Looking to make 500$ a month - any examples of super simple SaaS that make at least 500 USD per month?
I don't know where to start, so looking for inspiration/examples etc
And he is an excellent communicator; in particular look up his older podcasts.
But I think today it is getting harder and harder; so simple projects won't cut it anymore and more effort needs to be put into both product development and marketing to get any sort of traction.
But I think today it is getting harder and harder; so simple projects won't cut it anymore and more effort needs to be put into both product development and marketing to get any sort of traction.
I'd be willing to bet people have been saying that for at least 5000 years.
Presumably they haven't been talking about the same thing. You could sell software in catalogs for home computers, but that dried up. Then you could make web apps, and that dried up. Then you could make mobile apps and that has dried up.
(*Note: note completely, and I am sure many people know someone who still makes some surprising amount of money with this one weird trick/app)
When the next platform comes out (VR? Cars?) there will be a software shortage and you will have a few years to code up some stuff. Then the market will demand more elaborate and sophisticated software that will require a team, some investment and a lot of time.
Presumably they haven't been talking about the same thing. You could sell software in catalogs for home computers, but that dried up. Then you could make web apps, and that dried up. Then you could make mobile apps and that has dried up.
Exactly this. There's no industry that's always been easy to get in to, but there's always been something. It changes as society changes. You just have to work out what it is at the moment.
Heh, all the work in that comment is in the "just" in the last sentence. You can sort of see it as an extension of the efficient markets hypothesis: if there were money lying on the ground, someone would already have picked it up. Alternative formulation: any kind of arbitrage, whether in terms of the stock market or in terms of allocating labor to an underserved need, has to have some kind of search costs to it.
It's only easier if you're entering a greenfield industry, with no saturation. IE. the internet in the late 90's, or the App Store in 2007.
In any new industry, there's always very low-hanging fruit ideas to pursue. Like restaurant reviews (Yelp) or an app to track your calories (MyFitnessPal). It was also easier to market it because more people had the need for those types of products back then, and thus willing to try it. Now? Nobody will listen to you unless you have a truly compelling, original product ("Oh, that's been done already. I don't want to hear about it")
And SEO and ranking in Google for competitive keywords was much easier in the 2000's, even as late as 2008. 2010-2011 was when things started to turn, and became insanely competitive.
And SEO and ranking in Google for competitive keywords was much easier in the 2000's, even as late as 2008. 2010-2011 was when things started to turn, and became insanely competitive.
If your approach to marketing is "Google will send me enough traffic to succeed" then you've already failed.
When did I say that? Search traffic is a major part of marketing (along with PR, word of mouth, ads) for lots of companies, including public ones (tripadvisor, yelp, zillow, demand media). And to dismiss it is simply delusional.
But if I have already heard of a business from their marketing, and I can't find them on the first 2 pages of Google, then that marketing spend was wasted. Yes, SEO can't be the entire marketing plan, but it is critically important.
I don't doubt it, but it comes to specific spaces a lot of them have been correct.
Appointment Reminder, for example, is now in competition with at least a half-dozen similar products, just from my personal experiences. And many of those integrate reminders with account creation, customer tracking, online bookings/cancellations, and even followup marketing.
That's just one example, and it's not a surprise that small services are followed by larger, integrated ones. There are still good, untapped ideas out there. But it's also true that new technologies create lots of first-mover opportunities and then slowly become less accessible to small providers as the simplest value propositions are consumed. Actually, video games seem like a particularly clear demonstration of the pattern. A solo developer can make a good and successful game, even today. But a successful solo game these days is usually either fun but very shallow (Flappy Bird) or a niche game that skips many elements (Dwarf Fortress). Twenty years ago, it was RollerCoaster Tycoon. On the other hand, solo VR projects are going strong because there are lots of unexplored ideas and a low bar for depth and polish.
I suppose there's a force in the other direction, too; improving tools and services mean that the same number of development hours provide more features to users, or open up new categories of problem. (RollerCoaster Tycoon was written in assembly, after all.) As PG puts it, the simple tasks no longer require a schlep. But that leverage is open to everyone, and it doesn't seem to break the broad pattern that newer technologies are more accommodating for small-scale projects.
> But I think today it is getting harder and harder; so simple projects won't cut it anymore and more effort needs to be put into both product development and marketing to get any sort of traction.
There's always going to be problem domains where you can code simple solutions and make money but it's identifying the problem domains that's the hard part.
By the time you hear multiple people telling you "you can make something simple here and make a ton of money!" about a certain problem domain, you've already missed the boat.
Here's an exercise that would be interesting. Look at all the 'Show HN' posts announcing new startups from a couple of years ago. Find how many are still operating. Then contact the creators to see if the revenues produced have paid for the hours invested.
Then we would have some real data instead of my anecdote. And yours.
No, he's right. Most people are better off investing in the stock market than trying to build a successful small business, SaaS, startup, or otherwise.
I have a simple SaaS product that plans emergency shifts for dentists (evenings and weekends). The value is in 1) fair planning, 2) a single source of truth on who is on call, and 3) reminders. It makes $300 a month with minimal cost and almost no time spent. Since it is B2B I only have to send invoices once a year.
Anecdata of course, but it has been like this (and profitable) for the last 7 years. At least proofs it is not impossible (I also never really invested lots of time in it to get to this state)
I think i can bring it to 30k a year with sufficient effort, but then again, my salary is higher than that so it doesn’t make enough sense to switch my time to do so. (The growth problem of course is sales, not tech)
I disagree - I wrote a simple tool for my family a number of years back, left it on my personal website in a way that was usable by the general public, and ignored it. Came back a couple years later, saw it was getting tens of thousands of uses a month, added some relevant amazon affiliate links, and hit that $500 a month mark. I let it run for a couple years like that, then sold it.
So if I can hit the mark accidentally off a weekend project, it certainly is achievable if you put serious effort in.
Aside from the fact that there's a ton of evidence that proves you wrong (but there is truth that a lot of SaaS founders never make a penny), OP was asking about starting at $500/month, which is far from "gushing profits".
One source of ideas is the Indiehackers products listing. They also include revenue figures. Here's a list of all products with >= $500 in MRR (some are Stripe-verified, rest are self-reported so take it with a pinch of salt).
Just a heads up, clicking the logo in top left corner brings you to a similarly designed page thats about crypto. And is the copy on the book supposed to mention crypto community management?
can you talk a bit about crewfire? Fabcebook ToS specifically prohibitd rewarding any actions that are not organic and so does Instagram that belongs to Facebook.
I run a number of tiny services in this category, such as an autoresponder for Google Hangouts: https://gchat.simon.codes/. I originally built it for myself - I forward many gmail addresses to one and was missing chat messages - but these days most of my customers are small business owners or employees of larger companies.
However I was not really able to monetize in any form (needs permission from Spotify, and Stripe shut down the account before it got to even do anything). Did you encounter similar issues and if so how did you circumvent them?
I'm at a loss now and on the verge of shutting it down, but I have a few hundred users that periodically email me to ask for fixes / new features, and it pains my heart to just give it up like that, but it's just not making any sense economically for me now.
I'm not too familiar with Spotify integrations, but I'm surprised to hear you need their permission. Is that an api terms thing?
In my case it's been a better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission situation. I've had almost no official contact with Google and do my best to abide by their terms.
Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to chat! There's a chance I'd be interested in buying it if you're planning to shut down.
Thanks for the offer! I'll definitely reach out if I'm planning on shutting down
I believe Spotify has some API terms that say that explicit permission must be granted for monetization. I initially also went for the 'ask-for-forgiveness' route but Stripe didn't allow my account to get started at all as it was considered high risk.
For now I'm going to fix some issues and try to do more reaching out / marketing, and then I'll try reaching out to Stripe again - hopefully this doesn't look that shady / high risk anymore.
At first glance, if you can scale your user base you COULD have artists/labels pay you to add songs to playlists (of course that fit) and charge flat fees for the promo playlistings.
Charge $1 / user and setup targeting at genre level for MVP and similar artist level at your later stage version.
So a label/artist says "we want people who like electronic", you have 150 people in the list. You charge the label/artist $150 to add their song to the playlists which you generate.
I can’t speak for the simplicity, but by all accounts the backend of this system is (it was at some point) a single ec2 instance and is a single person project.
A little bit of trivia for people who might not know: cpercival was an integral part of one of the favourite HN threads of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
It's simple in terms of day to day running now that it works well but getting to that stage and the implementation behind it was a ton of work.
I don't think you're going to easily find a project that's easy to implement, requires little maintenance, has low running costs, markets itself, scales etc. You'll have to put in effort somewhere.
I think if you look into the projects being posted in the thread, you'll realise few are simple if you want to make something people will pay for.
https://certsimple.com - faster, easier verification for websites, so they can prove they're run by a specific company (with an EV SSL cert). It's essentially a UI and a bunch of APIs that connect to different data sources to pre-check info, then pass that on to a CA.
Ha, thankyou, but we’re definitely in the middle of the market. If your main thing is price you can find cheaper companies, our main thing is reducing verication time and hassle.
I've been pretty impressed with pullreminders.com - it is a Slack bot that alerts you for unreviewed pull requests. Seems to actually solve a real need and since the author, Abi Noda, has been pretty open about talking about it, seems it's been pretty profitable.
Friendly reminder that the important components of a successful SaaS is marketing, marketing, marketing, and code, so how to market the app should be considered just as important as how easy it is to code.
I'd probably recommend you take whatever your idea is and offer it as a consulting service that you do yourself manually. If people won't buy that, they won't buy your app, and you can prove the idea without doing any coding at all. Once you have an audience for the service, you can just sell the automated version.
I'm the creator of Complice and it was indeed made largely by me (I have another collaborator but he joined after it was already making over $3k/mo) but I wouldn't call it simple! Both the software itself and in relation to your comment above that describes how it's not just "how easy is it to build?" but "how easy is it to market?"
In a world where most people are just looking for a better to-do list, Complice is offering an entirely different philosophy of productivity, so it can be hard to explain it, as opposed to something that just straightforwardly scratches somebody's itch.
I will say that the software plays to my strengths: I'm not a data structures & algorithms guy, or a machine learning guy, or a fanatic about the perfect REST API, and Complice is much more about the workflow and the interface, which is what I'm good at.
So "super simple" also depends on what you're good at!
Hey Malcolm, cool to have you chime in! I've appreciated reading your stuff around the internet and your IndieHackers interview was really cool.
I noticed you have a coaching offering as a higher tier on Complice - have you had much success with finding takers on that? I'm currently working on a coaching practice of my own and have wondered how effective "coaching as the top tier of a SaaS that helps you do the thing I'm coaching you about" works.
Hey Abi! It's been really cool to follow Pull Reminders. I've been bringing it up in conversations a lot lately as an example of a solid one-person founder technical SaaS. Hope it continues to succeed! Thanks for all of your in public work on it. Cheers!
Fomo.com is doing a few million and is owned/operated by 1 individual (although he has a small team). Believe he acquired it and grew it like crazy. I’d reckon (if he chose) the company could do a 100k a month in profit.
This is an example of a product that probably does something cool, but really doesn't do a good job of explaining what it does or why I would use it on the front page. But it looks pretty.
You know those annoying notifications that usually say something like "Dawn in Idaho bought a 3 pack or gorilla stickers just now" on e-commerce sites? That's what fomo does.
indeed, the numbers speak for themselves. over the last few weeks since deploying we saw lower signup conversion rates. but, we also have a few product launches forthcoming.
balancing between "be short and to the point" and sharing a vision is perhaps more art than science, and that's why we have so much art on our website.
Second one seems to come closest for me. I prefer something clear like "see that notification at the bottom left corner of the page? We do that". But I get it; you're selling why someone should use the product (a bit abstractly, perhaps). As a tech product though, don't forget to highlight the actual product(s) and to be specific.
The "Install Fomo in 29 Seconds" section from the first iteration makes me feel confident, as a developer, that there's a clear path to get your product working for me and it won't be a pita. A documentation link at the top, rather than hidden at the bottom, would be nice - see how Facebook presents their tech offerings (granted, open source) at https://reactjs.org/ etc.
I'm just one guy who makes decisions about what techs to use for myself and others though, so yada yada grain of salt. Maybe I'm not who you're targeting as much as salespeople themselves.
Yeah I clicked around and came back here, still not knowing exactly what your product is. IMO it should be made a bit more explicit on the landing page.
It says 'marketing' right on the front page, right next some unique drawings which indicate the kinds of things they can create. It took me less than 5 seconds.
They "automate" social proof. That is, when someone buys something on your site, or performs a specific action (such as sign-up for a newsletter), FOMO will show a little pop-up in the left corner stating so ("XYZ from ABC just bought 2 widgets"). The idea is that knowing something is popular will make others more likely to buy it.
I reckon they could do a better job of conveying this, but I work in marketing and I understood it immediately. So I imagine their target audience understands it well enough.
That is so weird to me. Does that actually work on people? I see it now that you point it out, the popups in the lower left, but before I had been automatically mentally dismissing it as just annoying sales bullshit, like any other popup ad. There's statistical evidence that sales are actually influenced by that kind of nonsense? That amazes me.
So, say you're interested in a certain smaller brand that may not sell thousands or more copies of certain items, but something on the order of 50, or 100, etc.., then when you see that others have been purchasing said items you worry you'll miss out on your chance to buy one, and then you'll be one of the only people who like the brand who don't have said item.. thus, you wind up purchasing too.
There's sort of 2 types of social proof. Fear of missing out and testimonial. My favorite examples of social proof (not fomo.com) are hotels.com and opentable.com. When looking at a hotel: "15 people have booked this hotel today," or while making a dinner reservation: "23 people have reserved a table at this restaurant today."
In these cases, you're being pressured to act fast before the hotel/restaurant is fully booked. Further, this "proof" that people are making all these reservations right now also could make you believe your choice is a popular recommendation, persuaded your decision making.
It does. Probably not on the HN crowd. But on the usual e-commerce sites that use this app, it definitely works. The audience isn't quite as technically literate and doesn't have that banner blindness people here have developed.
Plus, the e-commerce sites that use it are usually small startups. They need to show that real people are buying from them to prove to shoppers that they're legitimate
It's not just banner blindness. Even as a less tech-savvy person I imagine I'd just assume those notifications to be fake, fictive customer stories that serve to illustrate a feature, similar to how "customers" used to rave about knife sets and fitness devices that changed their life on home shopping TV shows.
Yet people continue to buy knife sets and fitness devices from home shopping TV shows, proving that it does work.
You have to see it as a part of a broader persuasive effort. By itself, it doesn't work. But when it is paired with reviews, testimonials, ratings, high-quality pictures, etc., it adds to the impression that this is a legitimate product
Many hotel/flight booking sites – Expedia, Booking.com, etc. – have been using this pattern for a while. I assume it works, at least in that context, very well.
Incredible. If the stats on the website are to be believed, they have 11k users, and the cheapest plan is $35 per month (with yearly disocunt applied) so that must mean several $100k per month (though older customers might have cheaper legacy plans)...
hey, the 11k figure is active websites. you can verify all this via our Open API: https://fomo.com/open
since a customer can have unlimited websites per plan, we actually have around 5,500-6,000 customers. many will add a personal site and a company site, or an ecommerce store and a blog.
yes, older customers have plans as low as $8-12 /month. good times.
Maybe they are. I know of one site that had a premade array of "X bought Y" in the source HTML, which I imagine they repopulate after some amount of time.
Fomo is the same offering as Proof (https://useproof.com). Great case of the same idea in the market with difference customer segments able to produce paid users in a semi-automated-saas model
I've built a petition system that allow users to publish their own petitions and download signatures lists. Got a handful of loyal customers acquired threw relations. MRR is ~500€ since +10 years. Won't give the url here because it's running on a ultra cheap dedicated server at 5€/m, HN would blow it down in one minute :)
Sure, the typical customer is this semi-professional non-profit organization that need something more "result driven" than change.org when it comes to build its audience (nothing black hat, really).
Wife runs a not-for-profit. This is brilliant. My perception is that petitions don't often accomplish their stated goals, but what if the side benefits of gauging interest, drawing light first-step commitments, and collecting contact information accrued to your org instead of an activism-feelings-aggregator like change.org?
That may come off as cynical to people, but as a petition-signer, I'd rather get followed up a couple times by an organization actually working on something I care about (and given a path to act a little more on my caring, even if it's 'come to this event' or 'give us money') than followed up indefinitely by change.org, who cannot seem to guess well at all what sort of petitions I'd like to support.
So your wife's use case would be : she would create a petition, her users would sign it, then she would download their contact details, correct? What happens to the petition itself? Is there any action on it?
Just as much happens to it as usually happens to a petition. If you get enough signatures, you present it to whomever you think should care: government body or local news or whatever. There’s even a chance that they actually care and it makes a modest difference in some legislator’s deliberation or generates some publicity about the issue.
The idea is quite simple - crawl websites and figure out what makes them tick. Of course you're not going to enter the exact same market. No one is obligated to find a competition-free, low-hanging niche for you to occupy.
A lot of billion dollar company ideas are simple too like Facebook, Salesforce and Yelp. But I doubt 1 person can build those.
Those BuiltWith folks probably have hundreds of regression tests running daily. Maybe a bunch of freelancers who check for newer versions of software too every month.
Only Star Alliance so far, however the availability might not necessarily match for your specific carrier, as they have different rules between each other. Both me and my friend use SAS Eurobonus and the availability lines up quite well.
We're working on adding other alliances too though!
EDIT: Actually I see now that my partner added the list if you scroll down on the first page (Only visible if you're not logged in though).
It's a pretty simple concept: providing PhantomJs or Chrome Headless as a REST API.
The thing is, the SaaS itself is only about 1/3 the work. You need a website, account management, and billing too.
Today, there are perhaps other services you could leverage that can help reduce this initial burden (Kong?) but a few years ago when I started my SaaS, nothing really met my needs. Hope it's easier for everyone now!
Woah, that's really cool. I've been meaning to run my own headless browser in the cloud for personal scraping tasks and such, and may now sign up for your free tier. :-)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadHe has been documenting the whole process very well both on Twitter (https://twitter.com/czue/status/958993008543830017) and his blog (http://www.coryzue.com/writing/).
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-grew-my-appoint...
And he is an excellent communicator; in particular look up his older podcasts.
But I think today it is getting harder and harder; so simple projects won't cut it anymore and more effort needs to be put into both product development and marketing to get any sort of traction.
I'd be willing to bet people have been saying that for at least 5000 years.
And you can say that the tools and resources available to small time online entrepreneurs are better than ever.
Presumably they haven't been talking about the same thing. You could sell software in catalogs for home computers, but that dried up. Then you could make web apps, and that dried up. Then you could make mobile apps and that has dried up.
(*Note: note completely, and I am sure many people know someone who still makes some surprising amount of money with this one weird trick/app)
When the next platform comes out (VR? Cars?) there will be a software shortage and you will have a few years to code up some stuff. Then the market will demand more elaborate and sophisticated software that will require a team, some investment and a lot of time.
Exactly this. There's no industry that's always been easy to get in to, but there's always been something. It changes as society changes. You just have to work out what it is at the moment.
In any new industry, there's always very low-hanging fruit ideas to pursue. Like restaurant reviews (Yelp) or an app to track your calories (MyFitnessPal). It was also easier to market it because more people had the need for those types of products back then, and thus willing to try it. Now? Nobody will listen to you unless you have a truly compelling, original product ("Oh, that's been done already. I don't want to hear about it")
And SEO and ranking in Google for competitive keywords was much easier in the 2000's, even as late as 2008. 2010-2011 was when things started to turn, and became insanely competitive.
If your approach to marketing is "Google will send me enough traffic to succeed" then you've already failed.
Appointment Reminder, for example, is now in competition with at least a half-dozen similar products, just from my personal experiences. And many of those integrate reminders with account creation, customer tracking, online bookings/cancellations, and even followup marketing.
That's just one example, and it's not a surprise that small services are followed by larger, integrated ones. There are still good, untapped ideas out there. But it's also true that new technologies create lots of first-mover opportunities and then slowly become less accessible to small providers as the simplest value propositions are consumed. Actually, video games seem like a particularly clear demonstration of the pattern. A solo developer can make a good and successful game, even today. But a successful solo game these days is usually either fun but very shallow (Flappy Bird) or a niche game that skips many elements (Dwarf Fortress). Twenty years ago, it was RollerCoaster Tycoon. On the other hand, solo VR projects are going strong because there are lots of unexplored ideas and a low bar for depth and polish.
I suppose there's a force in the other direction, too; improving tools and services mean that the same number of development hours provide more features to users, or open up new categories of problem. (RollerCoaster Tycoon was written in assembly, after all.) As PG puts it, the simple tasks no longer require a schlep. But that leverage is open to everyone, and it doesn't seem to break the broad pattern that newer technologies are more accommodating for small-scale projects.
There's always going to be problem domains where you can code simple solutions and make money but it's identifying the problem domains that's the hard part.
By the time you hear multiple people telling you "you can make something simple here and make a ton of money!" about a certain problem domain, you've already missed the boat.
Jonathan, the founder, also wrote a great piece on how he built it https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-saas-with-0-fed2341078...
If you're interested in learning more about micro saas checkout Tyler Tringas Micro SaaS series https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas-ebook/
If you want passive income, write code for pay and invest some of the surplus.
If you want to do a startup, find a cofounder and apply to YCombinator. Or find another path to working at a startup.
I've started 2 simple SaaS products that are solidly profitable (simplecrew.com and crewfire.com), and a 3rd just shipped this week (chainfuel.com).
The internet is full of other counterpoints.
Then we would have some real data instead of my anecdote. And yours.
Anecdata of course, but it has been like this (and profitable) for the last 7 years. At least proofs it is not impossible (I also never really invested lots of time in it to get to this state)
I think i can bring it to 30k a year with sufficient effort, but then again, my salary is higher than that so it doesn’t make enough sense to switch my time to do so. (The growth problem of course is sales, not tech)
So if I can hit the mark accidentally off a weekend project, it certainly is achievable if you put serious effort in.
LINK => https://www.indiehackers.com/products?minRevenue=500&sorting...
https://www.simplecrew.com - street team reporting/tracking tool (2012 - present) https://www.crewfire.com - social media brand ambassador platform (2014 - present) https://www.chainfuel.com - telegram analytics/anti-spam/management dashboard (beta release last week)
And yeah - the book's been effectively repurposed. We'll get around to changing that up and updating the copy.
Appreciate you pointing these out!
Hopefully more to come, but thanks for the tip!
I recently summarized all my projects and my numbers here, if it's of interest: https://www.simonmweber.com/2019/01/07/side-project-income-2...
However I was not really able to monetize in any form (needs permission from Spotify, and Stripe shut down the account before it got to even do anything). Did you encounter similar issues and if so how did you circumvent them?
I'm at a loss now and on the verge of shutting it down, but I have a few hundred users that periodically email me to ask for fixes / new features, and it pains my heart to just give it up like that, but it's just not making any sense economically for me now.
In my case it's been a better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission situation. I've had almost no official contact with Google and do my best to abide by their terms.
Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to chat! There's a chance I'd be interested in buying it if you're planning to shut down.
I believe Spotify has some API terms that say that explicit permission must be granted for monetization. I initially also went for the 'ask-for-forgiveness' route but Stripe didn't allow my account to get started at all as it was considered high risk.
For now I'm going to fix some issues and try to do more reaching out / marketing, and then I'll try reaching out to Stripe again - hopefully this doesn't look that shady / high risk anymore.
Charge $1 / user and setup targeting at genre level for MVP and similar artist level at your later stage version.
So a label/artist says "we want people who like electronic", you have 150 people in the list. You charge the label/artist $150 to add their song to the playlists which you generate.
Granted that person is cpercival but whatever :)
https://www.tarsnap.com
https://www.checkbot.io/
It's simple in terms of day to day running now that it works well but getting to that stage and the implementation behind it was a ton of work.
I don't think you're going to easily find a project that's easy to implement, requires little maintenance, has low running costs, markets itself, scales etc. You'll have to put in effort somewhere.
I think if you look into the projects being posted in the thread, you'll realise few are simple if you want to make something people will pay for.
I think the story is similar with simpler products too. Getting the word out and optimising your sales funnel takes much longer than you'd think.
More info:
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pull-reminders
Friendly reminder that the important components of a successful SaaS is marketing, marketing, marketing, and code, so how to market the app should be considered just as important as how easy it is to code.
I'd probably recommend you take whatever your idea is and offer it as a consulting service that you do yourself manually. If people won't buy that, they won't buy your app, and you can prove the idea without doing any coding at all. Once you have an audience for the service, you can just sell the automated version.
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/complice
In a world where most people are just looking for a better to-do list, Complice is offering an entirely different philosophy of productivity, so it can be hard to explain it, as opposed to something that just straightforwardly scratches somebody's itch.
I will say that the software plays to my strengths: I'm not a data structures & algorithms guy, or a machine learning guy, or a fanatic about the perfect REST API, and Complice is much more about the workflow and the interface, which is what I'm good at.
So "super simple" also depends on what you're good at!
I noticed you have a coaching offering as a higher tier on Complice - have you had much success with finding takers on that? I'm currently working on a coaching practice of my own and have wondered how effective "coaching as the top tier of a SaaS that helps you do the thing I'm coaching you about" works.
this homepage is actually our 3rd and probably most abstract implementation.
1st, 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20161108025452/https://www.usefo...
2nd, 2017/2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20190107040431/https://fomo.com/
indeed, the numbers speak for themselves. over the last few weeks since deploying we saw lower signup conversion rates. but, we also have a few product launches forthcoming.
balancing between "be short and to the point" and sharing a vision is perhaps more art than science, and that's why we have so much art on our website.
The "Install Fomo in 29 Seconds" section from the first iteration makes me feel confident, as a developer, that there's a clear path to get your product working for me and it won't be a pita. A documentation link at the top, rather than hidden at the bottom, would be nice - see how Facebook presents their tech offerings (granted, open source) at https://reactjs.org/ etc.
I'm just one guy who makes decisions about what techs to use for myself and others though, so yada yada grain of salt. Maybe I'm not who you're targeting as much as salespeople themselves.
I reckon they could do a better job of conveying this, but I work in marketing and I understood it immediately. So I imagine their target audience understands it well enough.
So, say you're interested in a certain smaller brand that may not sell thousands or more copies of certain items, but something on the order of 50, or 100, etc.., then when you see that others have been purchasing said items you worry you'll miss out on your chance to buy one, and then you'll be one of the only people who like the brand who don't have said item.. thus, you wind up purchasing too.
In these cases, you're being pressured to act fast before the hotel/restaurant is fully booked. Further, this "proof" that people are making all these reservations right now also could make you believe your choice is a popular recommendation, persuaded your decision making.
Plus, the e-commerce sites that use it are usually small startups. They need to show that real people are buying from them to prove to shoppers that they're legitimate
You have to see it as a part of a broader persuasive effort. By itself, it doesn't work. But when it is paired with reviews, testimonials, ratings, high-quality pictures, etc., it adds to the impression that this is a legitimate product
Edit: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-a-social-proo...
since a customer can have unlimited websites per plan, we actually have around 5,500-6,000 customers. many will add a personal site and a company site, or an ecommerce store and a blog.
yes, older customers have plans as low as $8-12 /month. good times.
more here: https://blog.fomo.com/how-we-bought-a-small-software-startup...
(note, 2.5 year old post)
this is why we aggressively build native integrations, sometimes 1 per week. deters bad actors.
changelog: https://new.fomo.com
You should label/brand your pop-ups with a link to somewhere that explains this.
"Publish their own petitions" - can you give an example? Share more details, without giving your URL or any other secret sauce away?
I'm sure you know your audience very well - it is just that I am missing something.
That may come off as cynical to people, but as a petition-signer, I'd rather get followed up a couple times by an organization actually working on something I care about (and given a path to act a little more on my caring, even if it's 'come to this event' or 'give us money') than followed up indefinitely by change.org, who cannot seem to guess well at all what sort of petitions I'd like to support.
When he started more than a decade ago, there was zero competition and it was a novel idea. Now there is stiff competition.
This is far from simple - this is actually a very serious project, not an example of 500$ stuff!
Those BuiltWith folks probably have hundreds of regression tests running daily. Maybe a bunch of freelancers who check for newer versions of software too every month.
We're working on adding other alliances too though!
EDIT: Actually I see now that my partner added the list if you scroll down on the first page (Only visible if you're not logged in though).
It's a pretty simple concept: providing PhantomJs or Chrome Headless as a REST API.
The thing is, the SaaS itself is only about 1/3 the work. You need a website, account management, and billing too. Today, there are perhaps other services you could leverage that can help reduce this initial burden (Kong?) but a few years ago when I started my SaaS, nothing really met my needs. Hope it's easier for everyone now!
I'll make a more generic domain name sometime in the future (lots of stuff to do....)
Pretty simple code poster creator.