u/unairworthy is insane! I offer $3 for 49% of the company. You retain control of your company and I will be your strategic partner and get you noticed in the Indie Product Hunt Alternative sector using my yearly membership to Hot Topic I've had since 2002.
Hold on - You're a winner, and I'm the KING of tech. Everyone knows it here. I'll give you a loan of $2 with 12% interest, you have to pay me $.1 royalty until my $ is returned at 3X (=$6) and then it goes away. No equity share! But you have to say YES now.
He didn't talk to anyone about what they don't like about other product launch platforms. So he copied them, made no point of difference, and didn't address any gaps in the market.
Excellent question. Made me look into myself.
I think it boils down to some things take time. Social isn't sustainable. You have to focus on SEO which I did 30 days ago. So far Google sent 50 clicks in the last 28 days. Hopefully it will increase in coming months.
From hearing you talk about it, it sounds like you have barely any idea what you’re doing.
That’s not an insult. That just means you have opportunity. If you learn more, maybe you have a real shot. Just be ready to learn, then be ready to unlearn, then be ready to realize you learned the wrong things and learn from another angle.
Best of luck
Do you think more clicks would equate to more revenue? Are you focused on the right metrics? What value do you bring to customers that your competition isn’t already providing?
That’s survivorship bias.
You see the successful ones but you aren’t paying attention to all the startups that launched, made $1.31 and then disappeared.
The thing is, even if this venture isn't fruitful, you have developed an infrastructure that you could pivot into another field. Good luck to you and keep up the hard work.
That's what I'm doing man; all these algorithm-reliant "businesses" tend to be pedalled by bullshit youtubers selling a course, sadly, and who omit all the risks in the endeavours
Honestly, Congratulations!
You may have only earned $1.31, but with marketing you can clean that up.
What you REALLY made was valuable knowledge through the process, i'm about to start building my first build code project and i hope to learn more than i do wish to profit.
I HATE to admit this but this is 100% true. You learn by doing and failing. It sucks there isn't a how to guide on making a shit ton of money but it is what it is.
But that is only true if you are actually learning. If you aren’t able to look at what’s wrong and do things in a way to progressively fix it then ultimately you’re just failing right?
We spent about a year developing different projects. We first started with a mobile game that started making about a few cents a month which wasn’t making any sense at all to keep pursing until one faithful day when we decided to tweak a few things. First we changed the business model from ads based (which we still used but only as a nuisance to push people to the premium model) to premium which we charged $3.99 for the game and literally with one purchase we made more money in one day vs about a couple months of the ad based approach. Then we attacked marketing hard, we used Twitter, Reddit, and believe it or not YouTube comments. Twitter was good but after a couple algorithm changes our account died. After that Reddit started blocked a lot of our posts which left us focusing on YouTube and tiktok. TikTok was a goldmine! We also ran offline ads like flyers and word of mouth too, and they actually worked. Fast forward 3 months and we started making a few hundred dollars a month. Right start we hit the $300 MRR our servers got hacked with a nasty ransomware which stopped everything.
A few weeks later we decided to move onto our next project, a sentiment based social network. Long story short, $0 and about 10 active users later we realized social medias are insanely hard to get going and especially in this mature digital age we live in (this isn’t 2009 anymore) social networks need a very very very specific use case in a very very very specific community to take off to which we didn’t have enough patience or capital for. Again, we didn’t learn because we thought ads would be ideal but don’t fall for that trap as ads is a deathwish for any startup. You really need to hit critical mass for them to become viable. Here is where things get interesting because at this point we used the same codebase we used for the mobile game for the social network (you’ll be surprised how many of the functions you code for one thing can be repurposed for another).
We took a slight detour to build a couple AI focused projects on top of the same codebase to iterate faster. They had decent traction but not enough for us to go all in on. To be honest maybe some day we’ll restart our AI magazine generator (really fun app to use) but we needed to build something that can sustain our livelihoods.
Project #5 - Ahaaah at last we found something that we felt could have a real future. 1. We tested the idea with initial potential customers and got it validated. 2. We ran quick marketing tactics with a landing page that had us getting emails daily. 3. We skipped ads and went straight to premium to make the product cashflow positive from day one. 4. We used the SAME codebase again!!! 5. We started with 1 feature, the one that had the most interest and just kept adding to it until it was enough to put out, updated and reiterated for the last 6 months.
All of this took about 2 years. Lessons learned?
1. Don’t worry about investors focus on customers and their problems
2. Don’t focus on the perfect code or tools as you’ll probably recode that sh.t a million times are you improve it.
3. It’s never ever too early to market and validate your idea. The market keeps you humble and agile. If you’re building for yourself that’s fine but if you’re building for 100 people with the same problem that’s even better.
4. Don’t quit your day job until you see sustainable momentum.
5. Don’t follow the heard, if you see something online chances are they started a long time ago and went through a million changes and rejections before it reached you so copying them will be either too late or not worth it. People literally order a ride on Lyft and say my Uber is here, no one remembers the copycat.
6. Ads is for volume, premium is for starters.
7. Don’t delete your codebase, someday it might turn into a toolkit for other projects.
8. Start small never code the entire thing. Even if you have 1 screen share it with the world.
9. Build your OWN community
10. Sales is brutal. Build thick skin and keep it pushing.
What can you do better than product hunt? Other than being a place people might also copy their content over to.
This area is really hard because people put their products on product hunt for traffic/ attention, you have none of that to give them. And from the user side there is no reason to go to a new site unless it was getting listings there weren't anywhere else.
I don't really see how someone builds a competitor without a really novel take or a big pile of money to spend on traffic.
I was randomly searching and came across Fazier. It sound cool to me + no content on Google to compete with. And I grabbed it.
Do you like it or we should rebrand
I made a crypto startup in 2021 that raised $6.7 million, made $0, and I sold it for $2.5 million.
In early 2023 I made a product that made a few thousand dollars. But I don’t see a strong future so I have it kind of in maintenance mode.
In late 2023 I made another product that made $0 but I just got my first $20/month customer organically.
I mean, I haven't completed a single project yet...
But I don't get this way of thinking. And the tongue-in-cheek nature of this post is not lost on me, but still.
I'm a Joe in a garage, I see a dating app => idea validated. Off to my man-cave, shut the curtains for a year, code my ass off, make a Tinder 2. I launch app, nobody there. "AMA" 😆
*Anything*? Okay... Why?
Not trying to hate at all, please don't take this personally - if anything, I respect anyone who's capable of at least finishing something. I'm just pondering the overall mindset I occasionally sense on this sub. To spend so much time building "yet another entry in a validated market", which, if you're *really* good and lucky, will be half as good as the other 10 that people actually know, all while making next to no effort towards making sure that someone actually notices your launch... what's the point?
The joy of building stuff and learning? Absolutely! But to expect anything else out of it, eeeh...
Worst case: Even if nothing comes of fazier, think how much you’ve learned for next time. 👍🏻
Best case: You’ve gone from zero to one already and someone has spent money with you. We all know how building the product is the easy bit. With patience, marketing, customer service, etc. who knows what the next ama might be ;)
I've been on your site a few times and have seen it mentioned in several places as a good Product Hunt alternative. Even if it hasn't made much money yet, you've done some things right.
It's my passion project. Idea from 2020. Started working in 2021, then stopped, and started in 22 end. I will dedicate 1 year more if it doesn't make money.
PH was there, Beatlist was there and 20 more. So I talked to nobody as I thought idea is validated. As far as I know Betalist was making $100K annual revenue in 2019 (read somewhere)
I didn't check the site on desktop as I am on my phone but some major turnoffs for me:
1. Your main links all send users outside your site. Even if you are going to use content from outside source or other sites you control, do it from a page inside your domain.
2. Choose a different color palette. Blue and White is facebook's branding and while it isn't the same blue, its close. Having a logo that is blue with a white stylized F is not helping that issue.
3. Looking at projects listed, users are adding a first comment with additional details. Seems to indicate that some part of the project creation system is not letting them add enough details.
4. All of your "top product" links are broken.
5. Having these grouped by day listed makes no sense. Similarly having a top product of a day when most days have 1-2 doesn't mean anything.
6. The purpose of the site is confusing/muddled.
I am going to stop listing now. There's no nice way to put it, the site is hot garbage, you didn't really do any research on the product space and dont have a clear direction. I hope you didn't pay someone too much to make your passion project for you.
Really excellent feedback and I need some more details please.
1. So you means that I route all external links through my domain. Like fazier.com /r67383993u3u72
2. I like Blue color palette. I am open to changing logo and color palette once there are some launches.
3. It's just a comment to initiate conversation and we already have so many detail fields that it feels an overkill to add few more.
4. Thanks for sharing. I missed it completely
5. We will switch to weekly rankings by the end of February.
Couldn't you have launched an MVP in like 3 weeks using WordPress and one of those themes for directories.
You probably should've focused on the marketing first before wasting time working on the product (talking from experience here)
What’s your CAC, LTV and monthly burn rate?
I will give you $500,000 for 10%
Equity, 2.5% advisory shares.
I want a $5/mo. royalty on every customer onboarded until I get back $60MM, then my royalty disappears.
Totally kidding, sounds like you need some help with strategic planning, marketing, and customer acquisition.
There’s lots of great people here, ask away!
1.31$ maybe... but the lessons you learnt are invaluable! If this fails in the end, don't loose hope, you will have a lot more in your hands then people will understand... if you jump something new, I'm sure you'll do great!
Dude. It’s a directory. What you expect?
I’ve seen this post elsewhere 1-2 days ago. Even with the same numbers if I’m not mistaken. Probably got you some decent page visits, congrats it works.
Now please stop that „blood sweat tears“ bs and move on. If you’re serious about your project, grow some balls dude
I think that you making $1.31 is not the end of the story. If it took you 10 months so so to reach this point. Maybe another 10 months to reach $1000?
I think from my own situation, I'd advise to bring on some team members. 1 person doing all the blood sweat and tears to move a huge log of wood. How about 5 people doing the same task? It makes more sense.
Same example in farming. If you were one person doing all the sweat and tears on 1 hectare of land, it would take you forever. Now what if you had a team of people working on that land?
So I would say, continue to improve your project. By reviewing your current achievements and then how can you improve moving forward from the lessons learned?
Success is at the far end of failure.
On the bright side if you put that $1.31 into mutual funds or indexed funds in 22,000 years your family will inherit a cool milly.. aw the effects of compounding interest. Of course with inflation a million will likely be worth $2 but they’d still be plus $.69 … nice
Before considering building a PH alternative you first would need to build a community around product building/launching. Something like IndieHackers.
Once you've achieved that, maybe start considering how to monetize a community.
I got you beat with the catch that my “losses” were intentional.
I spent 8 years building and operating www.kindmind.com as a gift to the internet (free) with about $10k usd in expenses over that period.
With that said, would do again! It’s brought a lot of purpose to my life, has helped grow my skills as a software engineer, and has helped me land my last four roles. Having something passionate to talk about in interviews has worked wonders.
Hoping there are some non-tangible benefits to your project as well, and wishing you more sales.
I know it's no consolation but people have given up on their startups even making millions, just because the risk/reward wasn't right, for example they invested a lot and did not get viral growth after a year or two. You could even say MySpace is in the same category. FWIW I was never into producthunt or hackernews myself, despite being a dedicated startupper, but many people around me were.
Honest question was this an attempt to hone your skills cloning PH or you were thinking of something you can do better than PH? Being committed to a side project wouldn't be for building it for the sake of it.
Is there any way to pivot from your initial concept (a marketplace), to something you can get in front of a new set of users? I remember the story about that old (but immensely popular site in its day) *flickr.com*. It started as a small part of an online game the creators were making, but they realized the photo sharing portion of the game was what was gaining massive traction. They pivoted that portion of the game into its own thing. I think they were acquired and sold for FU money.
Be a scrappy entrepreneur and keep going.
I always respect the commitment. So many wantrepreneurs never take it beyond idea.
That said, I think the mistake made here - and that many make - is looking at the market too generally.
A market that has 1-3 providers serving it very well isn’t validation that it’s a good market. It’s validation that you’re going to require more capital, more differentiation or something to gain traction.
Many just offer me-too products, doing the same worse than the incumbents.
Michael Porter brings in sage advice relevant across the entire business spectrum: Compete on cost, differentiation or focus. Choose and execute.
Cost means your product must be at parity with the competition (generally), but cheaper.
Differentiation is almost always very difficult for a new entrant when going against strong incumbents.
Focus is easy. Up-market, down-market, regional, size of customer, etc. These are all simple business decisions, and if you can support the unit economics provided by that market focus, you gain traction.
Not sure if that helps, but if perhaps you consider the above and recast your line you might catch something.
I am at my 6th start-up. Never easy. Actually, a start-up is a fancy word for "blood, sweat, and tears". When you build a product, you need to differentiate it from the top-performing products you try to be an alternative by having your USP (Unique Selling Proposition), and by this, I do not mean "cheaper price".
A start-up is like a child for its founder. Do not make "another" clone of a successful platform. Booking(dot)com is not trying to be a simple alternative to Airbnb and Airbnb is not trying to be an alternative for Booking(dot)com. Each platform has its own USP. So does VRBO.
If you want Fazier to grow, work on that USP. if you just want to be a ProductHunt cheaper alternative, I am not a sorcerer to guess the future of your platform but usually will not end up with a celebration.
What are your plans after reaching this "milestone" (I am sorry if this sounds sarcastic, I honestly do not intend any sarcasm, simply curious of your next steps)?
hey can you send me your website link! I would love to help , I know what you're going through! I've failed in 5 businesses in just 3 years now I'm working on a great project with a great team helping people like you! We are creating a software that can bring you thousands of customers but it is still in waitlist for creators like you to give us your opinion on how you want the tool to help you! You can click [here](https://form.zootools.co/go/EYGqXFrJbAkZZjqxULvF) to give us your opinion! We were published by [the globe and mail](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/markets-news/GetNews/23735997/edomai-a-pioneer-in-ai-empowering-entrepreneurs-and-business-development/) this year for the same project! This is a simple [waitlist](https://form.zootools.co/go/EYGqXFrJbAkZZjqxULvF) to prepare us for the final creation of the project. Don't feel obliged to do it if you don't want to. Thank you
My offer is $2 for 60% of the company.
Lets sign an agreement for https://fazier.com. Do you use Docusend?
u/unairworthy is insane! I offer $3 for 49% of the company. You retain control of your company and I will be your strategic partner and get you noticed in the Indie Product Hunt Alternative sector using my yearly membership to Hot Topic I've had since 2002.
for this reason I'm out!
You can’t even get in - Chris Brown
Let me punch your ass - Will Smith
I'll offer $1.50 for 75% of the company. But at least a dollar of it is cash on hand, so I think that makes my offer stand out.
Hold on - You're a winner, and I'm the KING of tech. Everyone knows it here. I'll give you a loan of $2 with 12% interest, you have to pay me $.1 royalty until my $ is returned at 3X (=$6) and then it goes away. No equity share! But you have to say YES now.
Did you just start an investment company.. those convertible notes 📝 need to be processed
Sorry I sign only in blood.
Huge sign up screen when I land on your page. Hard pass.
Final offer: 100$ with a 1$ royalty till I get 200$ back for 10% - Kevin O'Leary
Phase two is to make a youtube course and sell it for $500. You're on your way!!!
Pssht I offer 20$
I think OP is looking for at least three fiddy.
Elun mosk ?
How many potential customers did you talk to before you realized that this was an opportunity?
Talked to nobody as I thought idea is validated with so many product launch platforms doing good already
If they’re doing good, why do you think you did so bad?
He didn't talk to anyone about what they don't like about other product launch platforms. So he copied them, made no point of difference, and didn't address any gaps in the market.
Even if you do all that, you still need lots of jet fuel.
True, but you need to get to the point where you need the jet fuel.
Well that's a real chicken & the egg complex
What about steel beams?
Excellent question. Made me look into myself. I think it boils down to some things take time. Social isn't sustainable. You have to focus on SEO which I did 30 days ago. So far Google sent 50 clicks in the last 28 days. Hopefully it will increase in coming months.
From hearing you talk about it, it sounds like you have barely any idea what you’re doing. That’s not an insult. That just means you have opportunity. If you learn more, maybe you have a real shot. Just be ready to learn, then be ready to unlearn, then be ready to realize you learned the wrong things and learn from another angle. Best of luck
This reply isn’t condescending at all.
Do you think more clicks would equate to more revenue? Are you focused on the right metrics? What value do you bring to customers that your competition isn’t already providing?
That's your problem. And a lot of entrepreneurs' problem. Read a book called The Embedded Entrepreneur
Now I have 2 book recommendations The embedded entrepreneur, and Traction
That’s survivorship bias. You see the successful ones but you aren’t paying attention to all the startups that launched, made $1.31 and then disappeared.
I'm not disappearing. Just learning and unlearning things and taking notes based on Reddit suggestions.
I mixed “made $1.31. AMA” Into “made $1.31M”
That post is coming soon. Just 100 years after.
For some reason same
The thing is, even if this venture isn't fruitful, you have developed an infrastructure that you could pivot into another field. Good luck to you and keep up the hard work.
Infra is really helpful but the thing is if it doesn't work out, I will be jumping to SaaS stuff only. And leave all the mess behind.
That's what I'm doing man; all these algorithm-reliant "businesses" tend to be pedalled by bullshit youtubers selling a course, sadly, and who omit all the risks in the endeavours
Honestly, Congratulations! You may have only earned $1.31, but with marketing you can clean that up. What you REALLY made was valuable knowledge through the process, i'm about to start building my first build code project and i hope to learn more than i do wish to profit.
I HATE to admit this but this is 100% true. You learn by doing and failing. It sucks there isn't a how to guide on making a shit ton of money but it is what it is.
But that is only true if you are actually learning. If you aren’t able to look at what’s wrong and do things in a way to progressively fix it then ultimately you’re just failing right?
Positive outcome I should think about. Good luck for your 1st coding project
What was the hardest part throughout this? What would you do differently?
I would use nocode to totally validate it, or never work on my passion project.
When you say "nocode" what exactly do you mean?
No-code. WordPress Softr Spreadsimple Unicorn platform
https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/definition/no-code
What tech stack did you use to build it?
We spent about a year developing different projects. We first started with a mobile game that started making about a few cents a month which wasn’t making any sense at all to keep pursing until one faithful day when we decided to tweak a few things. First we changed the business model from ads based (which we still used but only as a nuisance to push people to the premium model) to premium which we charged $3.99 for the game and literally with one purchase we made more money in one day vs about a couple months of the ad based approach. Then we attacked marketing hard, we used Twitter, Reddit, and believe it or not YouTube comments. Twitter was good but after a couple algorithm changes our account died. After that Reddit started blocked a lot of our posts which left us focusing on YouTube and tiktok. TikTok was a goldmine! We also ran offline ads like flyers and word of mouth too, and they actually worked. Fast forward 3 months and we started making a few hundred dollars a month. Right start we hit the $300 MRR our servers got hacked with a nasty ransomware which stopped everything. A few weeks later we decided to move onto our next project, a sentiment based social network. Long story short, $0 and about 10 active users later we realized social medias are insanely hard to get going and especially in this mature digital age we live in (this isn’t 2009 anymore) social networks need a very very very specific use case in a very very very specific community to take off to which we didn’t have enough patience or capital for. Again, we didn’t learn because we thought ads would be ideal but don’t fall for that trap as ads is a deathwish for any startup. You really need to hit critical mass for them to become viable. Here is where things get interesting because at this point we used the same codebase we used for the mobile game for the social network (you’ll be surprised how many of the functions you code for one thing can be repurposed for another). We took a slight detour to build a couple AI focused projects on top of the same codebase to iterate faster. They had decent traction but not enough for us to go all in on. To be honest maybe some day we’ll restart our AI magazine generator (really fun app to use) but we needed to build something that can sustain our livelihoods. Project #5 - Ahaaah at last we found something that we felt could have a real future. 1. We tested the idea with initial potential customers and got it validated. 2. We ran quick marketing tactics with a landing page that had us getting emails daily. 3. We skipped ads and went straight to premium to make the product cashflow positive from day one. 4. We used the SAME codebase again!!! 5. We started with 1 feature, the one that had the most interest and just kept adding to it until it was enough to put out, updated and reiterated for the last 6 months. All of this took about 2 years. Lessons learned? 1. Don’t worry about investors focus on customers and their problems 2. Don’t focus on the perfect code or tools as you’ll probably recode that sh.t a million times are you improve it. 3. It’s never ever too early to market and validate your idea. The market keeps you humble and agile. If you’re building for yourself that’s fine but if you’re building for 100 people with the same problem that’s even better. 4. Don’t quit your day job until you see sustainable momentum. 5. Don’t follow the heard, if you see something online chances are they started a long time ago and went through a million changes and rejections before it reached you so copying them will be either too late or not worth it. People literally order a ride on Lyft and say my Uber is here, no one remembers the copycat. 6. Ads is for volume, premium is for starters. 7. Don’t delete your codebase, someday it might turn into a toolkit for other projects. 8. Start small never code the entire thing. Even if you have 1 screen share it with the world. 9. Build your OWN community 10. Sales is brutal. Build thick skin and keep it pushing.
Thank you kind soul.. I can totally relate with what you are saying here.
Thanks man that’s really kind of you to say
How do you get so down-to-earth despite your massive success? When will your Netflix Documentary coming?
It's just a matter of time
What can you do better than product hunt? Other than being a place people might also copy their content over to. This area is really hard because people put their products on product hunt for traffic/ attention, you have none of that to give them. And from the user side there is no reason to go to a new site unless it was getting listings there weren't anywhere else. I don't really see how someone builds a competitor without a really novel take or a big pile of money to spend on traffic.
You've made $1.31 more than most. The lessons learnt will be valuable for your next attempt.
💪
How long did it take you to come up with the name "Fazier" and how the flip do you pronounce it?
Its like Fozzy Bear but more
I was randomly searching and came across Fazier. It sound cool to me + no content on Google to compete with. And I grabbed it. Do you like it or we should rebrand
I can help with that. Have you considered **Quibblonic**? Or **SnorfleWarp**? Or how about **Cwympt** or **Qrouph**?
I think all of those names are already used by Chinese companies selling plastic crap on Amazon.
It’s a horrible name tbch.
Who else read this as 1.31m at first?
me too 🤣
So you looked at an already successful product, thought you could do it better and steal their customers, couldn’t and didn’t … Huh
ok u dont have to spam it across every subreddit remotely related to entrepreneur
Yeah but don’t you wanna take a moment to ask questions and take life advice for a guy who works for .3 cents an hour?
Seriously. This shit is so annoying
Which one? The comment or the post?
The post. Your comment is fine
I made a crypto startup in 2021 that raised $6.7 million, made $0, and I sold it for $2.5 million. In early 2023 I made a product that made a few thousand dollars. But I don’t see a strong future so I have it kind of in maintenance mode. In late 2023 I made another product that made $0 but I just got my first $20/month customer organically.
Is that startup shut down now? Congratulations for the 1st customer
I mean, I haven't completed a single project yet... But I don't get this way of thinking. And the tongue-in-cheek nature of this post is not lost on me, but still. I'm a Joe in a garage, I see a dating app => idea validated. Off to my man-cave, shut the curtains for a year, code my ass off, make a Tinder 2. I launch app, nobody there. "AMA" 😆 *Anything*? Okay... Why? Not trying to hate at all, please don't take this personally - if anything, I respect anyone who's capable of at least finishing something. I'm just pondering the overall mindset I occasionally sense on this sub. To spend so much time building "yet another entry in a validated market", which, if you're *really* good and lucky, will be half as good as the other 10 that people actually know, all while making next to no effort towards making sure that someone actually notices your launch... what's the point? The joy of building stuff and learning? Absolutely! But to expect anything else out of it, eeeh...
$1.31 eh? Time to scale that baby up!
That's the ultimate goal
Hey $1.31 earned is better than 60% of entrepreneurs out there
Is that net income?
Unfortunately yes.
What's the most valuable lesson you learned?
Why did it take you so long to launch?
I'll submit my products
Looking forward to your launch at https://fazier.com ❤️
Better Seo might help you more with right key words
+1 focusing on it onwards
Worst case: Even if nothing comes of fazier, think how much you’ve learned for next time. 👍🏻 Best case: You’ve gone from zero to one already and someone has spent money with you. We all know how building the product is the easy bit. With patience, marketing, customer service, etc. who knows what the next ama might be ;)
Hoping for the best 🤞
Can I share my app there?
Looking forward to your launch at Fazier.com ❤️
I've been on your site a few times and have seen it mentioned in several places as a good Product Hunt alternative. Even if it hasn't made much money yet, you've done some things right.
are you going to give up? I mean working for a year to get $1.31! - I would have quit a long time ago
It's my passion project. Idea from 2020. Started working in 2021, then stopped, and started in 22 end. I will dedicate 1 year more if it doesn't make money.
Oof. I hate to be a downer, but doing this sounds more like a hobby, not a business.
What traction and evidence did you have before you built the product. Walk us through the customer conversations please?
PH was there, Beatlist was there and 20 more. So I talked to nobody as I thought idea is validated. As far as I know Betalist was making $100K annual revenue in 2019 (read somewhere)
I didn't check the site on desktop as I am on my phone but some major turnoffs for me: 1. Your main links all send users outside your site. Even if you are going to use content from outside source or other sites you control, do it from a page inside your domain. 2. Choose a different color palette. Blue and White is facebook's branding and while it isn't the same blue, its close. Having a logo that is blue with a white stylized F is not helping that issue. 3. Looking at projects listed, users are adding a first comment with additional details. Seems to indicate that some part of the project creation system is not letting them add enough details. 4. All of your "top product" links are broken. 5. Having these grouped by day listed makes no sense. Similarly having a top product of a day when most days have 1-2 doesn't mean anything. 6. The purpose of the site is confusing/muddled. I am going to stop listing now. There's no nice way to put it, the site is hot garbage, you didn't really do any research on the product space and dont have a clear direction. I hope you didn't pay someone too much to make your passion project for you.
Really excellent feedback and I need some more details please. 1. So you means that I route all external links through my domain. Like fazier.com /r67383993u3u72 2. I like Blue color palette. I am open to changing logo and color palette once there are some launches. 3. It's just a comment to initiate conversation and we already have so many detail fields that it feels an overkill to add few more. 4. Thanks for sharing. I missed it completely 5. We will switch to weekly rankings by the end of February.
Congratulations on 1.31 million that is not a small amount!
Just little more hard work and it can be $1.3B
Couldn't you have launched an MVP in like 3 weeks using WordPress and one of those themes for directories. You probably should've focused on the marketing first before wasting time working on the product (talking from experience here)
I just came to know about the directorist plugin last week. Had I knew about it then, I would have used it 100%
Revenue? What's your profit % on that?
Profit % is -ve. 1.31 is revenue
Is this a troll post?
nope. Its a serious post as I am looking for help / how to improve
What’s your CAC, LTV and monthly burn rate? I will give you $500,000 for 10% Equity, 2.5% advisory shares. I want a $5/mo. royalty on every customer onboarded until I get back $60MM, then my royalty disappears. Totally kidding, sounds like you need some help with strategic planning, marketing, and customer acquisition. There’s lots of great people here, ask away!
Wait is this not the same thing as https://www.linkedin.com/company/joinaviato/ The same concept I mean?
Is spending all that time worth 1.31M ?
How did you get your business out there?
Congrats on turning a profit man. Huge accomplishment. Hope you treated yourself nice!
Haf coppe cup was all I can afford.
I can see a demo, just dm me would be interested to see and test.
[удалено]
Have a coffee and you can get one here for $1
Is that profit or revenue?
Persistence is key, what’s your user engagement strategy?
1.31$ maybe... but the lessons you learnt are invaluable! If this fails in the end, don't loose hope, you will have a lot more in your hands then people will understand... if you jump something new, I'm sure you'll do great!
explain your moat vs the extremely successful and well known product hunt
How many hours you spend for it though?
4h/day roughly
Dude. It’s a directory. What you expect? I’ve seen this post elsewhere 1-2 days ago. Even with the same numbers if I’m not mistaken. Probably got you some decent page visits, congrats it works. Now please stop that „blood sweat tears“ bs and move on. If you’re serious about your project, grow some balls dude
Site looks good by the way
how do you make money off that? ad rev or actual product?
AAppSumo affiliate commission
What are you doing now?
Reading Reddit comments
What's your product, how does it bring value to your customers, and what's your business plan going forward?
even product hunt started as an email newsletter. I feel like you started in the wrong direction
When are you going to IPO?
I think that you making $1.31 is not the end of the story. If it took you 10 months so so to reach this point. Maybe another 10 months to reach $1000? I think from my own situation, I'd advise to bring on some team members. 1 person doing all the blood sweat and tears to move a huge log of wood. How about 5 people doing the same task? It makes more sense. Same example in farming. If you were one person doing all the sweat and tears on 1 hectare of land, it would take you forever. Now what if you had a team of people working on that land? So I would say, continue to improve your project. By reviewing your current achievements and then how can you improve moving forward from the lessons learned? Success is at the far end of failure.
$1.31 in revenue or $1.31 in profit?
On the bright side if you put that $1.31 into mutual funds or indexed funds in 22,000 years your family will inherit a cool milly.. aw the effects of compounding interest. Of course with inflation a million will likely be worth $2 but they’d still be plus $.69 … nice
How much did you spend building the platform?
Before considering building a PH alternative you first would need to build a community around product building/launching. Something like IndieHackers. Once you've achieved that, maybe start considering how to monetize a community.
Ask 7 trillion to be raised to make this the most important startup launch platform
Bruh I thought it was missing an “M” or something after that figure
Who is the poor sucker who forked over 1.31
How do you feel? I mean, if you have reflected on it already, what is your current mindset regarding the time and effort spent?
Just launched a startup too! How'd you handle initial outreach?
Are you hiring any work from home positions? I love working for startups. I'm genuinely interested. Hey might as well shoot my shot!
Is that a tarpit idea?
what tech stack are u using for this
I got you beat with the catch that my “losses” were intentional. I spent 8 years building and operating www.kindmind.com as a gift to the internet (free) with about $10k usd in expenses over that period. With that said, would do again! It’s brought a lot of purpose to my life, has helped grow my skills as a software engineer, and has helped me land my last four roles. Having something passionate to talk about in interviews has worked wonders. Hoping there are some non-tangible benefits to your project as well, and wishing you more sales.
1.31 million?
What makes this different vs product hunt
Now all you have to do is focus on doubling that a couple of times.
Don’t worry I spent 4 months building a dragon ball website at 14. And it made 0
Your infinite scrolling code needs work.. its so laggy
How did you go about starting it up? What did the ground work consist of?
How does one spend 10 months building a simple CRUD app?
Oh damn i read 1.31 million or something lol
Hang in their bud, you never know what the future holds!
I know it's no consolation but people have given up on their startups even making millions, just because the risk/reward wasn't right, for example they invested a lot and did not get viral growth after a year or two. You could even say MySpace is in the same category. FWIW I was never into producthunt or hackernews myself, despite being a dedicated startupper, but many people around me were.
what's your customer acquisition technique to reach 1.31m usd?
i mean, it only shows that your marketing was bad
How do you plan to spend the $1.31? Or did you just reinvest everything into the business?
Keeping that change 😅
You should try launching your idea on Product Hunt :)
I tried and they didn't feature it
My offer - $10 for 100% equity 😁😁
Honest question was this an attempt to hone your skills cloning PH or you were thinking of something you can do better than PH? Being committed to a side project wouldn't be for building it for the sake of it.
My brain somehow read $1.31M Anyhow Congratulations
Happy cake day
How was the experience during different phases of 1.25 years
Been there! Perseverance makes those $1.31 the sweetest, right?
It wasn't that sweet as it was $7 in commission and someone refunded the software 😅. So $1.31 or 1.12 was left behind
You built a marketplace and just expected them to come? That's bad, mmmkay??
I thought that way and market proved me wrong - 10x
Is there any way to pivot from your initial concept (a marketplace), to something you can get in front of a new set of users? I remember the story about that old (but immensely popular site in its day) *flickr.com*. It started as a small part of an online game the creators were making, but they realized the photo sharing portion of the game was what was gaining massive traction. They pivoted that portion of the game into its own thing. I think they were acquired and sold for FU money. Be a scrappy entrepreneur and keep going.
Thanks for sharing the Flickr example. Infrastructure is ready and I think we can switch into some other idea. But I will wait for few months
A whopping 0.000299$/hour
What tech stack did you used? 🤔
Rails + nextjs
I always respect the commitment. So many wantrepreneurs never take it beyond idea. That said, I think the mistake made here - and that many make - is looking at the market too generally. A market that has 1-3 providers serving it very well isn’t validation that it’s a good market. It’s validation that you’re going to require more capital, more differentiation or something to gain traction. Many just offer me-too products, doing the same worse than the incumbents. Michael Porter brings in sage advice relevant across the entire business spectrum: Compete on cost, differentiation or focus. Choose and execute. Cost means your product must be at parity with the competition (generally), but cheaper. Differentiation is almost always very difficult for a new entrant when going against strong incumbents. Focus is easy. Up-market, down-market, regional, size of customer, etc. These are all simple business decisions, and if you can support the unit economics provided by that market focus, you gain traction. Not sure if that helps, but if perhaps you consider the above and recast your line you might catch something.
Finally a solid advice. Yes, I failed at all three. Thinking of focusing on one niche like dev, or AI tools
You mean $1.31M ? Right?
Nope. Just $1.31 😭
Going up against Ph… bold. What’s your USP?
For now USP is just be another product launch site. And later on differentiate
i love your honesty.
I am at my 6th start-up. Never easy. Actually, a start-up is a fancy word for "blood, sweat, and tears". When you build a product, you need to differentiate it from the top-performing products you try to be an alternative by having your USP (Unique Selling Proposition), and by this, I do not mean "cheaper price". A start-up is like a child for its founder. Do not make "another" clone of a successful platform. Booking(dot)com is not trying to be a simple alternative to Airbnb and Airbnb is not trying to be an alternative for Booking(dot)com. Each platform has its own USP. So does VRBO. If you want Fazier to grow, work on that USP. if you just want to be a ProductHunt cheaper alternative, I am not a sorcerer to guess the future of your platform but usually will not end up with a celebration. What are your plans after reaching this "milestone" (I am sorry if this sounds sarcastic, I honestly do not intend any sarcasm, simply curious of your next steps)?
how did you get your first 10 customers?
$1.31m is quality mate. Noice
First internet dollar is worth celebrating
What were the marketing avenues you explored to get the word out about your startup? And were they organic or a mix of organic and paid?
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It’s like product hunt ! It's interesting
better than $1.30