I have been visiting this board for a while. It has been helpful to read about the thoughts and experiences of other developers who also have been bootstrapping the development without going for external funding.
Our product ElectricVLab, which was in development for the past few years, finally got released. The website is still being updated and the marketing is yet to ramp up. But, it still feels good to have come this far!
Any comments or suggestions will be appreciated.
Looks interesting.
The screenshots look great, so I would put one of those right near the top of the home page.
Too much text!
Some people might see the term ânewbiesâ as a bit insulting.
The irregular sized green boxes on the features page look ugly IMHO.
The âbuy nowâ button on the âbuyâ page doesnât look like a button.
I couldnât see how to download it. Is there no free trial? I think thatâs a huge mistake. Or maybe you just havenât added it yet?
Congratulations on launching.
Looks like you have a product with a niche that adds real value to people.
Hereâs an unsolicited tightening of your headline:
âElectricVLab is a user-friendly feature-rich software that lets you build and simulate electronic circuits virtually in an interactive environment.â
Is much better as:
âBuild and simulate electronic circuits virtually in an interactive environment.â
Are you selling any yet?
Have you targeted schools (or anyone teaching electronics) ?
Even an electrical engineering college dept.
(My degree⌠25 years ago!!, was in electrical engineering).
or (as 3D is your differentiator):
âBuild and simulate electronic circuits virtually in an interactive 3D environment.â
or
âBuild and simulate electronic circuits in 3D.â
Thanks for the feedback, folks!
Just finished one round of updates and incorporated some of your feedback (Yet to act on others). Also added a âGalleryâ page to put some more screenshots.
Too much text.
Youâve got maybe 10 seconds to get someoneâs attention.
As others have said, it looks like a really cool products (my degree is in electrical engineering).
Suggestions:
Thanks âClay Nicholsâ!
I am particularly intrigued by your suggestion #2 that suggests âcreate a much simpler versionâ. Would you mind elaborating upon that? Do you mean to say, for example, that we should have fewer components and features? We are currently doing the opposite :). We have been steadily adding more components and features. Yes, I am afraid that by doing this (i.e., adding more components/features), we do run the risk of potentially scaring away some of the âbeginnersâ such as young children, or parents who buy for young children. In a way, they shouldnât because we try to keep the usage simple enough for the novice users and they can delay using the more involved things until they have grown older or gathered more experience. As stated on our home page, our goal is that âElectricVLab is intended to be a lifelong companion of an electronics enthusiast starting from the budding young ageâ and âElectricVLab will entertain and invigorate the young mindâs curiosity in electronics and will continue to be a helpful tool in college and
beyond.â.
But, in reality, I do fear whether not all potential buyers might see it that way. It is possible that some of them might think that âSome of those are way beyond my childâs current levelâ instead of viewing the software as something that can be used over several years as the child keeps growing. If such âfear mindsetâ starts hurting us significantly, one thought we have is to split the product into separate âjuniorâ and âseniorâ versions at some point.
by âsimplerâ I was referring to the Landing Page.
I havenât tried the software itself, so I donât know.
I HIGHLY recommend you offer free 1:1 live demos for people. Itâs a GREAT way to get feedback. And if you can filter your visitors down to the 5% that are most motivated/interested, itâs very likely that theyâll buy.
-Clay
Thanks for the feedback âClay_Nicholsâ!
We have now simplified the home page by reducing the amount of text. At least, it is quite a bit less than it used to be :).
Better. But I think that page could work even harder for you.
On thing thatâs helpful is to let the user choose how deeply theyâll read and guide them to the most important stuff for that amount of reading.
For example, most people will spend about 10 seconds and then decide if this is appropriate, if not they leave.
(Look at your bounce rate to see that)
So⌠if the user was only willing to spend 10 seconds, have you made the most important 10 seconds completely obvious?
If you are a student, hobbyist, or any electronics enthusiast who wants to build and simulate electronic circuits in a fun virtual 3D environment, ElectricVLab is for you.
It it helpful for other people than those 3 above?
If so, why limit yourself. Youvâe also buried the lead.
Are you a/b testing (free with google analytics)?
Try 
in a fun virtual 3d Environment
Now, they canât miss that itâs about, even with a 5 second glance.
Iâd also show an image of a cool electronic circuit. (How about an op-amp used to make some cool sound effect, etc.)
Suggestion:
Offer free demos to 10 people. Show it to them, see they like, what words they use to describe it.
It can be scary to talk to strangers but itâll pay off big time. (You can also prescreen them with a few questions. Figure out who your ideal customer is. (Someone who has built circuits before, understands basic electronics, but would love to simulate a circuit, etc.)
If you are a student, hobbyist, or any electronics enthusiast who wants to build and simulate electronic circuits in a fun virtual 3D environment, ElectricVLab is for you
I think you forgot an important class of users who can really pay: teachers, schools, academic professors. They need to make their students understand the electronics, and you can help with your 3D effects
Also what about writers of educational books about electronics who need to illustrate the circuits.
Thanks âstartrinityâ!
You are right. The software can be very useful for instructors of electronics. For example, instead of drawing diagrams on the board and explaining, showing the circuits in action can be much more effective in many cases.
The sixth bullet point on our home page does include âelectronics instructorsâ to cover this case.
Has lots of features
that can cater to the needs of a wide range of audience including
newbies, students, hobbyists, Arduino users, electronics instructors,
and even professionals.
But, as you suggest, it may be a good idea to include that in the very first sentence. As of now, a handful of instructors/professors are already using ElectricVLab and have really liked it. But, so far, we havenât spent any money on advertisement or marketing and as of now, only a tiny fraction of the target customer base knows about our software.
Yes, I would move this bullet from 6 to 1st place. Because the professors and schools have good money. Another thing Iâd like to recommend you - watch usersâ activity at website and in the GUI via internet, track them
I also did not spend anything on marketing and advertising; it is good that someone already uses it without advertising
This looks very cool, and exactly what I was looking for as I am (as a hobby) learning some electronics.
Is there no trial download? The first thing you need to do is add a big bold âdownloadâ button somewhere, I had to click around to almost all pages to find any place to download - on the âupdateâ page of all places.
An audience that is certainly interested is the sparkfun/arduino beginner crowd (like myself). The price is good, if it works like described Iâd buy it, but I donât bother with getting out my credit card without having been able to try a demo. Also, Paypal is a pain in the ass that I only use if I really, really have to.
I agree with @Roel_V. Iâm anti-paypal myself. You could consider using something like Stripe. Iâve used it in the past to handle subscription billing for a rather unsuccessful SaaS attempt (should be even simpler to use for one-off purchasing like this), itâs rather nice IMHO.
Thanks for the comments âRoel_Vâ and âjcadamâ!
@Roel_V: Glad to know that you are also an Arduino enthusiast. That was somewhat of a pleasant surprise on this forum for bootstrappers. I presume you looked at our blog page related to Arduino?
Regarding Paypal: As you would know, one is not required to have a Paypal account to pay at their site. One can pay using any credit card at the Paypal website. But, I do agree with your suggestion and we do want to provide the option of paying via Stripe as well. It is on our âToDoâ list.
Holy sweet Jesus, this product is amazing. Victory was kind enough to send me a reg key âin advanceâ so that I could try it out, and this thing has so much potential. I think it has been released way too late though - by that I mean, you should have released years ago without the Arduino integration, way less components, no manual, no undo/redo, no BOM etc. You could have gotten revenue and customer feedback much earlier. But anyway, itâs here now, congratulations!
First, itâs WAAY too cheap. I understand you want to make it accessible, but maybe make a âlightâ version for 19.95 and a âproâ for 49.95. Thatâs still a steal. Users in a classroom wonât need e.g. the Arduino, the signal generator and the BOM, your application has the perfect model for segmentation by having different levels of components. At your current price point I donât see how youâll make real money, or at the very least, youâre leaving a lot on the table. The website says you want to be comparable to a textbook - there are no textbooks for $12!
BUT - there are many small things that, I think, prevent it from becoming a hit in its current form. But all of them are fairly easy to fix. In no particular order some things I found:
Navigation is hard. It seems there is no panning, except for âCenter in Viewâ? I expected it to work like Sketchup but the rotating is hard and error-prone, the forementioned lack of panning, even the zooming was wonky some times.
Hard to make connections between components. Itâs difficult to see which wires are connected, and you canât move connections at all it seems (after youâve placed them). Itâs difficult to wire up e.g. an LED because the legs are under the âbulbâ so you need to position the camere almost parallel to the plane.
Maybe you can draw a tin-colored half sphere on each connection point where there is at least one wire, like a solder joint? That would keep you from having to make algorithms that join the wire âpipesâ, plus it would give you an object that can be manipulated (moved) when you want to move the end point of a connection, because that is missing.
Selection - there is what looks like a selection rectangle, except when you release the left mouse button, the context menu is shown. It seems I canât delete more than one component or connection at a time.
Half of the time when I want to change parameters on a component, I end up moving it. The UI there isnât very intuitive.
So I made a small test circuit with a battery, a resistor and an LED. I had to set the resistor to 5 ohms to get the LED to light up in simulation mode, but at that point almost 1/2 amp was flowing through the wire. That must be a mistake somewhere?
No short-circuit detection it seems? I guess you can tell from the speed of the current indicator, but maybe color the connections red when more than X amps are detected somewhere. My LED is at full brightness even when 8.37e12 A is flowing through itâŚ
UI is (sorry to say) a real engineerâs interface. The colors are straight out of the 1990âs (why not color the working surface in dark green and copper, like a real pcb?). The controls (Build Tools, View Controls) look somewhat younger, but early 2000âs at best. There are plenty of free icon packs that look much better, I think an afternoon polishing that would yield 10-fold improvements.
Website is ugly and hard to find stuff on (whatâs the difference between âcomponentsâ, âgalleryâ, âresourcesâ and âupdatesâ?). Put a big, bold âDownload hereâ button at the top so that people can get straight to it. Plus a trial, but Iâve mentioned that before⌠Too much text, not enough whitespace, âŚ
The whole product/website looks like the prototypical âtechnical founderâ story: focus on product first, weâll do marketing âlaterâ, âwhen the product is doneâ. I think an improvement for the home page could be to focus on benefits to specific audiences. Toss out the list of text, and put in bullet points:
(note that these are three different benefits: âmake my life easierâ, âcheapâ and âeasy to useâ or âget better gradesâ - you need to split that out according to each audience you want to reach)
Here is a trick I use when I need to do something âcreativeâ in a field Iâve never done before: I get a few people on Fiverr to make a start, and then I work from there. For example, last year I officiated my sisterâs wedding. I had a concept for the ceremony in mind but I didnât quite know how to make it concrete. So I explained the concept to 4 people on Fiverr and had them write a speech of a few paragraphs each. I ended up with 1 ok (not great, but ok) idea and 3 half-assed ones (hey, what can you expect for $5 each). But I took those 4 speeches, wrote down what I didnât like and did like about each of them, and then from that, the actual one that I used was quite easy to write.
I do that for logos, icons, website designs and marketing copy too. For $20 or $40, I âbootstrapâ the brainstorming phase of the creative process. Especially because Iâm on my own, Iâve found that to be tremendously useful.
Iâm sure there are many more things like this, but the base product is great and Iâm sure this would be a useful tool for many. Maybe try to partner with component vendors like Sparkfun, Conrad, Elektuur etc, and see if they want to resell for you? And/or get them to feature a tutorial by you on your software? There are many ânaturalâ marketing opportunities for something with a target audience as focused as this.
But most importantly I think you need to focus on polish and ease of use a bit. Itâs not hard to be better than Eagle in this respect - in the land of the blind, one-eye is kingâŚ
Congratulations on getting this far, I know what a slog it is, but I also vividly remember that once I got to that point the first time, I only then fully realized that the hard work was still ahead of me. I mean you can read it a hundred times from others but you need to experience it to fully grasp that writing the software is only the first 10%. And I never made a product as ambitious as this. Feel free to contact me for any clarifications or if youâd like to brainstorm on how to move further with marketing and selling your product. Iâd love to see you succeed, if only because I love playing with virtual circuits myself so much 
@Roel_V: Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback! Much appreciated.
I will follow up with you over email regarding the details. A couple of things you mentioned (e.g., the ability to âpanâ) are already there. But, the fact that you didnât find them does tell me that we need to expose them in a more intuitively obvious way. Adding a 2D like âsymbol viewâ has been on our âtodoâ list for some time. That view will also make it easier to wire the components. Your comment makes me think that we should prioritize the implementation of that feature over some other things on our list.
Overall, very helpful feedback! Thank you.
Hi @Victory, I have a question, how did you come up to such a great idea? and how did you understand that it is the right one (if you have other ideas in your mind)?