Two New Products
in One Week
How Product Hunt helped us
earn back our Work Retreat
Last week Weekly Innovation was on a work retreat in Budapest, Hungary. Our very first business holiday since we’ve started in November last year. The whole work and pleasure thing was pretty new to us, but we read good stuff about it. So besides enjoying the beautiful city and perfect weather, we’ve created two new products that will extend on our business as innovation experts. We challenged ourselves to let the retreat earn back itself, money wise.
Monday
When we arrived on Monday morning we actually didn’t got a clue of what we were going to build. There were some restrictions though, since we only had so much days to spend. Building and launching something in limited time is already quite the task, but coming up with something creative under pressure may be even harder. So we started with a quick braindump about product ideas, who to target and of course how people were going to pay for it. The in-house pinball machine in our Airbnb — AWESOMENESS !!11!1 — served as temporarily whiteboard.
Tuesday
The first product we build is the Destroy Your Business Canvas. A way to help companies reinvent themselves, or at least give them the tools to think in such a way. While creating the canvas we’ve depended on our years of experience at corporates that are simply stuck. Although it kindly borrows some elements from other canvas tools such as Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas, it has a different tone of voice. One that will hopefully make it fun too use in numerous workshops and sessions at companies that have been unable to innovate for years. It is clearly targeted at CEOs, business owners, and managers at all levels.
The Destroy Your Business Canvas is a full package to help you get started right away. We set the “special introduction price” to €4,99. The package includes:
- The canvas in printable vector PDF
- A full manual to get you started in 3 simple steps
- Use cases from Amazon, Netflix and U.S. Postal Service
- Additional resources for inspiration
We hunted it on Product Hunt — the fastest way we could think of to boost our new product — and thanks to our buddy Bram Kanstein it got featured within a few hours.
Wednesday
Another day, yet another product. We see a lot of great inspirational quotes on terrible slides. While there are so many awesome photos available. Therefore, we came up with a very simple service: Quotes on Slides. Inspirational quotes on stunning slides with automatic monthly delivery.
For now it’s really just a simple first version, but it might become a real SAAS: Slides as a Service (pun totally intended). We collect the most inspirational quotes (on entertainment, innovation, leadership and sports) and display them on stunning visuals. We use high-res imagery under the CC license. It will probably prove to be a very useful tool for people that give a lot of presentations and would like to spice things up a bit. And they will save quite some effort browsing around for the good stuff.
If you subscribe, you’ll receive a Google Drive invitation on the email address used in the checkout process within 24 hours and you’re good to go. Access to our full database and 10 new gorgeous slides each month.
We started with two packages: a Basic (at €2,99 a month) and a Premium plan (at €3,99). A Hunter package containing 5 free visuals was also available. After submitting it to Product Hunt, we waited and let the comments inspire us.
It was a crazy day. We were overloaded with requests and feedback. The community spoke and we listened. Our basic package is now FREE of charge. Not for one month, or three, but forever! You can now access all our slides in high-res JPG format for free, right here.
Thursday
And on the 4th day we rest :-) We grabbed our cameras and jumped head first into the vivid city of Budapest. Here are just a few shots we took.
Friday
Time to go back home. We sure had an amazing and productive first retreat and will definitely do another one soon. How about our challenge to let the retreat earn back itself? We did it!! It was a close call but since we only put minimum effort in marketing and let the products speak for themselves, we dare to call this a huge success!
Some things we learned
- People go crazy over #giveaways: in just 8 hours 500+ people downloaded the free Product Hunt giveaway pack.
- The feedback from the PH community is of real high quality. We instantly followed up on the request of more extensive case material for Destroy your Business and added a free ‘Basic’ plan to Quotes on Slides.
- Don’t overthink it. Design it, build it, ship it! What’s your next product?
Thanks for reading!
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Cheers,
Tim & Maarten
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” — Brené Brown
