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Tell HN: I just reached 10 paying customers after 2 weeks of the public launch

47 points by koushikmarka90 ↗ HN
I am Koushik, founder of Supademo, and this is the story of how I got my first 10 paid customers.

Firstly, Wow, the feeling is memorable. I know it's a small win, but it feels like a big one in my heart

A little backstory.

I launched the beta version of Supademo(a tool to create interactive product demos in minutes) on Oct 8th.

Link to the product: https://supademo.com

After running the beta for 5 Weeks+, I officially made the public launch 2 weeks back.

Some stats so far: •340 signups •250+ user demos •10 Paid customers

So how did I get here?

I tried different strategies to get the initial word out and find the beta users. (mainly in the first 2 weeks)

These worked great for me: •Hackernews(70 upvotes) •Reddit: r/SideProject (70 upvotes) •Word of mouth •Cold DMs and emails to experienced Indiehackers for feedback. (%15 effect )

Fortunately, so many users found the product helpful. So, I started getting tons of feedback. I took calls with some of them, and some sent me feedback through emails and DMs.

I am so grateful to everyone who took the time to try the product and give feedback and suggestions.

So I quickly aggregated the feedback in one place and rolled out the most requested features one by one. I shared product updates through email every week with the users.

The users who saw me implementing their feedback trusted me and became my first paid customers.

Lesson learned: As Indiehackers, we know how precious is our time and resources. So when you are starting, instead of finding ways to get more users, find the right ones, listen to them, and optimize the product accordingly.

I know this is just the start, but I am excited about the upcoming journey. Much more things to learn!

If you want to connect and chat more, ping me on Twitter(@koushikmarka). My DMs are always open.

23 comments

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reneherse
Thanks for sharing your initial success and description of your process. Your product and landing page looks really solid! (Safari, MacOS, Desktop)
koushikmarka90
Thank you. I am glad you liked Supademo!

Take it for a spin when possible.

nonrandomstring
Congratulations. That's such a good feeling huh? Now you just need to hang on to them, double them every month ... The fact that you get good feedback you can act on is gold.
koushikmarka90
Thank you. Really a great feeling. The initial feedback from our users was super helpful in fine-tuning the Supademo.
donclark
What was your process or strategy for aggregating the feedback?
koushikmarka90
I felt the best way to get feedback from users was by speaking with them directly.

I used email and LinkedIn DMs to set up feedback calls from our users.

Few of them directly sent their suggestions through written responses in emails and DMs.

We also recently set up https://feedback.supademo.com to collect feedback.

codegeek
May be I am missing something but wouldn't you want to use your own app to showcase in the demo than a sample demo ? You are selling a product to create interactive product demos and in the sample demo, it shows some random app instead of your own app's demo. Don't mean to be dismissive but I think you are missing the trick by not doing this. I would have loved to see how to create interactive demo without needing to signup/login.
koushikmarka90
That's really a great idea. We are actually going to add two more sample demos this week, along with the existing one on the website. One of them is the "How to create your first demo"?

Let's see how it goes.

strongpigeon
Congrats on shipping and on your first customers! I remember getting almost teary eyed when I first put paid features in my app and people bought some right away.
koushikmarka90
Thank you, buddy. I understand; the feeling is super emotional.
scyzoryk_xyz
This is very very nice. Simple and straightforward. I just gave it a try with my niche little company react web-app project. It really did only take me several minutes to make a polished looking demo.

The best part to me was the way you simplified the cursor movement in the demo and made those stage-bars appear on the bottom. IMHO that's your core feature there. The only snag was that it wasn't immediately obvious to me that those stage-bars are something I'm supposed to click on. There was a brief second that I didn't quite get it - something about the way they transform on hover. (And I just now figured out that also clicking on the hotspot texts moves the slideshow forward.)

If I were you I would do some IRL user tests with difficult tech-illiterate Mom-type users. As a subscriber of this product I would want the peace of mind that all my clients are going to just "get" it and that I can work it in seamlessly into my stack.

That being said, it's clear to me that this is being developed based on user testing with a batch of existing paying users.

raylad
Have you done user testing on these? It seems fairly likely that many people won't know to click on the balloon text to advance the demo.
pkrotich
Nicely done and simple!

Perhaps not product direction - but I would suggest it anyhow; It would be awesome to explore making it an onboarding / interractive / guided self-serve walkthrough pilot with checklists and such. That's a better product for SAAS model in the longterm - making interactive demo recording a feature and a tool for metrics collection etc.

help_quanted
The fact that I can upload images and gifs to create demos made this useable for me as my demo I'm trying to create is for desktop software. Looks really solid, I'll likely convert to a paid customer once I have a bit more time tinkering.
koushikmarka90
I am so glad that you liked Supademo. Feel free to let me know if you have questions while using the product; I am happy to help you.