sheets? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:10 AM PDT I'm having trouble finding a source in the US to print a light weight folded instruction sheet for my product. I'm using a laser printer and folding them myself right now but I need to outsource this as sales continue to grow. It seems like it would be an easy service to find but every printing house seems to focus on high quality prints and I can't find any source for a light weight low cost print like this. [link] [comments]  |
| iOS app. Almost finished the app. Next step? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:00 AM PDT Hi, I am hoping to publish an app that sells physical services. I will be almost done with the app development, and I was curious if I need to make an LLC if I were to receive payment? I have servers and url purchased. I am curious if I need to make a business checking account and credit card to pay for app related expenses. Am I overthinking this? what's the next step for me to take? any help would be appreciated. thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Potential Solution to this Sub's general rubbish-ness Posted: 04 Jul 2020 09:32 AM PDT The irony of so many of us coming to this sub and wanting to solve the problems in it is probably not lost on most of you. I had a suggestion; What if we added mandatory flairs to users and their posts? For example; - [Established Entrepreneur] for users who had verified their businesses anonymously with the mods - [Wantrepreneur] For anyone who had not yet verified - [Plugger] For the people who just want to post their random pearls of wisdom or sell their books - [Young Entrepreneur] for the under 21s or whatnot who wanted advice Coupled with this we could create a template form similar to what you might get on the 'What should I buy' subs, encouraging the stupid questions that get asked to provide the actual information they need to get an answer. With this it might be possible to scroll the sub and browse without having to frankly wade through the 99% of utter shit in it. Just a thought. It pains me how bad this place is. Alternatively has anyone found a good anonymous ish place for entrepreneurs to chat? What are the alternatives? [link] [comments]  |
| Can I be successful with stocks at age 15 ? Posted: 04 Jul 2020 01:11 PM PDT Hello, I am 15 years old and my dad is setting up some software on my computer which will allow me to trade and do stocks. I wanted to solo it, I've read loads of books around the subject and I wanted to give it a shot as I dont have much too lose as I'm only 15 but, my dad said to me it is impossible for me to make it as a trader unless I work for a company, but in 1000 of hours and go do a degree in economics. Is this true ? Will I be unable to make it doing stocks/trading by myself? Thanks for all help! (= [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Jul 2020 09:12 AM PDT Is there any way to earn using CPA marketing with free traffic in 2020. [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Entrepreneur. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment