Yo, I'm Julien and I've been stalking for months. Time to get naked now

Introductions
#1

Hey everyone, nice to meet all of you.

I’m in my early thirties, worked at a tech startup for the past 10 years, then got tired and quit almost 18 months ago — with the goal of making things by myself from then.
I’ve been enjoying funemployement for the first few months with a lot of voyages, and then I’ve started working on side-projects, alone or with some close friends.

Now, we’re getting serious about our projects, and want to turn them from fun to profitable.
We’re pretty open to how we’ll do that, but one thing for sure is we want to avoid the path of unicorns. So bootstrap it is.

We’ve already launched some projects:

It’s been a whole lot of fun doing things by ourselves, but now I realize I miss connecting with other people, especially makers and product people.

So, hey — I hope to get connected with lots of you, to learn how to become somewhat good at marketing, and maybe teach a few thing here and there.
Julien

6 Likes
#2

Welcome, Julien!

All of the websites you listed have great design!
What have been your results in terms of users/signups/sales?

1 Like
#3

Not much. We’ve not really communicated on the websites, I think we’ve been kind of afraid to “officially” launch. The whole marketing / launch stuff is where we have to improve a lot.

  • TravelToday: we have 40+ members on Slack, mostly from word of mouth. The only thing we did is some tweets, mainly to test Buffer. The goal was to test InviteRobot on this community (making it a paid community), but turns out we’re not very fond of spending time promoting it. So, we let it live its life for now.
  • InviteRobot: we have 1 paying customer, who fully covers our expenses for the year to come. Same thing, we’ve not communicated yet. Instead we’ve sniped about 50 communities over the last 4 months, who we thought might be interested by the concept. We have 10 signups, 3 of which are active. We’re planning more communication in the coming weeks, namely blog posts and try our luck on Product Hunt.
  • CashNotify: this one is brand new. I’m actively looking for 20 beta testers since this week, and have already found 7. One of them actually bought it right away, as well as gave me invaluable feedback. I will update the website to add checkout + FAQ, so I can soft-launch and start getting first customers on board. Then I plan to spend most of the coming weeks on the marketing (a mix of blog posts, SEO pages, community reach, etc.). I’ll mostly try stuff out and see how it works.
2 Likes
#4

Welcome. You nailed the design and copy on InviteRobot — and congrats on your first customer. Seems like there is a real need there. If you can do it once, you can do it many more times.

1 Like
#5

Thanks Hannah.

I realize everything takes time, especially if you want to make it good.
Might be a bit too ambitious to start 1 new project every 4 to 6 weeks, even just for learning purpose.

1 Like