May = $121.17
Make it rain! Drinks on us! #StartupLife… or not ಥ_ಥ
On the bright side, with $121 we can buy this creepy horse mask, or this cowboy squirrel wall mount, or even this Thundercats Lion-o with working eyes. However, on our current trajectory, we will starve to death. Let’s break this thing down:
Hey Press ($55.17)
Hey Press is loved by startups — just read our Twitter stream. However, as far as business models go, we’ve learned that it’s a bad idea for us to target other small startups. This is because they do PR infrequently, so are unlikely to subscribe to our premium features… and it doesn’t help that a good portion are probably living on a shoestring.
So what’s a dev to do? We’ve spent the last month trying to make Hey Press useful for people who do PR on a regular basis. This has meant re-building our tech backend so we can easily expand our database, and talking to a lot of PR pros! The feedback couldn’t be clearer:
“Wow, I love it! The search functionality to find relevant articles is something that’d be really useful. I haven’t seen it before”
Great, right?
“Although it would need to be much more comprehensive before we pay for additional features”
The problem: it’s hard to say how much more comprehensive we need to be. So whilst we’re excited about our user growth and word-of-mouth sign-ups, we realise the point where we become a sustainable business remains unknown. As we continue to expand Hey Press and gather feedback, we’ll continue to work on other projects too.
Product Friends ($27)
This was a quick hack we made, and a product built from our own need. Product Friends lets you see your most influential upvoters from Product Hunt. Although we knew the target market to be very small (around 30 makers are listed per day on Product Hunt), we thought we could reach a high portion of them through Twitter.
Of the 30 makers, generally between 5 and 10 signed up per day — which we thought was pretty good. The problem was few people paid for our $9 premium features.
Time to try something new… and seeing as we’ve got this captive audience, let’s build something else for them. Perhaps they’d pay for a curated list of journalists that like to write about Product Hunt launches?
Press Hunter ($40)
$40 (5 x $8). Nope, not really.
So where does that leave us? Well, in the space of a month, we’ve built and launched 2 new products and pushed a big update for Hey Press. We’re getting better at building products quickly, but now we need to identify the right products to help us reach $1000 per month.
We won’t be spending any more time on Product Friends or Press Hunter — but we won’t kill them either (people are still using them, even if they’re not paying). Throughout June, we’ll be devoting our time to expanding the Hey Press database, and growing a new PR tool we’ve launched today: JournoRequests.com.
JournoRequests.com finds the best PR opportunities from Twitter, and delivers them to your inbox. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
Having spoken to lots of PR pros, we think JournoRequests.com is of immediate value. On with our quest for $1000 per month! We’ll let you know what happens…
