Featurebase
The modern support & feedback tool for the next generation
Last year we set a goal of getting to 1k MRR.
Today we have 35 active paying customers, are doing over 1.2k MRR, and growing faster than ever. 🎉
Some cool stats for 2022 📈
- 5 237 posts created on feedback boards
- 11 106 accounts created to post feedback
- 824 organizations created
- 36 359 upvotes to posts
Best marketing channels for us 🚀
- Word of mouth is underrated - Build a great product and offer outstanding customer service.
- "Alternative to" marketing - Create alternative pages for your competitors and drive SEO traffic to them. Post your product on AlternativeTo.net as well!
- "Powered by" marketing - Our tool allows you to create public feedback boards and widgets to capture feedback. All boards have a small "Powered by Featurebase" button.
- Integration marketing - We're featured on the Intercom marketplace and others. I really recommend this since you make your product more useful while marketing at the same time. Our Q1 goal is to double down on this.
Here are a few lessons we learned 👇
1. In a competitive market, your product comes first and marketing second 🏗️
You have probably seen tons of memes about how small-brain founders only focus on building new features and completely ignore marketing.
So we followed the advice. When launching our MVP we went ham on marketing and tried over 10 different marketing channels, and... none of them worked. 🫠
We almost quit back then since the general indie founder's advice is that if people don't care about your MVP after a few weeks, you should probably work on something else.
The problem was that our product sucked. Therefore any marketing efforts were wasted because there were so many better options on the market.
In a competitive market, success is at least = 70% product X 30% marketing.
Therefore if you have a shitty product, you are essentially trying to multiply by 0.
In our case, we could draw a matching line between our MRR and how good our product is.
I wish we had doubled down on making our product amazing before wasting so much time on useless marketing efforts.
2. Pick one marketing channel and stick to it 🎯
Rather than finding the next shiny marketing channel that could magically 10x your MRR, just pick one that fits your target audience and master it. Pierre from ScrapingBee made a great talk on this that you should definitely check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLVQ96pGHw4
3. It's much safer to build in a validated market ✅
If you're great at building products and design, then this is the way.
There are niches in big proven markets that you could hop into. Pick a few features from a bloated tool and do it much better.
And remember that 99% of the time, it is a big red flag when you can't find existing competitors to "your new fantastic business idea."
I hope you found something useful in this. However, take everything I shared as a data point and not a fact. Your experience might vary significantly based on the market you are in and hundreds of other factors. Hah, I wish more indie founders added this disclaimer.
Let's goooo, a few days ago we reached 25 active subscriptions and $765 MRR. 🥳
Some stats:
📈 600+ organizations created (We used to have a free plan).
📈 ~5% CHURN.
📈 ~6-7% new organization conversion rate (Based on past 3 months).
📈 ~18 Daily Active dashboard Users.
Here's how we got this far:
✅ AlternativeTo - This has proven to be one of our best marketing channels yet. We have gained 10+ customers by adding our product to AlternativeTo.net to offer a better alternative to our competitors.
✅ Powered by marketing - Our tool allows you to create public feedback boards to capture feedback. Each board has a small "Powered by Featurebase" button that brings us many customers each month.
✅ Referrals - Build a great product. Many of our customers love using our tool and have suggested it to others who are now happy customers as well.
✅ ProductHunt & Betalist - Although it's becoming harder by day to stand out from all the products on these platforms, they still work. Keep in mind that you definitely need an audience that can help you rank higher.
✅ Alternative pages - We have made separate landing pages comparing our product to our competitors - these pages already get some free SEO traffic that converts.
Here's what hasn't worked:
❌ Cold emailing - Maybe we just suck at it, but we have tried it over 5 times now in different ways and have not gotten any results with it.
❌ Niching down - We have tried to niche down and market our tool for smaller industries, but that has not worked for many specific reasons.
❌ Blogging & Twitter - We struggle to stay consistent with posting content and hate competing for popular keywords with blog posts that basically say the same thing.
❌ Google ads - We have experimented with Google Ads, but the results haven't been great. We are currently working on improving this.
10+ other things...
We're starting to grow faster and faster organically, but I still feel like we haven't found a marketing channel that would consistently bring us tons of new customers.
What's next?
We are on track to be hitting our end-of-year goal of $1000 MRR.
Every day it's getting clearer to me that you are playing the game in hardcore mode if you are not building an audience of your target market.
Now we're going to double down on content marketing and focus on building an audience of our target market.
EDIT: Wow, this really blew up. If you want to follow our journey to 10k MRR, you can drop me a follow at https://twitter.com/bruno_hiis to get useful ideas that you can implement for your startup 🙂
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You buried the lead. I couldn't figure out what your product was for while.
You should always include something like 'Featurebase - Let users vote on features' to content marketing.
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You mentioned cold emails did not work. Can you share some info like:
how many emails did you sent?
Did you sent follow emails?
What tool did you use for cold emailing?
Have you tried cold DMs on social media? -
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Wow, congrats!
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Thanks, Dylan! 😊
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How about using the same alternativeto approach on ads....for example, when someone google's UserVoice word your ad like this "Alternative to UserVoice"
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that's great, congrats.
never heard of alternativeto will try it soon.-
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Thanks a lot!
Yea, I 100% recommend listing your product there.
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Great landing page by the way. May I ask if you designed it on your own or used a template?
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Hi, great progress and feedback. I'm interested in how you implemented "Powered By" marketing.
I run https://powe.red URL shortener and one use case is to provide marketing intelligence for example https://powe.red/byFeaturebase. This link works and forwards to your homepage and if you append a plus (+) sign to the end of the URL you can get an idea of what type of analytics are available e.g. https://powe.red/byFeaturebase+ give it a try.
Good luck, seems like you're about to breakthrough :-)
Mark
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Thanks for sharing what worked and didn't @BrunoHiis. It's very informative.
Had never heard of AlternativeTo before, and now I've just created an account to add an entry for our UX tool EnVsion.
Could you elaborate more on why niching down didn't work for you guys? I'm asking because it's often recommended for (Indie) founders to niche down their product.
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wow! congratulations
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Wow, this is a great result. Congratulations! You did great. Highly competitive niches are a real challenge, but at the same time they bring the best results. In particular, I like to see the growth of SlotoGate https://slotogate.com/. It's great to see how young projects are gaining popularity
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@BrunoHiis your churn rate is ok and you're doing very good work keep it up.
You can check out churnfree.com, a very effective tool for reducing the churn rate. now in the last 30 day, this tool has saved 24% of customers which is very surprising for us I will highly recommend you once check it.
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Hey Bruno,
Great job you've done so far!
How long did It take you to get the first 10 paying customers?
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Thanks for sharing! We are trying to do the same at the moment.
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Congratulations on achieving a milestone. What tech stack did you use? UI looks great.
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Interesting story! Adding Featurbase to my saas database: http://growproduct.net/
I was planning to send out a list of review collection tools to subscribers and this would be a great addition. -
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I'm super excited to watch you guys test out different marketing methods.
I'm in the same boat and have around $400 MRR right now - I've found that $5/day twitter ads worked well and same with $5/day facebook adsFacebook gives much more reach and page views
Twitter seems to convert better and is actually cheaper cost per lead.Facebook I went broad and let algorithm do its' thing
Twitter I went niche into a communityMaybe give those a try to bump some top of funnel traffic in especially if word of mouth has been good
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Hey Bruno, great succinct post!
I saw you mention:
At the beginning of 2022, we launched V2 of Featurebase with a 10x better UI/UX, tons of new features, etc... and after that, we really started to grow.
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What made you return to the project after not touching it for a while?
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How'd you initially get the word out to get your first users?
I'm very interested in hearing how you went from 0 to 1!
Thanks!
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Thanks for the great tips. Didn't realise Alternate.To kind of sites had so much potential!
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Great suggestions for product ideas in a crowded market!
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Thank you for sharing, never would have thought of AlternativeTo before this, it sounds like a great tip in a competitive market! Next step - are there alternatives to alternativeto? :)
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Awesome work!! I was actually thinking of building this haha, decided not too as I thought it was a bit too competitive. Nice work on getting the initial traction, it's only upwards from here :)
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Thank you for sharing, this is super helpful and well laid out!
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Love the way you formatted this post. So digestible and insightful too. Thanks for the tips!
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Wow... this is great. Congratulations man.
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Thank you for the insights!
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Thanks for sharing an excellent post. It is extremely helpful and valuable.
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That is quite an achievement. I do agree with you on Google Ads' . Not all businesses get the expected results.
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Great for you! Amazingly useful post as well!
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When we print a book, how to choose paper for printing? The quality of books depends on the choice of paper. Different paper, the quality and cost to print a book is different. So different book printing services, the choice of paper is also different.
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Congrats Bruno! sorry if I've missed it but I wonder how long did it take for you to achieve these all?
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💪💪💪💪💪 congrats! Thanks for sharing and for being transparent about your best working channels. BTW, why did you remove your free plan?
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Thank you, Daniel!
We removed the free plan because many big companies with 20+ employees were using it and getting good value from it without paying anything. The reality is that over 95% of the people that use your free plan never plan to upgrade anyways.This basically sums up our view on this -> https://nomadlist.com/faq#free
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Hey @BrunoHiis, thanks for taking the time.
I am aligned with you on that view but I want to challenge your free plan comparison. I still surprise myself with how often I start using the free plan and move up the ladder to have more features or so. Here are my Business purchases from the last 2 weeks only:
- Typeform (started for free, upgraded on September 27th)
- BlackMagic by @tonydinh (started for free, upgraded on October 5th)
- Medium membership (started for free, upgraded yesterday)
It's a personal opinion but I just wanted to share my experience. I am planning on offering a free version on my SaaS but I will keep your thoughts in mind too!
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Congrats Bruno, and some really great reflections you've done.
I will take your idea of comparison pages, I need to try that.
Keep crushing it and then I'm sure you'll hit your target 🚀
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Thanks a lot! 😊
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✅ Alternative pages
- Can you share some examples of these pages please?
Cheers and congrats on the milestone!
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Thanks! 🙂
You can find all the alternative pages from our footer, here's an example:
https://www.featurebase.app/alternative/canny
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This is better than 99% of "build in public" posts because, rather than bragging about your MRR, you tell us what worked and what didn't.
Great job!
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Thanks a lot! 😊
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Thanks, I learnt a little bit more about marketing
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Thanks for sharing! It's helpful 🙏🏻
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Your list is spot on with what I’ve done for limey.io!
I’m working now on alternative posts and debating if that show be a blog posts or landing pages.
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I would recommend both. Make dedicated alternative pages like this: https://www.paddle.com/compare/stripe and then blog about "Top 10 X tools for Y", etc...
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Great insight! Especially in alternativeto. I use it all the time but somehow it never occurs to me that it’s a good marketing place.
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Well done and some great insights
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WOW, Bruno, I'm following your progress.
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Thanks for sharing.
Did you find paying for rankings on Alternativeto had some benefits over the free platform?
All the above points make a lot of sense, except one.
Niching down, that one was surprising.. I always felt your ICP should be as a target as possible and then slowly expand, but it seems to work for you.. What is your ideal customer profile?
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We have never paid for rankings on AlternativeTo. I'm not even sure if you can pay to rank higher on that platform.
Yep, I agree about that. Our ICP is product managers working in teams of 5-30 people.
So I guess I just worded my point incorrectly. We tried to niche down into crypto & gaming projects, hosting companies, etc... since many of them started using our tool organically. We did personal outreach to 30+ warm leads (with follow-ups) for all those industries, but the results weren't good.
Therefore, we have a niche but haven't yet found a hyperspecific one that would show us an immediate product market fit.
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" it’s hard to predict the traction channel that will work best. You can
make educated guesses, but until you start running tests, it’s difficult to tell
which channel is the best one for you right now " - Gabriel Weinberg - TractionI believe you followed, literally, what Gabriel advised. You cannot be sure of a channel's outcome unless you test it and, in the end, not all marketing channels have the same outcome for every type of business.
Congrats on cracking the first milestone :)
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congrats
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Congrats. Awesome!
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Awesome progress!
Thank you for sharing -
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Congrats! Big milestone. Keep it up.
You actually reminded me about alternativeto. Never added alternatives, so no traffic lol. My experience is similar to yours. Really need to figure out the content part.
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Congratulations!
The product looks great, did you use tailwind UI components?Also a bit off-topic question, I saw you launched your MVP on JANUARY 4, 2021, it's about a year and a half+ later today and you just reached 765$ MRR, Is it a side project or a full-time one? kudos on the dedication to one project for a such long period of time without revenue.
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Thank you! 🙂
Yep, we use TailwindCSS and have used a handful of their UI components in our app, but 99% of it is custom-made.
We launched a shitty version of our product at the beginning of 2021 in like 3 weeks. After that, we barely worked on the project for almost 11 months since the initial traction wasn't that great.
At the beginning of 2022, we launched V2 of Featurebase with a 10x better UI/UX, tons of new features, etc... and after that, we really started to grow.
It's currently still a side project that my co-founder and I work on when we have free time left over from school.
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Oh, I see, interesting story!
Working on such projects at a such young age is amazing!The product looks great, keep the good job going!💪🏻
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I saw your other post earlier when scrolling through groups, this is very encouraging. Congratulations, by the way, you're making awesome progress!
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Thanks for sharing @BrunoHiis.
Quick question, did you build a referral program or ask your customers to refer others? Or did that just happen organically? I'd love to learn more about your referral process.
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Nice! Is your Twitter DM off? Want to have a quick chat. Thanks.
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago
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Thanks a lot for supporting us Supun! 😊
Best of luck to Hyvor Talk as well.
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Yay, we can officially fund our monthly coffee costs with Featurebase now.
Why the f*ck did it take over a year to reach $500 MRR & how did we even do it?
We launched on ProductHunt/Betalist and started getting customers organically.
After that, we struggled to find the motivation to work on Featurebase for quite a while because we had problems finding new marketing channels that would consistently bring us new customers.
Most of the customers we got were people switching from our competitors to us.
So what are we going to do differently now so we can drive with Lambos next summer?
Our main problem was that we were too stubborn to build out marketing channels that would work long-term.
Think of it like this - are you either going to spend 3 months writing the best content possible for your target audience to see great results OR are just going to sit there, and complain about marketing being hard and everything taking too much time, as we did.
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That's fantastic - I did $6/MRR after 2 years so you're on to something! haha
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Patience <3
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Look on the bright side, your 1/4 of the way to ramen profitability.
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Maybe this will boost the motivation for better marketing!
Here's to Lambos 🥂🥂🥂-
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Haha, definitely. 🥂
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Love the interface! Did you use a UI kit or did you hand make all the styles? It looks great!
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So, I am a tech blogger, that gets fascinated by new emerging tech. Would you suggest I keep on writing about very small new tech or the same old programming languages that are very popular but everyone writes about them?
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Could you share links to some articles that you've written.
would be interested in having a look -
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I'm not an expert in content marketing by any means, but I would suggest writing about small new tech because I imagine that writing about the same old programming languages is already extremely saturated, and it is hard to rank for any keywords.
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Congratulations for such a meaningful milestone and thanks for sharing!
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Thanks a lot! 🙂
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Wow! Congrats on $500 MRR!
I’m curious — does “too stubborn to build out marketing channels that would work long-term” mean hat if you could do it again, you would’ve focused on SEO (for example) more instead of other channels?-
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Thanks a lot!
Yes, after looking into how our competitors grew their products, the general theme comes out to be SEO & content marketing.
It takes time, but when done correctly, it can bring amazing long-lasting results.We just started working on building content, and already seeing great results through our "Alternative to x company" pages.
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Bruno
Congratulations
I'd be interested in understanding your journey, perhaps by reading some blog posts that you've made or even doing an interview.The other thing i'm interested in understanding is, what do startups with a bit of traction need other than capital? so what resources do you find yourself needing at this particular time?
I think the whole notion of startups just purely needing only money is somewhat true but doesn't tell us the whole story of what else we founders need.
would you consider joining a private community of saas startups who already have traction?
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Our goal for 2021 was to gain 10 paying customers. Not only did we achieve that, but most users signed up for the annual/lifetime plan, meaning more money for us. In total we made $960 last year from Stripe payments. 💰
In the beginning of 2022, we started to put serious effort into marketing again. I am happy to report that we have made $560 in just the first FIVE days of the new year. That is more than half the revenue of 2021. Crazy, right?
Here are some of the things we did to get ourselves out there:
🐦Twitter account: https://twitter.com/FeaturebaseHQ/
#️⃣Started posting under the #buildinpublic on our personal twitter accounts [@]rohukas, [@]bruno_hiis
💻Google Ads with conversion tracking.
🌐Made our landing page 10x better, improved SEO and started creating blog posts.
⬜Making valuable posts on IndieHackers about our experiences with Featurebase
🚀Put ourselves on some launch pages such as BetaPage and BetaList (not live yet)
2022 is going to be a great year!
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Congrats on the results! First customers are the hardest to get.
How did you make the landing page 10x better? Did you rewrite it entirely?
We started looking for our first users at the beginning of the year. A mistake that we first made was making the free plan 30-days long. Although that may be appealing for the user, we have bills to pay, and the conversion rate with long trials is usually much worse. After reducing it to 14-days, it didn't take long for us to convert our first free trial user to a paying customer. What is most important - we have gotten a ton of positive feedback from the people who use our tool, they love it.
Our plan has been to stop wasting a lot of time on development for now. Currently, we are focusing on marketing the product and getting more customers. When we reach 10+ paying customers we will start heavily working on releasing new features again.
We are very excited about the future of Featurebase! We will continue working with our current users to keep improving the product. Will update you guys when we have reached the next goal - 10 paying customers 😊.
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This is awesome! Congratulations Bruno.
I like how you have well-defined conditions controlling when you're in sales or dev mode. I thinks that's a good strategy.
Can't wait to hear more when you reach 10 paying customers. :)
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Thank you, Aaron! :)
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Congratulations! That's an amazing feeling 🔥
Hope you reach the 10 really fast. Keep up the good work 🍻
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Thanks a lot, Nikola! 😊
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Congratulations for that milestone.
A couple of days ago we released the MVP for our new product called Featurebase.
Featurebase makes getting user feedback easier and lets your customers know what features you are currently working on.
As with any MVP, we needed to get some first users/beta testers.
The first thing we did was to make posts on channels like Reddit, IndieHacker and even some Discord communities.
The initial traffic was great, as we got over 400 page views in around 24 hours, however, not many people seemed to actually want to use the product or sign up. We learned that having big analytics numbers from doesn't always mean that people will start signing up/using the product. Especially if the target audience isn't the correct one.
This made us reconsider our initial marketing tactics. After a bit of thinking, we decided to do cold email outreach. We hand-picked some companies that we thought could profit from our product and put them in an excel sheet. We then created personalized emails for each company and sent them out.
The results could be seen immediately. In less than an hour of sending the emails, we had already received multiple signups. What's even better is that the first users had the intention of actually using our product. They created their organizations, added submissions, and even gave us feedback on a couple of things that could be improved.
I think the big takeaway from this is that having quality leads is really really important. You could drive all the traffic to your site that you possibly can, but if the quality of that traffic is subpar, you will not see good results.
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Looks very nice! You are 2 already, if not I would have asked to join the team.
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Hi, great progress and feedback. I'm interested in how you implemented the "Powered By" marketing trick.
I run https://powe.red URL shortener and one use case is to provide marketing intelligence for example https://powe.red/byFeaturebase. The link works and forwards to your homepage if you append a plus (+) sign to the end of the URL you can get an idea of what type of analytics are available e.g. https://powe.red/byFeaturebase+ give it a try.
Does your implementation of "Powered By" provide this type of analytics? I appreciate any feedback you can share.
Mark
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Thanks for the feedback and apologies, I thought I was commenting on your most recent post.
or
https://powe.red/byFeaturebase
I've reposted my comment there as I think this will benefit us both.
Good luck, seems like you're about to breakthrough :-)
Mark
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7 Comments
Was a blast working on Featurebase this year! 4K next year? 📈
@BrunoHiis It has been a while since an update. How are you tracking a year and bit on?
Hey! Just published an update 🙂: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/turning-a-struggling-side-project-into-a-2-500-mrr-success-098be617b1
Agree with the product being the major factor of success. Marketing can only do so much, then it still falls back down to how good is your product. Congrats on your milestone and cheers to more growth!
That's amazing, Bruno, congratulations on the goal! Wishing you all the best!
Thanks a lot, Phillip! 😊
Glad to join the team and be part of the madness that's coming next year! ✌️