diegogcouto

Well, I don't usually listen to podcasts, but I'm really glad I took some time to listen to yours.

As everything else, a lot of this common marketing BS are very seductive when you're in need. They're usually advertised as a way to get higher sign-up and conversion rates and, when you fear that you might be going out of business, an exit popup with an autoplaying video doesn't even look as bad as it really is.

I'm looking forward to listening to your next episodes. ;-)

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Florianópolis / Brazil)

I have a degree in CS and a lot of experience building web apps. I'm freelancing in order to be able to self-fund my own product, which helps people doing speech therapy to have better results.

As a technical founder myself, I can help you with a lot of aspects of building a product:

   - Building complex webapps [AWS, Rails, Sinatra, Node.jS, Redis, Sidekiq, React, Redux, ...];
   - Developing Android apps;
   - Creating growth strategies and social media presence.

Feel free to drop me a line: diego.gcouto@gmail.com

I've already used a messaging app for couples with my girlfriend. I do remember they had some nice features, like sending kisses and hugs, but we eventually stopped using it. Mainly because we had a lot of messages not being sent.

Currently I'm also bootstrapping my own product and I can see that you might have some problems (like I've):

1. It's always nice to have an app for each mobile platform... but it costs a lot of energy to keep them running! I'd start supporting only one. Use all the spare time for marketing (it's incredibly hard to sell things...).

2. We had access to nice features using the app I mentioned, but the chat experience wasn't fluid enough. Sometimes, when we try to do a lot of things, we forget the basics.

3. The heart beating feature sounds nice... but is it something important to your public? We've added tons of features we loved to our product. It's very disappointing to see that they aren't using them.

In my experience, we're able to create a lot more engagement using Facebook, but you have to consider that we're a niche startup in Brazil (where CPC seems to be cheaper).

On the other hand, most of the users we got from Facebook were a kind of "freebie hunters". As soon as they saw it would be necessary to pay a monthly fee to use our services (It's an app! Am I really supposed to pay for this?), most of them disappeared.

In the end, as someone has already mentioned here, Facebook seems to be a really good place to advertise free stuff or products that can naturally trigger some emotional response (Look at this lovely products made by this grandma)... and maybe just them.

It definitely helps, traskjd! You really got me thinking by mentioning the effort necessary to provide support. Initially I thought that the whole service is kind of self-explanatory but we're receiving a flood of questions about the product without even have launched it yet. Imagine when they all start using it.

I'm only afraid to scare them by pricing it too far from their expectations, but you really have a good point!

Your help was very important. Thank you very, very much! :-D

Now I'm not sure whether I'm being too pessimistic or just if we're really very poor in here. hahaha

Actually, doctors usually make a lot of money (at least US$70k/year) here in Brazil if compared to other careers but, unfortunately, it doesn't seems to be the same for speech therapists (most of them won't make more than US$15k/year).

I really like your price anchoring and completely agree with you but, at the same time, I'm also afraid to scare my audience. hahahah

As soon as I have any results about this thing, I'm gonna blog about it and share here!

Thank you very, very much for you help and attention, saluki!

crossed fingers. hahahhah

Yeah, unfortunately I have the same perception as you have about how they (although I'm a brazilian myself) value apps and online services here.

The income of my target audience seems to be around US$10100/year (or R$32500). That's fairly low to make me consider if, even if providing a lot of value, they'd be wiling to pay a premium fee for the service.

On the other hand, I have a niche audience (not more than 10k people in Brazil) so, pricing it too low could make the product unsustainable.

I really appreciate your help and be sure that I'm gonna share the results of all this thing.

Thank you very much, napsterbr! Brigadão. ;-)

Thanks for your help, mtmail! They really know how to communicate. Maybe the path really is through transparency.

Although it's somehow complicated to define what is the real minimum, as Joe demonstrated, I'd only like to recommend another concept that I've read about and from which I hope you could take good things out of it: The Minimum Lovable Product.

https://medium.com/the-happy-startup-school/beyond-mvp-10-st...

I hope you're proud of your project, that's really great one. ;-)

I'd like to congratulate you, not only for your app (that is pretty nice) but for being open to criticism and help a lot of new developers making your app open.

Thanks!

Maybe with your video it'll be clear, but just looking to your layout, I can't understand what you're going to do, so there isn't any motive to "tell you" my email.

So, I suggest you to, with few words, describe what's your purpose. You're going against an app? Which app? Why? What are you going to do?

First, I'd like to say that you've made a very good job! My suggestions (I'll try to focus on things that haven't be already suggested):

* Try to get rid of this image slider. It's difficult to pay attention with this huge thing moving.

* Your logo is a button equals to other buttons on your page. It's quite confusing to me.

* Try to work with tables only when you're really want to make use of a table and not as a way to organize your layout. You'll find out that this approach will help you to save a lot of time to maintain your website.

* Make use of standard icons: I saw some icons in 3D and others that are really similar to "cliparts".

It's good to know the point of view of another WP developer, so thank you for your feedback!

I've also worked with WordPress and, as I said, it's really a very nice product, but it's not as user friendly as it should be and it probably won't change in any near future, because its user base already is used to work with it as it is.

My experience with WordPress showed me that for both, users and developers, it could be really easier to work with.

I made some experiments with some of my clients who use WP, and the Pareto's principle was king here, I mean, 80% of all the actions made use of 20% of the features.

I agree with you when you say that there are a lot of big players working on a minimalist approach. But I really think that there are a lot of users who really want to own their data. If you make a fast search about people incentivizing another's to get their own blog with their own domain, you'll see that maybe there's some market here.

I've never heard of KickPress, so I'll study it, but I got really impressed with HappyTables!

Thanks again for you comments. They're pretty useful!

It's a very interesting point!

I'm focused to make all the process easier (and the WP admin panel is full of boring stuff, in my opinion), so maybe the creation of the whole product could be a natural evolution of the plugin instead of a new product.

The plugin could also help me to attract users, adding some functionalities to WordPress blogs and making available an option to move to my product, with even more features.

Your feedback was really important to make me think about which kind of user I should focus initially.

First, I was thinking how to get attention of the regular user, but you made me think about how it could be a lot more useful to developers and designers in a first moment.

Your idea is awesome, I'm very grateful for your help!

First of all, thanks for your feedback!

It's really important to know the experiences of people that already worked on this area, I'll consider everything that you've said.

How it's important to me to store my thoughts and my work on my own server, I though that improving the process of blogging and bringing some social features (taking care with noise problems) would be nice to everyone.

It's really a naive approach, I know, because as you also have said, Tumblr is very powerful now and it's free.

Probably I won't get attention of the usual Tumblr user in the beginning, so I'll bet on the developers and designers, with a simple to use app for their clients and easy to work and customize (as orangethirty brilliantly suggested).

What you think about it?

Thanks again!

It's different because it's a powerful approach, I think.

Doing this, I'll make every blog open to a lot of different applications to interact with it's content.

By example, a user will be able to comment on an article published on a blog he "follows" from his own page.

I'm very interested about it too.

A non-hosted web app can be easily copied, and the solution that I've found to this issue was to bet on crowdfunding to develop and make profit with services.

Now I'm preparing the ideas to launch and as soon as I get some usefull information I'll update it.

I agree with you and it's a very interesting point, but I also think that there is another one.

Let's suppose that you're developing some tool that could solve problems of a lot of people. It's natural that you try to sell this to them (there isn't free lunch).

Getting paid only by services, in my opinion it's not that sustainable, because you'll have costs with this service and you already have other costs with development. To start making some profit, the price of the service has to be high.