Pivoting my bootstrapped startup to revenue
Two years ago I wrote a post on Medium titled “Productizing Backend Driven UI”, and to this day the post still generates a good amount of traffic. It beats every other post or product announcement I’ve ever written.
I felt it’s fair to share the following update:
Product Hunt Launch
Being a first-time hunter and the creator of the product itself meant that the chances of a successful launch were incredibly low. However, I was surprised to see that there was plenty of interest. Although it didn’t reach the top 3 products of the day, I managed to secure a good number of demos.
Selling The Product
The interest generated from the original post, Product Hunt, and Reddit brought in mainly two types of people, hobbyists or large enterprises (usually the R&D team would reach out).
For early customers, the idea was to license the product, this would give them the freedom to build anything they wanted on their own infrastructure. It would also take away a lot of the pain that comes with hosting a SaaS product.
For large enterprises, the model was perfect as it gave them the flexibility they required. I spent hours preparing demos, example code, and anything I could to keep them interested. The biggest issue was trust. Why would a company of thousands of employees put the faith in a one-man operation? I also think there was a feeling of “if this guy can build this, so can we”.
To make things worse, the model made it impossible for hobbyists to experiment and generate the feedback I was so desperately after.
In the end, I realized that the product had failed to appeal to the audience I targeted — product teams who wanted to engage their customers.
Dusting Myself Off
Luckily, I was still employed while all this was happening. This gave me time to think about my next steps. I knew I had the technology to build something that could help people, but I needed to make the product more approachable.
In-App Messaging
This felt like the obvious next step to explore, as it would solve the same problems I was hoping Engine alone would solve. Luckily the product that could make this possible was already in my hands.
With a demo that was put together with passion and duct tape, I reached out to a friend so that I could demo the product to his marketing team. He loved the idea and managed to book a meeting with the head of marketing. While driving back home after the demo, it was the first time I felt that I was onto something.
What was evident though is that message creation needed to be as simple as possible. This meant that the product needed to have ready-to-use templates and a visual editor, among other things.
Having experienced other products on the market I knew that few had support for native iOS/Android apps. The ones that did, didn’t do very well when it came to preserving brand identity.
These were the goals when I set out to build Gist:
- Enable everyone to create
- Deliver experiences that feel like they’re built in-house
- Support every platform (iOS, Android & Web)
- Be open and provide the necessary tools to allow integration
Building Gist
Later that year I left my full-time job as a Product Manager and started my journey as a solo founder. In August of last year, the product went live with the first customer I gave the original demo to and I've been onboarding new customers ever since.
If you’re interested in reading more about this, I’m currently working on a series that will give you a behind-the-scenes look at building the product, you can follow me on Twitter for updates about that.
Also, if you want to try Gist, you can book a demo from the website or reach out to me on Twitter and I’ll send you an invite.
