Show HN: After 2 months my project management software is finally finished (flourishfreelance.com)
Hey Hacker News,
I have finished this after 2 months and made the entire thing free (up to 2 projects) for you all to try out, all you need is an account.
Thansk and enjoy,
Dan
20 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadIt wasn't obvious to me that I could scroll to read more. I clicked 'Get started' to find out more. I think it might be at least worth making it more obvious that you can scroll.
"Other tools all have this problem" or "lack this killer feature" so I built my own to fix that.
Otherwise it's not clear there's a reason to choose this over one of the many existing options.
What problem are you solving? This is probably related to the lack of discussion of features.
What are you doing that other services in this space aren't doing?
Why should someone trust you with their data? Also, you want a lot of information that few people are going to give you without even knowing anything about your product beyond the tiny bit on the homepage. You'd be much better off providing a demo page.
There's no info about pricing.
Is anyone currently using it? Would someone signing up be nothing more than an unpaid bug finder?
Yeah. I don't pay anyone for software, I pay them to get rid of a problem. One example from when I used to do more consulting was having to send information to the client securely. I didn't look for software, I looked for a way to do what I needed, and to do it in a way that met the client's needs.
As an aside, I wouldn’t mention “2 months” anywhere but to your friends here. To someone working hard on a project, 2 months can feel like an eternity. To someone outside that project, 2 months sounds like a pretty tiny project someone worked on for funsies.
“All you need is an account” is more of a blocker for your target market than you might expect. I’d recommend some mechanism like “click here for a demo” that creates a temporary account that gets deleted after a couple hours. That’s way more likely to get me to play with it to see what it can do than registering for Yet Another Test Account is.
I'd like to point out that your text for "Email Notifications" and "Deadline Notifications" is the same.
Something that rattled me several times when releasing my own projects like this is that once I released my thing I'd expect people to start using it. Most of the time, after I built things nobody cared. I felt really discouraged and would try working on something else to see if people might start using the new thing, but the same thing would happen.
What I've come to realize is that building things is its own skillset distinct from the skill of figuring out what needs to be built which is distinct from the skill of telling people about it. I wasn't (and still am not great) at the last two, but I've been working towards getting better at it by practicing things like:
- talking to customers like a researcher (ie: without asking leading questions like "do you like it?"). Deploy Empathy and The Mom Test were great resources for this.
- figuring out where potential customers hang out online, what their problems are, and how they talk about them. 30x500 was a great resource for me here.
- learning an explore/exploit system for marketing to figure out how to build machines that take in a dollar and spit out more than a dollar. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg is the best resource I've found here so far.
For a good overview of the whole system of building profitable SaaS businesses I've recently really enjoyed The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling.