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Show HN: My second startup; solving the problems from my first startup

7 points by rex_gsd ↗ HN
A little history first. Back in Jan 2011 I quit my day job after saving up my $ for a year and began my first startup, a hardware + SaaS business. It was exciting and at the end of 14 months I had a handful of customers but not enough incoming to keep me going so I went back into the workforce full time, running it on the side. Naturally my time is pretty limited. Users kept signing up and I had to constantly print and post them unique welcome forms, direct debit forms, post out monthly invoices etc, the list goes on. The paperwork alone took me hours. I'd have just coded up each form into a batch job if the content on them didn't change so drastically. I needed a mail merge system that worked.

So I checked out the offerings from MS and Libre Office much to my dismay. 36 steps, an excel file, stand on a sheet of alfoil and hit merge and you've got your mail merge done hopefully. Finding them not quite capable of doing what I needed I did what any coder with a few spare evenings does and I wrote my own that spat out PDFs from a csv file. I shot the idea past some business connections from startup 1 and got back a lot of positive feedback from. In fact so much feedback that the recurring theme was that they were shouting at me "How do I use this, my secretary/wife/monkey spends hours hand editing our invoices and still half of them are inconsistent. Sell me this now!". I realised hardly anyone except MS Word pro's and well trained office staff actually know how to do a mail merge. Usually not the kind of people you find in a small business. So why not make an app out of it.

The spare evenings turned into 6 months and a few banking headaches but finally it's ready for it's first release.

www.rocketmailmerge.com

Any and all constructive feedback is welcome. I've got plans to put an intro video on the front page when time permits and add some extra features, but I'll see how the feedback goes first before stretching the MVP boundaries too far.

9 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] thread
schoash
Didn't really get what you are doing while browsing the start page. Digging deeper helped though. Not sure if you need a video, I think more people don't have the time to watch a video anyway.
rex_gsd
That's the problem with landing pages. They're always hard to design objectively when you've worked on the product for so long. I'll think of some optional wording for headings etc to better explain it.
schoash
Instead of the 3 points after the fold I would rather put up 3 easy steps. eg: 1. create your mailing/printout/letter 2. merge the data 3. print and send pretty much like the "3 easy steps" you mention in the tour.

The current 3 points on the landing page sound rather empty to me.

xtrycatchx
seems like the page is not working? images are not showing,css not working too
rex_gsd
My server decided it would be a good time to do an update cycle, at 2am our local time; just bad timing unfortunately for users from the US.
dgunn
Your page looks great. Did you design this yourself or hire it out?

That said, unless it's a term widely understood by your audience and I'm just not part of that audience, you should ditch the word "mail merge". It may be hard to do, but I really had no clue what you were talking about til I saw your page. That may not be an issue for you right now if you plan to get your customers via direct sales but if you have any intention of scaling your customer acquisition by trying to get some search traffic etc, you'll want to make sure you find a way to describe what you do the way your non-technical customers would describe it. This may be difficult but I'm sure you'll figure it out. Seems like a great start!

rex_gsd
Yep, I totally agree about the term Mail Merge being pretty unknown so I'll get some feedback from friends on what it could possibly be changed to.

I'll be trying direct marketing first to the businesses that already do mail merges so if that fails I'll fall back on search hits and make it more new user friendly.

camz
I'd say that people who need mail merge know what it is. It was made most famous by Microsoft Office (at least thats where i heard it first). But, it'd be a good idea to have a simple description thats a natural search term.