Show HN: Attract more customers by highlighting why people trust you
shoutout.so
shoutout.so
I'm Sharath co-founder at Shoutout. This is my first posting a product on HN so I'm pretty stoked at the same time heavily nervous about it!
Five months ago, I had this idea of gathering all the shoutouts I get on Twitter under one place, and I thought it would be cool to launch an LP and validate it with everyone. As a no-code maker, I shipped the LP in less than 24hrs, got 120+ signups, and saw people saying we need this! I then shipped a no-code MVP, tested it with few close friends who asked for more features. The signs were so clear that I went ahead and put a bat-signal on Twitter searching for a co-founder. Curtis Cummings from nowhere approached me, and we clicked in our first meeting and started building a fully coded product.
We launched our private beta 2 months ago and got the opportunity to onboard some iconic creators like Jack Butcher, Julian Shapiro, Lenny Rachitsky, and startups like On Deck and Knowable. We've iterated on our early believers' feedback and made a product that delivers value to creators and startups!
A month ago, we launched Shoutout to the public and on Product Hunt and secured #3 product of the day. We now have 36 paying customers and got Product Maker Grant Recipient award.
Today, I'm pumped to announce Shoutout to the Hacker News community! We truly believe creators and startups should leverage the social proof they are getting on Twitter, and our mission is to make it easy for everyone!
Shoutout lets you tap into your existing social proof and turn it into a beautiful "Wall of Love"
How does it work?
Curate and Organize: With an infinite feed that is constantly updating every second, tracking social media shoutouts* is an invaluable task! Shoutout removes the tediousness and spotlights all the high-signal tweets in one place.
Customize and Design: We believe in personalization and value the importance of custom branding. Shoutout quickly turns the bunch of tweets into a beautiful wall within minutes. Rearrange these shoutouts according to your need and add custom colors that represent your brand.
Showcase and Embed: Share your public wall or embed it directly on your site without any coding. Our embeds are blazing fast, so they won't slow down your site. As you update your wall, your embed will show all of your latest shoutouts, making the experience frictionless.
What's next: We are not stopping here, and this is just the beginning of our mission to help creators and startups to leverage the social capital they gain on Twitter! We are excited to launch many more features based on your feedback and look forward to delivering more value to you constantly!
If you have any feedback, feel free to comment or say hello to us on Twitter @shoutoutso_!
For the landing page, I used carrd.co, mailerlite for wait-list signups. For MVP I used bubble.io, Twitter API.
One question I have is how you drove traffic to your LP initially?
If you are buying drugs and the dealer says "hey, by the way, I just want you to know I'm totally not a cop"... that is a huge red flag. I'm equally wary of random websites that feel like they need to prove trust to me.
Definitely a nice page to have on your site, I guess the fact that it's lasted this long (well after I left the company) means it must still be showing value. Quite simple on the backend, it just pulls in tweets that the official Buffer account as fav'd on an hourly basis.
Our embeds loads ridiculously fast!
Some initial feedback/suggestions:
1) Raise pricing, especially on the $15 plan.
2) The $50 plan looks like something agencies will pick up for their clients. So get ahead of that and charge more for that. Limit to N walls per domain or something. Then add agency plans that scale by # of domains where walls are posted. Agency plans probably should start at $99 (maybe for 3 domains) and go up.
3) Auto curation could be cool. Run tweets through some kind of sentiment analysis and email/Slack/SMS candidates to your customers. Let them Y/N each. That way they don't have to log into the app to get results.
Good luck!
I’d also reconsider the ability to publish a wall from the Free plan — you can get a hell of a lot of value out of this product with a single wall, and pay nothing in return.
Two alternate approaches could be:
1) Give away less value. Generate the wall for a proof of concept, but keep it in draft until payment hits.
2) Get something in return. Badge the free wall with a Shoutout link/logo/“what’s this?” that can be removed by paying.
OP should consider making a plugin for Shopify/Wix, etc. That would be more their target market anyway.
If OP is targeting solo operators (Effectively B2C), then I agree that the price seems exorbitant.
I see a lot of opportunity for this further upmarket though. I saw someone mention that this could be useful for agencies, and they do seem like an ideal customer. Funded startups seem like another ideal customer with more money in the bank.
> I wouldn't pay more than $5/mo (or a $29 one time fee for something self-hosted)
And that's awesome for you, and the millions/billions of people like you. Likewise, I think Figma is expensive (but I'm not a designer!).
But the Internet is big! A new company doesn't need that many customers to do well. It's smart to choose customers who value more heavily the problem you're solving. That's why there's Shopify $360/year in perpetuity and Magento for $20k+ per year in perpetuity and self-hosted WooCommerce for no licensing fee. And they are all able to be successful. Customers that value your problem are also the type who will suggest valuable brand extensions in the future.
I got the impression that this product is marketed toward businesses. If that's the case, keep in mind that $15/mo or $25/mo or $45/mo are all psychologically in the same bucket as expenses go, for most businesses. Even most solo operators aren't price sensitive to $10/mo for a business tool they have decided they want. Choosing $15 instead of $45 could literally mean you're leaving 2/3 of the value on the table. That's value that could have gone into e.g. acquiring customers, which typically has some monetary cost. (Customer Acquisition Cost & Churn are two very real costs that people tend to ignore when modeling these businesses. $15/mo definitely covers the servers, but does it cover Churn?).
The point is to pick your niche and pricing and do it deliberately.
(Also, look at some pricing psychology as I think $15 is probably not optimal from that perspective either.)
ps -- I could write another few pages about how you get a better class of customers (more engaged, better feedback, more tolerant of bugs in a new app, lower churn, etc.) at higher price points, but that's another topic.
If so, I don't understand why one would pay $15/month for this when you can just embed tweets in any html page or CMS for free.
1. Save time - We find the best shoutouts for you so you don't have to search them in bookmarks and find them. 2. Design beautiful walls - We are offering design layouts(grid view, carousel view) with custom settings like changing colors, dark mode etc. 3. Zero maintenance - Once you setup an embed on your website you are done. All you need to do is add shoutouts to your wall and the embed automatically reloads with news shoutouts. 4. Ultra-fast embeds - Our embeds load ridiculously faster than Twitter embeds. 5. We are not just limiting ourselves to Twitter but will expand it other platforms. So we are here to monopolize the social proof niche.
This strikes me as something that took longer to build as a service, than it would take an individual to build for their own app.
Social proof is given in the first place by people to people whose work or service made a positive impression on them.
We focus to showcase that and leave the rest.
You can embed any tweet anywhere you feel like (and actually the embed won't fully disappear when the tweet is deleted, but I digress).
Would love to see a wall of love for Circles for Zoom. Btw big fan of what you are building!
We have build an algorithm that curates the high-signal mentions and we suggest them to you.
We have a mechanism in place to avoid the low-niosy tweets.
The tweets we suggest are high-signal and we believe it will help your product, newsletter or whatever you are selling.
So the company is able to "lie" to potential customers.
How companies manipulate Glassdoor is an interesting case study
I doubt there is more money in that direction though
If you filter for positive shoutouts only, the result becomes strongly biased by definition :).
E.g. on Amazon I ended up only ever reading 3 star reviews. Not for their positivity or negativity, but because they often point out some shortcomming of the product that might or might not effect me. Say some audio hardware not supporting some MIDI feature. I might not care about it at all, or it is a dealbreaker. I have made more pruchase decision based on those reviews than positive ones. For the latter what usually lacks is knowledge about the context, the use case they have.
Tweet compilations actually decrease trust for me if they are on a website. Twitter sucks overall and bringing obviously filtered tweets is a turnoff.
As a consumer in both business and general, I want third parties who give unbiased reviews, covering multiple vendors / products which solve my problem. This is why genuine influencer marketing is doing well. I actually spend a fair amount of time on youtube looking at reviews and finding trustworthy sources there. They need to point out flaws and put some products down do gain that trust
How does this filter even assure that these are real accounts and not bots or a Serbian click farm selling positive impressions?
Step 2, use tweets for marketing
Since they're Tweets it's also theoretically organic, which is even better.
It's an easier way to source all of those testimonials that people have on their website and really cool because it shows that people "like me" value the product. If they do their job right, you could have a testimonial that is more valueable than anything you could have sourced yourself because you are surfacing that diamond in the rough. Especially if you a big brand with thousands, or millions, of people tweeting at you.
Cool prooduct, nice work guys.
What you said about social proof is absolutely true! It is the relevancy that helps people make a decision and through credibility it is even easier.
In fact, the exact opposite concept of this could exist, scrape Twitter for consumers to show them who they shouldn't do business with, and it would still be social proof.
Again, in this context, a company will always seek out positive social proof.
Actually my technical co-founder is better to answer this question.
E.g. Picking a $15 USD plan in the UK would bill me for £10.80, and fluctuate each month.
How's that for meta social proof?
Regarding the pricing and product: I do understand that some agencies may be willing to pay a few bucks to use your product. But over the long term, I'd expect that someone creates an open source gatsby plugin that outperforms your product.
Or Am I missing something?
Yes, daily/weekly reminders is a feature we already planned. Stay tuned, for it to become live.