
From a Mailchimp email and Wufoo form to $25k in 3 months - gozmike
https://medium.com/who-what-why/c744d79a6e76
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johnrob
A classic pivot: "This gold mining thing isn't working out, perhaps we should
just sell goods to the other miners".

~~~
sgdesign
As someone who's working on the exact same concept for another domain
(freelance designers), I've come to realize this is one of the least original
business models ever (there's about 10 similar services in my space alone).

Still, it fills a need and people are ready to pay for it, which is more than
you can say for a lot of startup ideas…

~~~
mahmud
Just 10? Have you been looking with both eyes closed?

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starrhorne
Is that $25k in revenue? Profit? Or total transactions from which you take a
%?

Just curious. I really like your lean approach.

~~~
mikaelcho
That 25k number was total transactions from which we take a 15 percent
commission.

~~~
rubiquity
So you've made $3,750 in three months?

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joelgascoigne
$3,750 in 3 months is not bad at all. It is super difficult to get something
off the ground. Once you're in motion, it can grow pretty fast.

~~~
rubiquity
I wasn't scoffing at the number, I was clarifying the honesty of the number.

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reustle
This reminds me of Kyle Braggers Tinyproj project. I really wish he hadn't
sold to GroupTalent (which subsequently killed it).

~~~
mikaelcho
Ya, I loved Tinyproj when I was working freelance before ooomf. Hated to see
it go.

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unclebucknasty
Good stuff. Congrats to the founders on the pivot and the success.

Getting the MVP approach right is hard. Really hard. Either that, or I have
just been doing it wrong. We have one line of business that is our bread and
butter. It came up the old fashioned way: getting in the trenches, gutting it
out, and tweaking the model until we gained traction. Since then, we have
launched no less than 3 new businesses. Two were shutdown and one is currently
languishing.

The challenge is marketing. It's hard, there is too much noise, and when the
product is not refined, conversions can suffer. So, it can be difficult to
discern whether your company is failing because of the minimal product
(especially in these days of "high design"), because of some other execution
element, or just no market fit.

I also think the MVP approach is suitable to businesses with specific
characteristics and these may be relatively rare. In this case, the business
already had fairly extensive relationships with its target market on both
sides of the equation. That was key, I believe, as much of the marketing
legwork had been done and the established trust could override any qualms
about such a minimalist approach. Also, the nature of the business was such
that simple forms and manual processes were sufficient to start. That is
frequently not the case with tech businesses.

This is not to disparage their accomplishments in the slightest. It was an
astute pivot and their approach was smart. It's just that the mantra of MVP,
fast iterations, fail fast, etc. has been the magic hammer lately, and too
many companies have been nails.

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dylangs1030
This is the kind of writing I love to see from founders. It's first-hand
experience, and any advice is accompanied by narrative that explains the line
of thought. It doesn't just seem as though it came down on stone tablets from
gods of startups. In a word, it's _practical._

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sgdesign
Funny, this is exactly how I started Folyo
([http://folyo.me](http://folyo.me)) as well (which is the same thing but for
freelance designers).

The only difference is that I used Posterous as well to get an online archive
of each project (you could post directly form Wufoo to Posterous if I remember
correctly).

Edit: from reading the post I thought they catered only to app developers.
After taking a look at the site, it seems that they do designers, so they're a
direct competitor.

Others include:

[http://onsite.co](http://onsite.co)

[http://juiiicy.com](http://juiiicy.com)

[http://workingnotworking.com/](http://workingnotworking.com/)

~~~
3stripe
I think you mean [http://onsite.io/](http://onsite.io/) ;)

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k-mcgrady
Thanks for writing this. I'm launching a product this month and while building
it I regularly fall into the trap of trying to create the vision I have in my
my head that's fully automated rather than the MVP that requires some manual
operation.

Your post reminded me of the recent PG essay [1] "Do Things that Don't Scale"
which I also found really useful.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

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walden42
Great post, thank you. I'm wondering, when you "manually contacted the best
developers", was this a telephone call or an email? I'm having a hard time
finding the "fine line" of annoying telemarketing call or not. Although the
service I provide would genuinely be useful to the one I contact (as useful as
your service), it's hard not to sound like a telemarketer nonetheless.

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Simple1234
Isn't anybody going to talk about the irony of a developer service that found
success without writing any code? I think the take away is git or ftp, ruby or
php, sql or a text file, json or xml. Customers don't care, not even
developers. I find that interesting.

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simonswords82
Nice work people, I've read a number of your blog posts and one in particular
stuck with me (the one about getting press). You've certainly got your own PR
and marketing in general nailed, glad to hear you've now nailed your product.

~~~
mikaelcho
Thanks Simon. That means a lot.

Here's the link to that getting press post:
[https://ooomf.com/blog/post36194316012getting-
press/](https://ooomf.com/blog/post36194316012getting-press/)

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arbuge
How exactly does the money back guarantee work? After a developer does all the
work for a project, the project owner can just say he's not happy with it and
wants a refund? There must be some safeguards in place to prevent abuse...

~~~
mikaelcho
For each milestone or project, the details of the deliverables are put into
the system. This way, if there's ever an issue (hasn't been yet), we look at
the documentation to make a decision.

Because the projects are vetted as well, this decreases the chances of this
happening.

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txttran
Slightly off topic, but the website of the company being talked about in this
article ([https://ooomf.com/](https://ooomf.com/)) take a REALLY long time to
load on my computer.

~~~
mikaelcho
Thanks for the heads up. We're working on it now.

~~~
cschneid
Holy crap does the site's landing page look like Simple.

~~~
allenpc
I don't think these are the only two sites using a big hero image overlaid
with white Gotham/Lato/Proxima Nova headers...

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torbit
It instantly reminded me of simple as well. Both top fixed headers with orange
buttons and large BG image with a white background. There are more for sure.
The basic app/tool website layout.

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josegonzalez
Both sites use twitter bootstrap with a few font changes, among other things.

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cschneid
Didn't mean to come off so accusatory. I had simple open in another tab at the
time and thought it was weird that the sign in link had changed text before I
realized what was going on :)

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scottmagdalein
This is encouraging. But it's not an MVP approach as much as a validation
approach. They validated the idea/product with Mailchimp. The product didn't
come until they started building something to "productize" what had already
been validated manually.

This is what I want to do with a new type of email-based shopping experience.
We'll see.

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theycallmemorty
Great post. I especially loved the screen shots of the signup and payment
forms that very clearly had Wufoo branding all over them. It really goes to
show that if you have a good idea you don't need to have all your I's dotted
and T's crossed in your MVP; If people like the idea they'll look past those
little lumps.

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Felix21
The art of the MVP.

I love it.

Good Job.

~~~
mikaelcho
Thanks a lot. It's been a crazy ride so far.

~~~
arbuge
That is a great job - and a great post too. Thanks for sharing that.

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sarhus
It's a great story. Mind if I ask how did you get the first programmers to
sign up?

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antoinec
From what is in the post, it seemed too me that it was through personal
connections

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fumar
This is a great story that focuses on iteration.

There are several players in this field. Where are you sourcing all the
project/clients from? I understand the connection to developers. What about
the clients?

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clarky07
I didn't see a link to their site in the article, so I thought I'd include one
here - [https://ooomf.com/](https://ooomf.com/)

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joeblau
Did your team end up ditching the mobile marketing effort? That's what I need
for my next project.

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mtgx
Anyone who's used both Aweber and Mailchimp? Which is better for a mid-level
website?

~~~
Noxchi
I prefer to use self hosted autoresponders using a 3rd parties SMTP service
(like Sendgrid or Amazon SES). Much cheaper and just as reliable (you pay 1
cent per 1000 emails sent, no pay-per-user-per-month).

You'll need to spend $XXX on a self hosted autoresponder first though,
Interspire or arpReach are good.

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aurelius83
Pretty interesting. I wonder if that is 25k per month, in total revenue, gross
profit etc.

~~~
reledi
I believe it's 25k worth of projects submitted to their site in the first 3
months, from which they take a 15% commission fee (though they started with a
$10 fee).

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lunarprose
Have loved following ooomf since about March of this year. Brilliant, simple
service.

~~~
mikaelcho
Thanks! So happy you enjoy it.

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dmak
This is leaner than lean.

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sfall
how often are you sending out the email newsletter?

~~~
mikaelcho
It's usually 2-3x per week

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caruana
thanks for the insight, very helpful

