

Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it - joelg87
http://blog.bufferapp.com/post/3328167762/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it

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cfontes
Great post, thanks for sharing.

I Am here in Brazil, crazy trying yo start something just the way you did,
Twitter here is very hot (2nd place in the world in tweets after USA)I think
you should try to market it here a bit, people here doens't pay a lot for
online services but with more than 81,3M internet users you should hit some.

If you need help, fell free to ask.

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joelg87
Thanks :)

That's really great to hear. We want to expand as quickly as we can globally
since we think many people will find Buffer very useful, so any help would be
hugely appreciated.

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cfontes
<http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/cfontes.html> in case you need info about
brazil.

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keeptrying
Great story. How did you handle your initial billing? Did you integrate
paypal?

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joelg87
Thanks. Yep, just a simple Paypal setup. One of the interesting decisions was
not to implement Paypal IPN (automatic upgrading when the payment comes
through). My reasoning was that it could have been 4 months before I had the
first customer, so I didn't want to implement it until I had validated that
the time spent on it was worth it. I could rather spend the time gaining that
first customer. So it was a very simple initial integration.

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keeptrying
Cool. So you just added some html and javascript which took the user to
paypal? No api integration at all ? Smart!

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joelg87
Exactly. Minimum viable ;)

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keeptrying
Thanks for letting us know this. I've read that this is the right way to go
but I've never seen a writeup of someone who was successful doing this. This
has seriously pushed me over the edge onto customer development.

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chopsueyar
Good writeup. I really enjoyed your story, particularly your discipline to
focus on customer acquisition and resist the temptation to code in a bunch of
new features once you got some paying customers.

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joelg87
Thanks. It's definitely something I still have to keep reminding myself of.

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pestaa
Amazing to see how the idea itself revealed the way it could be validated -
through Twitter of course.

Nicely done. Informative post.

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ncavig
Building a service that is dependent on another service is always a risk, but
this is a very nice and simple app that a lot of the "social media" sides of
companies could utilize. It's a great idea to make some extra revenue and I
think has a nice market. Well done.

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fourhourstartup
Nice work! I love this quote, "It was a tiny idea. I wanted to take the
scheduling feature of many Twitter clients and apps and make that single
feature awesome. I believed that single feature was worthy of it’s own
application."

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matei
nice job. I'm surprised however that people are willing to pay for this type
of service. Makes you wonder if people would be willing to pay in order to use
twitter

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bootload
_"... nice job. I'm surprised however that people are willing to pay for this
type of service. ..."_

It appears to be a toy product but if you consider:

* As a twitter subscriber, reading multiple posts are a pain to read. This is a real problem for users and their subscribers.

* Twitter has a lot of potential users/businesses looking for ways to automate etiquette.

* Twitter has a lot of users

The real problem for any developer here if I get a product with a lot of
users, will Twitter just roll out the same product or will they pay enough?

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hsuresh
Great story. How many users sign up when you had the website put up? Also,
were the users still helpful when they realized you don't have the app yet?

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joelg87
Thanks. In around 4-5 weeks of having the landing page and pricing page up
without the product existing, I got a total of 120 emails. I sent an email
when they gave me theirs explaining a little more about the product and how I
needed their help to shape it into something truly useful. They were delighted
to be shaping a new product, and were certainly not negative about it not
existing yet. One mistake I made was telling people in that email that it
would be live in a week :) In the future I won't be telling people time
scales!

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hsuresh
Thanks for sharing your story. Congrats

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smiler
This is great - my only worry is that this is something that Twitter could
easily replicate and destroy the revenue

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pestaa
Twitter has no interest in complicating their interface and delaying the
content.

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smiler
In my opinion, the 'new' twitter is more complicated than old.

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pestaa
Read it as 'complicating it further' then. :) I agree, but its speed bothers
me even more.

