Published my first proper product after working as a developer for 10 years
dytto.co
dytto.co
Could you explain on the marketing site what type of business this would be best for? Are there other workflow tracking features?
For grammar, there are only a handful of things which don’t ring quite true for me as a native speaker, like “stop losing your time” which for its prominence on the page seemed worth mentioning. Others might think it sounds fine, but that felt awkward to me compared with “stop wasting time”, for example.
To be honest we, two cofounders, didn't spend days to decide on the words. We both are not native speakers. Google'd some keywords, took a look at dictionary websites and decided quotation was fine. We will do further research on that. Would "offer" work in this context?
We are decided on targeting freelancers and businesses that sell services, like software or advertisement agencies. But to be fair anyone doing business negotiations via sending an offer to a client could possibly use the app. Right now the app is pretty basic as this is a product of 2-nights worth of time and we only went live this week.
"Stop wasting time". Noted.
Again, if you have any more feedback, I'd really appreciate it. You can also contact me on Twitter if you'd prefer. My username is hkanaktas.
* Autocomplete of customer name does not seem to work. If I put in part of the customer name and then click the name, it seems to complete but will then not allow me to save the quote. In fact, I do not seem to be able to make a quote at the moment without going through 'customers'.
* Unsure what Active / Passive is. No obvious way to change a quote between the two, or set a quote to be in either.
* Would be good to change the unit rather than everything be in 'items' - i.e. 5 m2, $32 per m2.
* There is no single workflow for creating an invoice for a customer. I would expect to be able to create the customer & invoice in 'one shot'. I made an invoice first, then couldn't save it without adding a customer - so I had to go and open a new tab so as to not loose the quote. This is a bit unintuitive.
* There is no way to reorder items. If I have 4 items for installing a door (cost of door, cost of handle, cost of frame, labour) and want to add 'cost of hinges', it will either appear after labour which doesn't make sense from a flow perspective, or have to delete labour and then put it in.
* No way to provide subtotals - in the example above I would like to subtotal parts vs installation labour.
* There is no way to edit a line item in an existing quote without deleting the line and creating a new one. This is particularly problematic if I want it on the top line of the quote, as it means you have to delete all line items to make sure it is the first (no reordering)
* Would be good to write the email to the customer rather than it look like a generic mailshot - like "Hi Dave, As discussed during our phone call please see the quotation attached. Cheers, Barry".
* No way to apply charges at the final line level (i.e. 5% payment processing for above lines)
- Active/passive filters mean "still ongoing offers" and "responded offers" but I see why that might not be obvious.
- Can you elaborate that subtotal part? I'm not sure what you mean.
- We are thinking of payment processing, but that's not an MVP-level feature in my mind, so that feature needs to wait a little.
Parts (processor, RAM, case) Software (OS, AV) Labour (base build labour, any up sell labour for software) Accessories (Mouse, Keyboard, Webcam) Shipping
Where each of these have line items, but are totalled separately (e.g. immediately after a group of line items). I guess it could be a big long list of randomly sorted line items, but for more complex invoices it gives much more clarity if you can categorise the cost into buckets.
Maybe this link clarifies: https://members.tinshingle.com/category/accounting/top-5-rea...
FYI for further feedback if useful, I believe you calculate tax slightly incorrectly (off by a few pennies sometimes) by not counting half pennies correctly after saving the invoice. Aware it's only a small bug but thought I would flag!
I'm aware of the tax calculation problems. It's a somewhat fragile topic, at least in my country. It's on my list and I'll work on it soon. Thanks for the heads up.
It seems like the tax logic is different in the edit sheet from when it is saved on the page. The below test case will produce you a 0.01 penny tax pre-save, and a 0.00 penny tax post-save. If you click between them the value changes:
Line item 1: £10, tax @ 0.04%
Line item 2: £10, tax @ 0.04%
Result pre-save (correct) is 1p
Result post-save (incorrect) is 0p
Otherwise, looks great!
If you are doing business negotiations, you are probably using a CRM which allows for proper pipeline and offer tracking (e.g. hubspot, salesforce).
If you have more feedback about the target market or any other business decisions, I'm looking forward to listening to them.
I think you also should find a few 'bookish' native speakers to proof-read your blog posts before you publish them. While it's impressive that you're speaking another language, the casual reader likely won't know that and so your writing will seem amateurish - which might not reflect well on your product.
Which really depends on the industry and the business owner so the word you use should be configurable per account.
Similar to how different businesses use different words such as customer, client, patient, guest, patron, etc.
"All these employments and hourly works are means to make some money, but it doesn't worth much when you want to take a trip for a few days/weeks but your "boss" says no."
When success hits you might have less time for travel compared to scheduling a vacation at work. The more important you are the more important your business is can create longer hours.
I'm aware that owning a business means much more work and I'm willing to put in the necessary effort. Maybe I will go nomadic, work in part of the day and travel in the remaining hours. Possibilities are endless.
What I would personally add: - Use GIF/carousel instead of an image on the landing page so I can use what exactly the product does - Add some kind of API (really basics) to integrate a product into other solutions
The landing page is literally 5 days old. I am constantly tweaking it with new ideas and I will definitely apply your feedback. I was thinking of a speed-up video to show various pages.
API sounds so good. I was thinking of Zapier integration but why not both, right?
I propose that having the ability to manage clients and quotes through an API would be a powerful feature. If you’re worried about rapid iteration and backwards compatibility, remember to version your API route(s), and use a sub domain so you can scale out the API easily in the future independently of other app components. Consider firing off web hooks for any events that your customers would want action taken on faster than polling your API could support.
Congrats on the launch!!
(Hopefully constructive) feedback:
1.) Why only four currencies? Now I can't use it. Netflix has helped normalize credit card usage all across the world, so your potential market is huge, but you've only targeted four countries. I don't get that.
2.) All price/currency fields have placeholders in the format 0.00. When I click on one of these fields, I expect it to go blank so that I can enter my own price. So I just click anywhere on that field and start typing. If I happen to have clicked after the decimal point, and try to type in 2000 (meaning $2000), the value I end up with is "0.200". This is unexpected behaviour for a form field, at least for me.
3.) In your quote entry form, you need to widen the tax % field. When I enter 0.09, the 9 is half cut off.
1- The app is like in alpha/beta stage right now. I planned to put currencies in the database but it was too much work for an MVP so I literally typed them into the template lol. Which currency do you need? I can add it manually now and be sure to have it in the database when I make the transition.
2- Agreed. Number inputs are funky. Tried to have custom Javascript for the minimal asset size but I didn't do well. I'll use some 3rd party plugin for those.
3- Noted. One question though. Why do you type 0.09 in a percentage field? Is it just a test or do you really have 0.09% (9 in ten thousand) tax rate?
Oh don't trouble yourself on my account. I have no urgent use for it, so will just wait for it to be done properly.
And you're right about the percentage field. I didn't notice that 9% was correct for that field rather than 0.09.
My company was providing design and development services. The quotation is just a document to confirm a deal from the customer. The content should fully cover the service scope, deliverables, the price & terms very clear.
I just set up a template from OpenOffice writer & google docs and create a quotation from there.
- There is no example how a 'beautiful quotation' looks. - Pricing would be a concern. You say it is free, so why should it be of concern: if I change my business process now to use your interface and then I am locked in, I would really like to know how much I have to pay next year.
I was working on the preview button before my server crashed from the extreme traffic :D I will deploy it soon.
About the pricing, we don't have set in stone amount right now but we will be nice to our early-adopters, I promise!
I think you can still get someone's email for follow up if you use them.
I work for Elastic Email and I don't recall any problems from our side lately.
Fair. We'll update the pricing section with some numbers tomorrow.
What is it about this niche that makes it a thing that everyone wants to start.
If you're talking about the colors in the app, they are the default color palette of Tailwind CSS. Most components are also exactly copied from Tailwind UI examples.
There are also too many required fields in the customer form
Your latest addition should be displayed at the top of the list. Is it not? Also, were you redirect to quote details page after creating it?
- Basically a lot of CRMs handle the offer/quote stuff. Some have partial support, some have more functionality then we do.
- There is quoter[dot]com as a direct competitor. I'm not sure how well they do. My co-founder is more aware of this topic.
- There are some old desktop softwares doing the same thing offline. I don't think users of these would convert much to online solutions.
- And of course there are users that do everything manually. Keeping the records in an Excel file and exporting Word documents as PDFs to email to clients.
Edit: sorry about the formatting. I'm exhausted.