Comment by vanschelven

Comment by vanschelven 7 months ago

27 replies

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Grown way past 100 users with:

• Make a great product. Everyone tells you "build it and they will come" is not working anymore, but it's working _for me_.

• Outreach via your network. Talk to people with the intent of learning, not selling.

• I'm personally on a freemium model. But that's in the developer-to-developer market, which is vastly different from your B2C

EDIT:

https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

meander_water 7 months ago

Cool product! How much time would you say you spend on support per week? I've always heard that it's harder to scale when you're reliant on income via support.

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  • vanschelven 7 months ago

    As it stands I'm on the other side of the scalability issues wrt support-based growth: although I do have paying customers, I'd rather have more

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90s_dev 7 months ago

I've been struggling with choosing a model to make enough to keep the lights on with my upcoming project. Has freemium actually gotten enough paid users for you?

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amanchanda 7 months ago

Make a great product. -- > this is an iterative process as per me. Unless users come and try it out, you won't know what a great product looks like.

The need is real, and the problem is real. I am one of the users myself. I built it because I felt the need myself. I ran the MVP with 15 others in my network with similar profiles. Quesiton is how to scale beyond that.

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  • vanschelven 7 months ago

    Is there any word of mouth ("virality") among your existing user-base?

    Reply View 1 reply
    • jll29 7 months ago

      Virality can be the key to growth, and it can be engineered.

      I almost didn't buy the great book The One Billion Dollar App because of hits clickbait title, but it actually well-elaborates the mechanics (and the mathematics) of viral spread of apps, which not by coincident corresponds to the familiar formulas that people will have seen during the CoViD19 pandemic ("r-coefficient", r or R0 [1]).

      For example, if you have a mobile app that gives you something free for each friend you invite to it, it may encourage some folks to share with r friends...

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

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coolcase 7 months ago

It is as if there is no formula for startup success and you have to experiment. Like if there was a formula everyone would follow it and it would become the only way. A bit like chat up lines- these 10 words and you always get a date. Like there is no counterforces like competition and attention against a cookie recipe for startups.

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herbst 7 months ago

Same here. When I create a product I try to build something that makes a good impression and if done well everything kinda goes from there.

My first SaaS was basically traffic kick-started from a single comment on the digital ocean blog, that described a complicated solution to the problem I 'solved'. No freemium either.

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calmoo 7 months ago

Cool concept but AI slop photos are really offputting, this would steer me away from your product (as a naive first viewer).

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  • helloplanets 7 months ago

    Yes, just use a crisp screenshot related to the use case. Especially when it's a product aimed at developers.

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    • vanschelven 7 months ago

      This comment is a bit puzzling to me given that this is literally the very top thing at the homepage.

      Reply View 0 replies
sebstefan 7 months ago

> https://www.bugsink.com/ link to product, may give an idea of what we're doing.

It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

You should invest 20 bucks into getting some pictures of a guy in a datacenter, or 200 to pay some dude on Fiverr to draw you some sinks, instead of having these be the first thing customers see when checking out your product

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  • stevoski 7 months ago

    I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not.

    They care much more about whether this product solves a problem they have.

    This is based on my 17 years of running first a successful B2C product then a successful B2B SaaS.

    Minor changes to one's home page tend to have little observable change in numbers of trial signups, the rate of conversion to paid customer, and so on.

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    • drysart 7 months ago

      > I'd wager that paying customers really don't care whether the images look AI-generated or not.

      Maybe, but in a conversation about acquiring your first hundred users; you don't have a lot of word-of-mouth backing up the quality of your product. Your ability to effectively present your product will never be more important.

      If it's important enough that your brochure website has images on it at all, then it's also important enough for them to not look like something you'd see slapped on a scam.

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  • conductr 7 months ago

    I also think those images are not super aesthetically pleasing but I also don’t care about the sink metaphor they’re using so I instantly ignore them and just focus on the text

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  • bwb 7 months ago

    wow I didn't see it that way at all, they looked good to me.

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    • wahnfrieden 7 months ago

      They are very obviously "AI generated genre" which many still don't pick up on. Whether art that is obviously AI-generated is appealing or effective - that may also be the case

      Reply View 1 reply
      • bwb 7 months ago

        shrug, i don't mind, looks good

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  • theshrike79 7 months ago

    Still a tiny bit better than the "massive limbs bendy people" corporate style.

    Reply View 3 replies
    • sebstefan 7 months ago

      It's called Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis)

      Might be soulless and ugly too, but at least it doesn't make your customer think "Hold on is this a scam?"

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      • vimy 7 months ago

        I’m not sure seeing AI art and thinking scam is a thing. Most people can’t even spot AI art.

        His website seems fine to me.

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      • MajorLettuce 7 months ago

        It’s actually quite interesting how both styles can be considered slop, but Corporate Memphis evokes different association. It makes me think that style did something right.

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  • MobileVet 7 months ago

    > It's immediately obvious to me that the illustrations are AI slop

    I don't believe this qualifies as AI Slop. They are all consistent in their style and thus 'on brand' for what they are trying to convey. While visuals are fairly subjective and these may not speak to you, they don't have 'obvious slop characteristics' eg 6 fingers or 3 eyes imho.

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    • sebstefan 7 months ago

      If you can tell immediately that an illustration is AI-made, for me it already qualifies as slop. It gives low quality, lack of effort, "Is this website legit or is this some guy running a scam from their bedroom in Malaysia" type vibe

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