Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

http://blog.bufferapp.com/post/3328167762/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it

by joelg87 • 15 years ago

66 22 15 years ago

blog.bufferapp.com

pestaa3• 15 years ago

Amazing to see how the idea itself revealed the way it could be validated - through Twitter of course.

Nicely done. Informative post.

smiler2• 15 years ago

This is great - my only worry is that this is something that Twitter could easily replicate and destroy the revenue

pestaa3• 15 years ago

Twitter has no interest in complicating their interface and delaying the content.

smiler2• 15 years ago

In my opinion, the 'new' twitter is more complicated than old.

keeptrying3• 15 years ago

Great story. How did you handle your initial billing? Did you integrate paypal?

joelg875• 15 years ago

Thanks. Yep, just a simple Paypal setup. One of the interesting decisions was not to implement Paypal IPN (automatic upgrading when the payment comes through). My reasoning was that it could have been 4 months before I had the first customer, so I didn't want to implement it until I had validated that the time spent on it was worth it. I could rather spend the time gaining that first customer. So it was a very simple initial integration.

keeptrying3• 15 years ago

Cool. So you just added some html and javascript which took the user to paypal? No api integration at all ? Smart!

ncavig• 15 years ago

Building a service that is dependent on another service is always a risk, but this is a very nice and simple app that a lot of the "social media" sides of companies could utilize. It's a great idea to make some extra revenue and I think has a nice market. Well done.

chopsueyar• 15 years ago

Good writeup. I really enjoyed your story, particularly your discipline to focus on customer acquisition and resist the temptation to code in a bunch of new features once you got some paying customers.

joelg875• 15 years ago

Thanks. It's definitely something I still have to keep reminding myself of.

hsuresh2• 15 years ago

Great story. How many users sign up when you had the website put up? Also, were the users still helpful when they realized you don't have the app yet?

joelg875• 15 years ago

Thanks. In around 4-5 weeks of having the landing page and pricing page up without the product existing, I got a total of 120 emails. I sent an email when they gave me theirs explaining a little more about the product and how I needed their help to shape it into something truly useful. They were delighted to be shaping a new product, and were certainly not negative about it not existing yet. One mistake I made was telling people in that email that it would be live in a week :) In the future I won't be telling people time scales!

hsuresh2• 15 years ago

Thanks for sharing your story. Congrats

cfontes2• 15 years ago

Great post, thanks for sharing.

I Am here in Brazil, crazy trying yo start something just the way you did, Twitter here is very hot (2nd place in the world in tweets after USA)I think you should try to market it here a bit, people here doens't pay a lot for online services but with more than 81,3M internet users you should hit some.

If you need help, fell free to ask.

joelg875• 15 years ago

Thanks :)

That's really great to hear. We want to expand as quickly as we can globally since we think many people will find Buffer very useful, so any help would be hugely appreciated.

cfontes2• 15 years ago

http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/cfontes.html in case you need info about brazil.

fourhourstartup• 15 years ago

Nice work! I love this quote, "It was a tiny idea. I wanted to take the scheduling feature of many Twitter clients and apps and make that single feature awesome. I believed that single feature was worthy of it’s own application."

matei• 15 years ago

nice job. I'm surprised however that people are willing to pay for this type of service. Makes you wonder if people would be willing to pay in order to use twitter

bootload• 15 years ago

"... nice job. I'm surprised however that people are willing to pay for this type of service. ..."

It appears to be a toy product but if you consider:

* As a twitter subscriber, reading multiple posts are a pain to read. This is a real problem for users and their subscribers.

* Twitter has a lot of potential users/businesses looking for ways to automate etiquette.

* Twitter has a lot of users

The real problem for any developer here if I get a product with a lot of users, will Twitter just roll out the same product or will they pay enough?

Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

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