My write up of results and steps taken in the past month can be found below.
http://surfertas.github.io/korabo/2020/02/14/korabo-users.html
2. If you truly believe your idea is worth it, and have some cash set aside, I highly recommend you hire someone to build a decent website. I actually went with https://draftss.com/ - if you truly know what you want, you should have a logo + website ready within one month or so. I know it sounds like a lot of time, but in the long run, it'll feel like nothing.
3. Either do marketing yourself, or hire someone - to truly see if there's interest, you should spend at least $500-1000 / month, and see what that gets you (feedback, subscriptions, etc). Then decide how to continue.
4. A bit more detail on marketing - be sure you do it correctly, if you decide to do it yourself. It took me a looong time to realize I was wasting money big time, until I hired a marketing person.
Good luck!
I wasn't aware of the service draftss but it seems like I can outsource the branding, which I really need help with.
With regards to marketing, it really may be best to out source once I get the landing page in order per @photon_off comments.
Trying to do everything by oneself might not be the best course of action...
Thanks a lot for the input.
For sure, doing everything yourself is not the way to go -- there's simply too much to do :)
Marketing is really, really hard. Even user research is an entire profession. You've done well to attract your first signups, but looking to grow organically from zero may let you down. If you can trial this with a real person then you have a user and case study to write about. You can start thinking, talking and designing for users rather than analysis.
The https://www.korabo.io homepage looks like a holding page rather than a signup page for a live product. I think a lot of this is because the background is too stock-image-y. It isn't fantastic that it leads to a signup form with no context, but one improvement at a time.
For a new product it probably isn't worth building a flashy homepage. But you need to have some sort of intro to draw people into the site and state that it's a functioning product. Taking https://basecamp.com as an example, the top two paragraphs say a lot in very readable language. Compare Flesch Reading Ease using https://datayze.com/readability-analyzer and try to come up with a pitch that does better than your blog post :)
The 2 examples you provided are great...thanks a lot. Think its going to take some time flesh things out!
The list you posted of what actions you took is not that - it is you sharing a couple posts on sites that are not great for conversions. HN and reddit are good for driving traffic, but that is not the same thing. I have no idea if your product has a market or not, but you'll only find that answer if you start actually looking for the market.
I'll be frank here. It's like a date. If you don't think it's going well, it probably isn't. It might be doing okay, but it's probably better to move on.
If people aren't lining up to give you their money, it's likely not working. If it is working, your focus would be scaling, dealing with complaints, getting frustrated yet excited that there's too much to do.
That doesn't necessarily mean the product is wrong. It could mean you have the wrong market, wrong marketing channel, wrong pricing model (imagine if Facebook tried to charge membership or Netflix tried to monetize from microtransactions), wrong pitch.
One thing that always works for me is asking, who is the best competitor? And trying to build a product that is 10x better.
How do people do split proceeds now? They write out the math on a piece of paper, transfer to friends. Cash or click click bank account details. Is your product 10x better? Probably not. It's not too hard to do as it is, and it's more effort to sign up.
What about someone who does this a lot? Course seller, or freelance teachers for a studio. Well, they probably have done it in a contract, where they collect a sum and then pay it out. It's a burden, but is it a burden worth paying 6% + the cost of figuring out a new system?
Your fee system could be off too - I strongly dislike pushing fees to customers, because it feels like a dodgy 'hidden cost' thing. The reason people offer "free" shipping (i.e. write costs into the price) is because this puts off customers.
Alright, so who would actually have this issue so badly that they would be happy to pay 6% to get it off their hands?
A large scale company probably has integrated it into payroll, and at some point it's cheaper to just hire someone to split the bill. So you'll want something medium sized, maybe hectic and complex. Event management perhaps? Or training. If so, you'll actually want to be approaching those target clients directly and asking them. Asking your friends and family, or posting on HN will likely just give you fake data - your effective customer base could be 0, but is being floated up by supportive people.
I would be ecstatic with 1000 users, and would definitely give me motivation to continue to build. Out of curiosity what was the state of the 1000 user 1st month vs. 200 user 1st month? Were they both pretty much complete apps? Or still in a MVPish state?
I was torn between spending more time developing before releasing or get some sort of validation to avoid the “building a solution for no ones problem”, and really was getting drained spending hours on developing. Maybe a bit of burnout being a solo dev working on this. I wanted to be reinvigorated by some level of validation.
Generally feels like the bar for getting any validation/feedback is higher, as the general consumer wants a shiny, not buggy, fully functioning app before even dipping their toe in.
Agreed its not 10x better for most people, but do think there is a convenience factor and some price that someone might be willing to pay for that maybe not 6%, but the 6% covers stripe charges (processing & payouts to connected accounts)
With regards to the pushing fee to customers, my logic was that a possible user would be pushed off by the 6% charge, and not even try out the application (albeit everything else about the app is pushing them away anyway!)
Thanks again.
The app with 200 users is http://random-character-generator.com
So generally, I disagree that customers want something fully functional. But fintech is a big exception, because people want something solid before trusting it their money to it. We made up for our glitches by handling payment in person (Automated WhatsApp messages and bank account transfers, rather than shopping carts).
I still think that validation is #1 priority, because you'll probably have to build a dozen prototypes before you get to something people want. Our app with 1k users was ironically a low risk prototype. We were making a recipe app, but decided to test user behaviour by making a low carb variation first. Turned out that there's a lot more demand for low carb recipes than any recipes.
I can give you my initial first impressions of your landing page:
1) I am utterly confused as to what this is or how it works. Something about splitting proceeds. I will scroll, surely it will be explained.
2) I scrolled past the gigantic top fold and found "Find members, set percentage share, and get paid Let Korabo handle the splitting of proceeds and delivering actionable analytics to you". What are members, and how does Korabo help me find them? Splitting proceeds of what? Analytics?
I managed to find the tiny menu in the upper right, and now I better understand what this app is for, and actually I think it could be useful to some groups of people. On further thought, is anybody willing to pay somebody else to split the proceeds? It seems easier for some group of people to simply do this manually, as organizations have been doing since the dawn of time.
Anyway here's my feedback:
- Your landing page is about 1/50th as good as it could be. It's not bad, but to actually get people to trust you enough to do work (eg: sign up), you need to get them excited.
- Having somebody sign up requires a very high degree of interest. You're lucky if somebody cares enough to scroll past the fold, or even click on a link for more info. Signing up is an order of magnitude more difficult. So you're going to have to put a lot of work into showcasing the right things in the right places.
- Show the key points above the fold -- all the stuff on your "how it works" and "what it costs" pages should just be on the front page, and clicking should scroll down.
- A picture is worth 1000 words, so feature the product, and not a stock photo. If you could show one killer screenshot that immediately shows me what the app does and makes it clear that it's useful for my use case, then you'll see 10x improvement in conversion rate from what you have now.
- Improve your tagline. "Sell together" is fine, but I cannot fathom how an app would help me do that -- so maybe "Sell together, split the proceeds".
- To improve trust factor -- Get a logo and favicon.
- If you could show a demo of the app without forcing me to sign in, I'll be more likely to actually sign in.
Suggestions for finding users:
- Firstly, do the things above. You only get one chance at a first impression, and as it stands I would not trust your app with doing checkout processing for me.
- For yourself, clearly define your target audience. It seems to be small groups of people bootstrapping some service or products. You should have a better idea of this than me, but for example say it's "yoga studios". Reach out to management in yoga studios and ask for feedback. Go to a relevant subreddit and find users that work at yoga studios and ask for feedback.
- Asking for feedback, and parsing feedback is a whole game, too. Realize that you are incredibly biased in your knowledge of your problem domain and your apps features. Assume everybody you show this to knows nothing, even if it's something they'd be interested in. So if you want general landing page feedback, you'd ask: "Is it clear what this does?" -- if you want feedback from prospective customers you'd ask: "Do you think this could help you? Why/Why not?" or "What would prevent you from using this?"
Good luck.
Yes, I have been struggling in trying to communicate the functionality of the application in a few words & images. This resulted in including the “tiny” menu (LOL!), which is becoming more clear that it's probably not the correct medium for delivery.
All the ideas you mentioned with respect to the landing page, I am going to take into account for sure. They all make sense. One reason, I was trying to keep it as simple as possible was that I just don't have the skills to design and integrate a well-flowing landing page. The current landing page is only using React components and MaterialUI for styling which probably is very apparent to the professional eye. I think with more work I can get it into the right form, but was trying to balance timing of spending money for professional work and user acquisition. In other words, I wanted to see that the app was getting some sign ups before actually spending cash, but seems like I am dealing with a chicken and egg problem to a certain extent.
Your comment “as it stands I would not trust your app with doing checkout processing for me.” really resonates. Will put more work in for sure.
Thanks again for the candid response.
I am genuinely curious though, who is this app for? For what group of people is splitting proceeds really so daunting of a task that they would prefer to pay a company to do it for them?
Seemed like a hassle to translate the % splits to actual amounts, figure out/confirm wiring details, and then decide when to wire...I would also think the other instructors were wondering when their share was going to hit.
So I stood there thinking, what if she could pre-set percentage share, and have software split the proceeds on a per payment basis so she doesn't have to worry about getting the split amounts right and the disbursement of proceeds. Her partners wouldn't have to wait either.
Felt like the software solution would be killing many birds with one stone.
A light bulb went off in my head, as I registered a problem, and as any sane individual would nose-dived into building an app!
My wife isn't using it at the moment as her yoga studio/business is in Japan, and Stripe doesn't allow for a platform to be in a different country then its connected accounts and I chose the US to release.
The users aren't being charged to use the application. The app will absorb the costs and lump it into a fee that is charged to the final consumer.
That all said, maybe this doesn't generalize outside this particular example and the problem is too specific to her situation...
In summary, the app is for any group that is receiving proceeds from the sale of a service or product, that wants to avoid the hassles of splitting proceeds after the fact.
> In summary, the app is for any group that is receiving proceeds from the sale of a service or product, that wants to avoid the hassles of splitting proceeds after the fact.
Be careful here. The app is for a narrower group than that. As mentioned above, it's probably only relevant if the group has multiple offerings where the splits are different... otherwise you're just a middleman that does, um, division.
> The users aren't being charged to use the application.
While this is technically true, the app adds a cost to the final consumer, which is the same as the business "charging" the user. I don't see this as a "feature". Basically, it's an additional cost to the business -- it should be up to the business to include a separate line item on the charge vs. just increasing their price to the consumer.
In other words, allow the business to choose "show additional fee" or not. Businesses probably prefer just increasing prices to showing the user an additional "fee".
I am going to take all this feedback and have a think.
Thanks again.