Recap
In the last post, I mentioned that I’ve launched a landing page for Your Numbers and that was it.
Let’s take a look at how things look like today.
User feedback
For this app, in contrast to Docker Deploy or Speakerhouse, is very very easy to get potential users.
Who would be interested in a personal finances app? A lot of young adults.
So I did some user research on the landing page and the app with potential users around me (my wife & sisters) and that gave me a lot of information. For exame:
- How the hell does the app work?! I realized is not so easy to understand if you never used YNAB or something similar.
- Several missing adjustments in the app (text, links, colors).
- The onboarding (register + pay => get link) should be smooth if I really want customers (and not just validate).
It’s crazy how different the perception of a product (or anything) can be to two different people. The preconceptions that I (and you) have make it quite difficult to put myself in someone else’s shoes and see the product through their eyes. Talk to your prospects.
In any case, with the collected feedback, I got work to do.
Docs
In this situation, documentation serves at least 2 purposes:
- Document how the app works
- Generate confidence in the app/company
Might also improve SEO, but who knows 🤷♂️.
So I built a relatively basic help site with Docusaurus, with more or less all the basics of envelope budgeting and the app.
One feedback I got was “Don’t make me read that, it’s just too much”. So I recorded a video explaining at a very high level the basics of Your Numbers.
I still have the to-do item of adding a tour to the app, so people doesn’t even have to leave the app to understand how it works, but first I need more people finding the app.
Automated onboarding
I automated the user registration and instance deployment as follows:
- User registers through a Stripe Pricing Table in the landing
- Stripe calls my API through a webhook
- The API deploys a new instance in Docker Deploy and sends an email to the user with Resend
Smooth, quick and easy. For this I had to implement Personal Access Tokens in Docker Deploy and it was actually easier than expected.
Mentioning it around
In the meantime I also promoted the app around in forums (mainly reddit) where people was complaining about YNABs pricing or that they don’t support european banks. That gets me some traffic but not enough.
That said, I had 3 users register: 2 before the onboarding automation (never heard from them again) and 1 after. If all goes well for him/her, then I’ll have my first paying customer in the next 20 days.
What’s next: Marketing of course
The app works, it has all it needs and I have no doubts it could add value for a lot of people.
What I have to do now is get customers. Sounds easy, it’s not so easy. Right now I’m exploring these 3 sources of traffic:
- People I know (I need to get more agressive here)
- Google Ads
- Influencers
I’ll push in those directions to see if something works, but in any case I need to step up my marketing game because I suck, and I need customers. I hope in the next post I can come back with some marketing insights.