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_!
What 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?
It seems like your product is focused around promoting trustworthiness and not just positive reviews. Why? Who is the target customer here?
If you are buying drugs and the dealer says "hey, by the way, I just want you to know I'm totally not a cop"... that is a huge red flag. I'm equally wary of random websites that feel like they need to prove trust to me.
Very 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.
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.
I 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.
I agree with you about everyone saying "raise your price" however, you can always move upmarket if you're B2B so I think pricing is generally dependent on your target market.
If OP is targeting solo operators (Effectively B2C), then I agree that the price seems exorbitant.
I see a lot of opportunity for this further upmarket though. I saw someone mention that this could be useful for agencies, and they do seem like an ideal customer. Funded startups seem like another ideal customer with more money in the bank.
This is a really good point. In my case, I'm not suggesting a price increase because it's trendy. I'm suggesting it because I've run a low-dollar SaaS for > 10 years and I can say from experience that it's easier to lower the price than to raise it. Start high and find an audience who value it enough to pay your price.
> I wouldn't pay more than $5/mo (or a $29 one time fee for something self-hosted)
And that's awesome for you, and the millions/billions of people like you. Likewise, I think Figma is expensive (but I'm not a designer!).
But the Internet is big! A new company doesn't need that many customers to do well. It's smart to choose customers who value more heavily the problem you're solving. That's why there's Shopify $360/year in perpetuity and Magento for $20k+ per year in perpetuity and self-hosted WooCommerce for no licensing fee. And they are all able to be successful. Customers that value your problem are also the type who will suggest valuable brand extensions in the future.
I got the impression that this product is marketed toward businesses. If that's the case, keep in mind that $15/mo or $25/mo or $45/mo are all psychologically in the same bucket as expenses go, for most businesses. Even most solo operators aren't price sensitive to $10/mo for a business tool they have decided they want. Choosing $15 instead of $45 could literally mean you're leaving 2/3 of the value on the table. That's value that could have gone into e.g. acquiring customers, which typically has some monetary cost. (Customer Acquisition Cost & Churn are two very real costs that people tend to ignore when modeling these businesses. $15/mo definitely covers the servers, but does it cover Churn?).
The point is to pick your niche and pricing and do it deliberately.
(Also, look at some pricing psychology as I think $15 is probably not optimal from that perspective either.)
ps -- I could write another few pages about how you get a better class of customers (more engaged, better feedback, more tolerant of bugs in a new app, lower churn, etc.) at higher price points, but that's another topic.
It sounds like you don't think this tool is worth putting on your site. If you don't believe it will generate more than a few hundred dollars in revenue, would you clutter your site with it even if it were free?
love 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?
There 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.
Also, 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.)
But 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.
I can understand feeling that way, and I would too. But you've signed over to Twitter the right for them to display your tweets in any way they see fit, and they've given everyone else permission to embed your tweets wherever they want (subject to some TOS no doubt).
You have signed over the right to Twitter, not random third parties. They are not using Twitter's embed API to render the content, but even if they did it wouldn't automatically absolve them from having to get permission. Plenty of courts have already ruled on this in the copyright owner's favor (specifically for Twitter and Instagram embeds in fact).
This is somewhat of a legal gray area, but courts have ruled in the copyright owner's favor in a few cases like this (see https://tingenwilliams.com/2020/does-embedding-a-tweet-count...). If I post a picture on Twitter, sites other than Twitter aren't free to use it regardless of whether they are rehosting or embedding it.
Agreed. Even if it's legal I'd be upset. I'd sever my relationship with the company and maybe post a negative review warning people not to post positive reviews.
I 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
We believe the same. In the age of information overload building credibility on the Internet is tough. That's why we are building Shoutout. It will dig the unbiased positive shoutouts and help creators, startups build credibility.
Personally, from a consumer perspective I'm not convinced postive reviews are actually that useful, vetted or nor.
E.g. on Amazon I ended up only ever reading 3 star reviews. Not for their positivity or negativity, but because they often point out some shortcomming of the product that might or might not effect me. Say some audio hardware not supporting some MIDI feature. I might not care about it at all, or it is a dealbreaker. I have made more pruchase decision based on those reviews than positive ones. For the latter what usually lacks is knowledge about the context, the use case they have.
If it's just positive reviews on a website, i skip it as low information.
Tweet compilations actually decrease trust for me if they are on a website. Twitter sucks overall and bringing obviously filtered tweets is a turnoff.
As a consumer in both business and general, I want third parties who give unbiased reviews, covering multiple vendors / products which solve my problem. This is why genuine influencer marketing is doing well. I actually spend a fair amount of time on youtube looking at reviews and finding trustworthy sources there. They need to point out flaws and put some products down do gain that trust
Agree with this strongly. If Steve from Gamers Nexus, Jeff from Athlean X, Wendell from L1 Techs, Greg from Stronger by Science, say a product is good, I'll believe it. I've followed them for years and know them and trust them. Random Twitter users, no matter how many there appear to be, not so much.
How does this filter even assure that these are real accounts and not bots or a Serbian click farm selling positive impressions?
Agree with you. Also we are not asking anyone to form any behavior. People naturally give shoutouts to others(depends on their work) and we believe it should be used to our leverage instead of buried deep under these social platforms. That's where Shoutout comes in picture.
Social proof is to give credibility, reviews are to make decisions. This is for social proof. Also, by definition social proof is positive or else it wouldn't be valuable.
It's an easier way to source all of those testimonials that people have on their website and really cool because it shows that people "like me" value the product. If they do their job right, you could have a testimonial that is more valueable than anything you could have sourced yourself because you are surfacing that diamond in the rough. Especially if you a big brand with thousands, or millions, of people tweeting at you.
Social proof just means herd behavior where animals that don't know what to do in some novel situation simply take cues from their peers and do what everyone else is doing. There is nothing at all inherently positive about that. Just in humans, mob behavior, witch burning and pitchforks and all that, are all examples of people acting on social proof.
In fact, the exact opposite concept of this could exist, scrape Twitter for consumers to show them who they shouldn't do business with, and it would still be social proof.
Sorry, I am using social proof in the business context, not the academic context. When people use it in a business context, they typically mean "I don't know if I can trust this company, therefore, I can use my friends/community/peers to see if this company has built trust with someone I also trust."
Again, in this context, a company will always seek out positive social proof.
Very 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!
We'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.
Congrats 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?
Cool 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.
I built exactly this for Buffer maybe 8 years ago now, and amazingly a version of it still stands today:
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.
Wow! I buffer pioneered many things, a wall of love one among them! The only beef I have is, the page loads so slow because of Twitter embeds. That's where Shoutout outcompetes Twitter.
We 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.
I 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.
So 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.
82 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI'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_!
For the landing page, I used carrd.co, mailerlite for wait-list signups. For MVP I used bubble.io, Twitter API.
One question I have is how you drove traffic to your LP initially?
If you are buying drugs and the dealer says "hey, by the way, I just want you to know I'm totally not a cop"... that is a huge red flag. I'm equally wary of random websites that feel like they need to prove trust to me.
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!
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.
OP should consider making a plugin for Shopify/Wix, etc. That would be more their target market anyway.
If OP is targeting solo operators (Effectively B2C), then I agree that the price seems exorbitant.
I see a lot of opportunity for this further upmarket though. I saw someone mention that this could be useful for agencies, and they do seem like an ideal customer. Funded startups seem like another ideal customer with more money in the bank.
> I wouldn't pay more than $5/mo (or a $29 one time fee for something self-hosted)
And that's awesome for you, and the millions/billions of people like you. Likewise, I think Figma is expensive (but I'm not a designer!).
But the Internet is big! A new company doesn't need that many customers to do well. It's smart to choose customers who value more heavily the problem you're solving. That's why there's Shopify $360/year in perpetuity and Magento for $20k+ per year in perpetuity and self-hosted WooCommerce for no licensing fee. And they are all able to be successful. Customers that value your problem are also the type who will suggest valuable brand extensions in the future.
I got the impression that this product is marketed toward businesses. If that's the case, keep in mind that $15/mo or $25/mo or $45/mo are all psychologically in the same bucket as expenses go, for most businesses. Even most solo operators aren't price sensitive to $10/mo for a business tool they have decided they want. Choosing $15 instead of $45 could literally mean you're leaving 2/3 of the value on the table. That's value that could have gone into e.g. acquiring customers, which typically has some monetary cost. (Customer Acquisition Cost & Churn are two very real costs that people tend to ignore when modeling these businesses. $15/mo definitely covers the servers, but does it cover Churn?).
The point is to pick your niche and pricing and do it deliberately.
(Also, look at some pricing psychology as I think $15 is probably not optimal from that perspective either.)
ps -- I could write another few pages about how you get a better class of customers (more engaged, better feedback, more tolerant of bugs in a new app, lower churn, etc.) at higher price points, but that's another topic.
Yes, daily/weekly reminders is a feature we already planned. Stay tuned, for it to become live.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can embed any tweet anywhere you feel like (and actually the embed won't fully disappear when the tweet is deleted, but I digress).
And yes, people have lost cases about using embeds too.
The tweets we suggest are high-signal and we believe it will help your product, newsletter or whatever you are selling.
So the company is able to "lie" to potential customers.
How companies manipulate Glassdoor is an interesting case study
I doubt there is more money in that direction though
If you filter for positive shoutouts only, the result becomes strongly biased by definition :).
E.g. on Amazon I ended up only ever reading 3 star reviews. Not for their positivity or negativity, but because they often point out some shortcomming of the product that might or might not effect me. Say some audio hardware not supporting some MIDI feature. I might not care about it at all, or it is a dealbreaker. I have made more pruchase decision based on those reviews than positive ones. For the latter what usually lacks is knowledge about the context, the use case they have.
Tweet compilations actually decrease trust for me if they are on a website. Twitter sucks overall and bringing obviously filtered tweets is a turnoff.
As a consumer in both business and general, I want third parties who give unbiased reviews, covering multiple vendors / products which solve my problem. This is why genuine influencer marketing is doing well. I actually spend a fair amount of time on youtube looking at reviews and finding trustworthy sources there. They need to point out flaws and put some products down do gain that trust
How does this filter even assure that these are real accounts and not bots or a Serbian click farm selling positive impressions?
Step 2, use tweets for marketing
Since they're Tweets it's also theoretically organic, which is even better.
It's an easier way to source all of those testimonials that people have on their website and really cool because it shows that people "like me" value the product. If they do their job right, you could have a testimonial that is more valueable than anything you could have sourced yourself because you are surfacing that diamond in the rough. Especially if you a big brand with thousands, or millions, of people tweeting at you.
Cool prooduct, nice work guys.
What you said about social proof is absolutely true! It is the relevancy that helps people make a decision and through credibility it is even easier.
In fact, the exact opposite concept of this could exist, scrape Twitter for consumers to show them who they shouldn't do business with, and it would still be social proof.
Again, in this context, a company will always seek out positive social proof.
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.
Would love to see a wall of love for Circles for Zoom. Btw big fan of what you are building!
How's that for meta social proof?
Actually my technical co-founder is better to answer this question.
E.g. Picking a $15 USD plan in the UK would bill me for £10.80, and fluctuate each month.
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.
Our embeds loads ridiculously fast!
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?