I just launched my first SaaS 🎉
Hey all!
I've been a lurker here since 2017 (almost 6 years! 🤯) but never built up the courage to just take that one step out of my comfort zone and start building and sharing in public.
In the past, I was very attached to my ideas and what people would think of them. I think I avoided sharing as much since I didn't want to get judged based on the idea. But now I've internalized that this is a fairly common feeling and almost irrational! The reality is that nobody really cares! 99% of people won't even read up until this point 😅. In an effort to overcome this pesky fear I'm writing my first post on Indiehackers to get the ball rolling. Hope this inspires some other brilliant indie hackers here too.
Over the past 2 weeks I built https://automatic.chat which is a ChatGPT support chatbot trained to answer questions on your website.
Potential use cases:
- Answer questions about SaaS products
- Answer questions about Developer documentation
- Answer questions about Wordpress sites
- Recommend products on Shopify stores
Yes yes I know... 🙄 not another chatbot product! I've also seen a couple of these pop up over the past few weeks and it's been exciting and scary at the same time.
On one hand, I understand that this competition validates the solution (not the problem), but on the other hand I feel its getting saturated too fast. However, there is also this rational side of me which thinks the market for this is still incredibly massive and there exists customers who could definitely still use something like this despite the competition. So I'm willing to take a risk and continue pursuing this idea to try and find and grow a niche for this product which sticks.
I've also focused my product towards great design / UX and also priced it to be very competitive compared to alternatives.
Questions for you:
- I take feedback very seriously and I want to build something actually helpful for users. Be brutally honest and rip me a new one: What's stopping you from adding this chatbot to your website?
- I made a launch tweet yesterday which didn't get much traction https://twitter.com/dillionverma/status/1646912379119075329. How would you go about marketing this if this was your product?
When you reach your monthly quota, what will the visitor see?
To be completely honest, there's no guards in place yet. What would you want to see happen?
I guess as long as visitors don't know the guys on the other end are cheap and reached their quota, it should be good. Maybe pricing per session instead of per message?
Is the per message pricing a turn off for you?
I think another solution is just not show the chatbot if limits have been reached
Say a visitor is in mid convo and the chat disappears because the quota has been reached.. kinda awkward
That's a great point. I see why a session cap would make more sense in that case. I'll look into that, thanks!
To answer the question about what would stop someone from adding this to their website- I think the biggest deciding factor would be what sets this apart from all the other similar chatbots on the market?
The biggest I can think of aside from functionality my biggest factor would be cost.
Congrats Dillion! I appreciate you being open and vulnerable about your feelings here. I think that doing so inspires other and helps them realize that they are not alone.
I love this paragraph. On the one hand, I agree that it's important to think about problems, not solutions. So far it sounds like you're in a bit of that "solution in search of a problem" category.
Which usually is bad, but there's always the exception that proves the rule. I think what you say about it being worth pursuing anyway due to what a goldmine this market seems to be is plausible.
My advice would be to avoid the "boiling frog" situation where you keep thinking to yourself "just another few weeks", "just another few weeks", "just a few more features", "just a few more improvements", and you end up spending two years on it. Maybe set some goals about where you'd like to be in X weeks in order to justify continuing to work on this.
Looks very similar to another chatbot api i found on producthunt called https://anywebsite.ai.
There's alot of Ai directories being made, and they're desperate for more listings, so you should deffo post on those.
I don't think indiehackers are your audience here, there's no pain point for us imo. See if you can hit up companies, people on linkedin, facebook groups and find people who have a decent customer support team, and ask them if they want this Ai bot to speed up their process or do a bit of heavy lifting for them to make a smoother support pipeline.
The previous company I worked for used GPT to help them with listing descriptions, Ai would do most the heavy work for grammar spelling check and formatting. Im definite there's companies out there that you can help, you just need get in touch with them and probably reformat your product so it fits in with their backend
Hope this has been helpful, keep it going there's 100% pivot opportunities, keep us updated