Hi I'm Bryan from Singapore

Introductions
#1

Hello!

Merry Xmas and A Happy New Year to all of you all. My name is Bryan and I’m from Singapore. I been hanging out in this forum for a while and have learn lots of interesting stuff about building up a business.

I’m currently working on http://blogwith.co/ - a service that allows you to write and publish to major publishing platform staight from Evernote. Still in beta stage and right now it is free. I was thinking when the product becomes more stable (less buggy) I’m looking to charge 29$ per year for this service.

I love to hear your views, especially to the many writers in this forum. What can I add to Blogwith to make it more valuable :smiley:

Also if any bootstrapper is travelling in Asia and passing by Singapore. Do drop me an email at reachme@bosslee.co. Maybe grab a coffee or so and I can also show you some co-working spaces here in Singapore.

Cheers
Bryan

1 Like
#3

I have my own blog, but since I’m not an evernote user, I can’t really comment on the product itself. As a developer myself, it is always challenging for me to not just think about the product side of things, but also the business side. How have you validated that people are willing to pay money to have their evernote posts synced to their blog?

#4

Hi @pwim

Thanks for commenting :smiley:
You are right about the business side. In fact, I have no clue if anyone would pay for the service. The only thing I know is that people are using it if it is free :frowning:

You trigger my thoughts. I going to email the existing users to test if they would be interested in paying for more features.

Thank you so much.

#5

Hi fellow Bootstrappers

With reference to @pwim advice, I started asking some existing users if they are willing to pay for upgrade.

Now the struggle I’m facing is that some of the users are asking if they would have a trial of the upgrade features and the it would be easier for them to decided if they are looking for upgrade.

However, the advice I been getting from fellow developed are, “do not start coding unless you are certain, that some one would be willing to pay for it”

I’m kinda of stuck now. Should I be seeking more feedback and “do first, worry later”

Looking forward to hear from fellow bootstrappers.

Thank you :slight_smile:

#6

Since the last update, I took the leap of faith and start building.

Here I have beta.blogwith.co
This service current works with Evernote sandbox account ie ( does not use your realy Evernote account, I still waiting approval for me api key)

I was wondering if any parties over here would like to test out the service and give me some feedback?

I also came to realised that my service is extreme useful for live blogging. Currently when u create an account, a special notebook named BlogwithPublish will be created in your Evernote account. Any note that you push into the notebook will be publish to your respective Wordpress account. :smile: also currently works with text :slight_smile:

#7

I thought I use the forum to share my thoughts on building Blogwith :smile:

Since it officially launch, I only added 5 new users excluding some who are my friends who help me to test out.
Not exactly the kind of launch any founder is looking for. However, these 5 users are active users and I’m be emailing them asking for the features they are willing to pay for.

The good thing about this is that if gives me a better idea of my exact user base. It’s a small niche Evernote / Wordpress power users.

The challenge now is to build up even more users to justify the need for the requested features. Each day I spent an hour or 2, talking to potential users who are interested to give my app a spin. My goal is to add 20 new users each week.

Initially I wanted to shift the site to digital ocean for self hosted solution. It would be cheaper but also more work for me. But there are so many things to do so I decided to leave the backend work for heroku and work on adding features and customer engagement.