30 days after launching my side project | Hacker News Reader

30 days after launching my side project

16 pointssecondmod12 comments

Hi, I launched a side project called Pinwoot (https://pinwoot.com) exactly 30 days ago on hackernews and reddit. Pinwoot is a simple user discovery tool for Pinterest users to grow their pinterest following organically but quickly and find like minded pinterest users.

After 30 days of launch, I managed to get 7000+ active users, about 100 paying users and $6129 in revenues.

My learnings : 1. Build your first main feature really well 2. Dont launch with 100s of features, keep the product simple 3. Make sure to have some influencers on your board as users from day one and make them super happy 4. Use tweet button very smartly - this is make or break up for your side project 5. Dont hurry up into making money, let your users ask you for more feature and then roll out paid features.

I invite your feedback and suggestions on how to further increase my user base. People are loving the product (you may search for pinwoot on twitter) but somehow, none of the good blogs are covering it. Any contacts or suggestions, most welcome.

My name is Alexander and can be reached at alexander@pinwoot.com

"After 30 days of launch, I managed to get 7000+ active users, about 100 paying users and $6129 in revenues"

Wow! That's brilliant! How did you manage to convert 100 users to pay >$60 in less than 30 days? Can you tell me more about it?

Thanks. As I mentioned in the post, I made sure that everyone sees the benefit of this product within 30-60 minutes on the platform (algorithm pushes new users on top of list to get them few followers quickly)

I waited for users to start asking for some extra features or more seeds/credit points (people get 15 seeds to start with). I also clearly mentioned that we have two things in pipeline 1.) Another useful free feature 2.) Pro Accounts as low as $15(will be available for only first 100)

So, by first week, people had tested the fruits of being on pinwoot, so they started queuing up for pro accounts.

In 2nd week, I allowed people to start buying seeds for as low as $5 and maximum $29. So, my users are buying those seeds on regular basis for last 2.5 weeks. I haven't launched pro accounts yet - once those are launched, I may see monthly rev at around $15K.

In nutshell, make that one feature super awesome but add a limit to it such that people get addicted to it and in want for more, they pay you.

Clickable: https://pinwoot.com

Congratulations - looks slick. I don't have a pintrest account so I can't really try it out or give you meaningful feedback, but good luck going forward.

I really love this idea and think I can/would like to help out.

Can we chat on Skype? My username: sdnerzz

"Use tweet button very smartly" -- elaborate ?

We have to engage/activate our existing users to get more users. For that twitter is the best mode.

On signup, we request users to tweet (just a request) - about 10% new users to do this tweet. The language of this tweet was selected after number of (sort of) A/B testing with different texts.

In the dashboard, when ever a user gets more than 10 new followers, we start showing a message that provokes them to share a message like "Woot! I got X #Pinterest followers from Pinwoot for free. If you are on Pinterest, you must try it". This tweet is resulting in 15% of new signups daily.

With the early traction you are getting are you considering dropping the side from the project and go at it full time.

My answer would be No for now because yes, traction is great but as a programmer(who loves hacking to find solutions to different pains/demands in market), my challenges will go lower with time because there are very few other features that we can build for this app, hence I don't see it motivating enough to focus all my attention on this. I may hire someone full time to take care of daily work at Pinwoot to give myself ample time to keep trying better ideas that I can see myself working on for next few years atleast.

"who loves hacking to find solutions to different pains/demands in market" I like your enthusiasm and your mindset.Would you be interested in a little challenge?I would like to have a talk with you.I don't see your email but if you are interested send me a contact id on my mail address.Thank you.

Great idea prompting the user to tweet after 10 follows. Can I ask why you didn't do the same with Facebook posts? Is your target market more likely to be on Twitter?

We tried with both Tweet it or Share on Facebook. 83% people clicked on tweet it only button. 12% clicked on both and rest 5% on Share on FB only. All the new users that we got from this "Got_Followers" social sharing where from twitter only. Yes, zero converted from Facebook posts. Hence, we decided to stick with twitter only.

Another test we ran on our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/pinwoot) was to have a tab called "Try Now" which was basically connected to our Facebook connect app - that was great, many many conversions. So, we are still using it.

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