timjones

Thank you! And thanks for the tip; I'll look into that.

Hey HN!

I started building HelloHailey in public (TheMVPSprint.com) last November, and launched in January. Today, 600 teammates across dozens of teams use it every day.

My last company was backed by YC and raised ~$3 million (not a successful outcome), but this time I'm going the bootstrapped Indie Hacker route as a solo founder.

I'd love to hear your feedback - about the product, home page, messaging, or anything else. Installation only takes a few minutes if you want to try it out!

For companies where innovation previously sprouted from in-person watercooler conversations, replicating that after a sudden shift to remote work is a real challenge. Their entire DNA needs to change.

Certainly they could do it, but it's far easier for an "always was remote" company than for a newly remote company. Remote-first is in Doist's DNA.

Hey HN! Author here.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you've built MVP's in the past, and how my process could be improved.

Hey HN! Author here.

I'd love to hear any feedback you have on my MVP process (or my solution). I haven't started building yet, but I hope to have an early prototype ready in just a few weeks.

The "launch with 100 free members" strategy worked extremely well to avoid the classic "chicken and egg" problem. It's hard to quantify, but it set the tone for the community with friendly, intelligent, and experienced people.

As a new member, that led to an amazing first-time user experience where I got high-quality answers to every question I posted.

And now I'm motivated to help out other members just as the first members helped me.

Launch revenue is great, but it won't survive unless it gets this right ^^

It's not entirely clear to me why gig-workers would choose to receive compensation via equity (at least from the contents of this article).

For a W-2 employee, it's appealing to have a share price locked in - when Amazon is worth 3x what it was when an employee started, the value of their stock comp goes up 3x.

Will gig workers similarly see some sort of locked in share price to really see the value from this sort of structure?

Likely to be built within Slack, but certainly not a competitor.

Definitely a good question! Short answer - I have a strong idea, but nothing concrete yet.

I've started this whole journey with a problem-first mindset.

In the first 2 articles, I chose a problem and a niche:

As a remote product or engineering leader in tech, it's hard for my team to develop personal connections with teammates distributed across time zones.

Over the next 2 weeks I'll set my product vision and share specific requirements for an MVP. I'll scope an MVP that I can build in a month or less.

The landing page today is vague - I was hoping the problem and potential outcomes would resonate with potential users, with the goal of collecting and qualifying early waitlist sign-ups.

So far I've had 50-60+ signups, but hard to say how serious they are.

1. Customers email me.

2. I fix their issues and answer their questions as quickly as possible.

3. I email them back.

I'll develop processes when this starts to break down or take too much of my time.

Interesting. So if their 12-month plan allows for 100 seats, and they grow to 150 seats during those 12 months, then for month 13 they would:

1. Pay a pro-rated amount for exceeding the seat limit during the first 12 months.

2. Pay the 12-month contract rate for 150 seats (or maybe more if they expect to continue to grow)

Is this a common practice?

Agreed. Everything sounds like a great idea when the only thing challenging it is your own thoughts.

Thanks for the thoughts! I agree, and was thinking something along these lines as well.

I'm leaning towards having a permanent free tier with a low seat limit.

On billing, I'll definitely have an annual subscription option. From interviews I found that, in some cases, team leads will have to file expense reports and doing it monthly would be too tedious.

I'll have to think through offering quarterly and semi-annual plans. My gut feel is that it'd be too much complexity to have 3-4 options.

Hey HN! Author here.

I know there are tons of readers out there with more SaaS sales experience than me (which is none...).

See any major flaws with my strategy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with spending a week or two developing an MVP first.

I don't plan on spending more than 3-4 weeks building an MVP, which I'll start within 2 weeks.

An advantage that my current approach gives me is a few dozen low-commitment (but qualified) waitlist users that have shown some initial interest.

I obviously have some close friends that will try it out with their teams. But going distribution-first allows me to easily expand beyond that close circle to a more unbiased group of people.

Thank you! And I agree 100% with what you've said. I could preface every sentence with maybe and I think but then it wouldn't be on the HN front page :)

I know that everything I'm laying out will be much harder than I've made it seem. I see this strategy as being a north star, but necessarily a hard and fast path.

I'm only advocating for reducing uncertainty around distribution before building; not eliminating it entirely.

It's important to at least have a strong growth hypothesis that you've validated to some degree.

That's all I have right now - hypotheses.

You're right; I certainly could've delved deeper into those case studies.

I suppose at this point in the article, if you're not yet convinced that distribution is half the battle, you won't care about the rest of the article.

Thank you!

There are some people for whom growing a business is the exciting part. They can get excited about tax prep software if they see the opportunity.

I'm more like you (not one of those people). If I don't care about the problem, and (maybe more importantly) the users I'm solving it for, I won't solve it well.

Another point - not everything has to be a business - you can always work your day job and build adventure games on nights and weekends purely for fun.

Sometimes the best businesses come out of hobby projects. If not, whatever - it's fun and fulfilling.

I hope it's that easy! Until about 3-4 weeks ago, I'd rarely used Twitter for professional purposes.

It can be a bit intimidating at first to put yourself out there. And there's certainly strategy required to use it well.

But I think consistency is the name of the game to be successful with it. We'll see!

Emphasis on some haha - I don't want to claim that the collective power of the internet is more valuable than a human that's 100% invested in the business :)

But yes, I'd definitely recommend it! Feel free to DM if want any tips - https://twitter.com/AnotherTimJones.

It was uncomfortable at first, but got easier pretty quickly (and honestly a lot of fun).

Most likely will be built entirely in Slack :)

Feel free to DM me on Twitter if you had more specific ideas! https://twitter.com/AnotherTimJones/

My main point was that these companies likely had strong hypotheses about how they would grow before building an MVP.

You don't always need to prove out all your growth channels. But it's important to have strong hypotheses and remove at least a little bit of uncertainty around those hypotheses before building.

Looks like a neat tool!

I had 2 cofounders in my last company - I agree it's easier.

But so far, building in public has been a great way to replicate some of those benefits without one:

1. I have external motivation to produce results on a weekly basis.

2. I have to be able to justify all my decisions to everyone on the internet (anyone who cares at least...). I end up thinking things through more deeply.

3. I get continuous feedback from others - not nearly as good as a cofounder who's 100% in the business, but still helpful.

Thanks for the thoughts!

I agree on your first point. This is the easier niche for me right now, but probably not the best niche.

I 100% agree with your second point too. My first step was supposed to be "Choose a problem" (https://www.themvpsprint.com/p/choose-a-problem). But I can spot the flaws in how I presented this - it looks like I was starting with a potential solution someone asked about on Twitter.

That being said, the solution I'll be building is actually quite different from an "always on zoom room" - more focused on teams that operate largely asynchronously.

I'll be formalizing and sharing my product vision over the next week or two :)

Agreed! I think this is becoming even more important as the barriers to building software products shrink.

Every day, there are dozens of products being launched on ProductHunt - many of them without code.

The "easy" distribution channels are being flooded.

Thank you! Definitely interested in hearing others' thoughts on the name as well.

Here was my thinking: As a solo, bootstrapped founder, I think people are interested in the person behind the product, at least at first.

I've been using my personal story and the process of building in public to grow an email list and waitlist. The HelloHailey name gives me an opportunity to re-enforce that personal story in the product messaging.

That being said, I'm not ruling out a name change when it comes time for an official launch.

Glad you liked it! Numbers are always most interesting to me so I wanted to share them.

Hey HN! Author here.

I couldn't find any great resources while researching how to promote the launch of a Substack newsletter. After a successful launch 48 hours ago, I wanted to share my blueprint along with a channel-by-channel metrics breakdown.

Hopefully this provides some value for future newsletter "newbs" like myself :)

Happy Friday HN!

I’m building BugTracker in public as a way to walk through all the topics required to build a SaaS (software as a service) product.

- Here’s the demo - https://bugtracker.dinosaas.com/

- Here’s the source code - https://github.com/Dino-SaaS/BugTracker

There are tons of technical resources out there for learning programming. But if you’re trying to build and launch a web app, you have to know a little bit about a lot of things.

It’s hard to know where to start.

My goal with BugTracker is twofold:

1. Cover all the topics you need to know to build, deploy, and optimize your own SaaS app

2. Build reusable components so you don’t have to repeatedly reinvent the wheel as you go.

It’s built with my preferred tech stack of Ruby on Rails, Sass, and Bootstrap.

What features or general topics would you like to see covered next?

Any and all feedback is welcome!