Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my side project
I am looking for any kind of feedback on my side project template2pdf[1]. My main problem is to spread the word about the service without behaving or feeling like a spammer. I get a sign up now an then, some people are using the service on a regular base, so I guess I am not totally off with the product itself.
If you have the time and energy, please provide feedback on the following questions:
Do you understand the problem I'm solving? English is not my first language, if you have an idea on how to communicate better, please let me know.
Do you like the website itself?
Any idea on how to improve the sign up form? Should it be on the start page?
Sadly, I have not nearly enough visitors to do A/B testing, so I need people to actually tell me their opinion.
At the moment, you could actually enter a wrong email address and just start testing. Should I advertise that?
About getting people to know the service:
I'm not active on facebook, twitter or any kind of social media service that could help me to spread the word. Does anybody have experience in paying somebody to market to a target group there? Without feeling that this is somehow shady?
As a general question: How do you promote stuff without already established social media status while not behaving or feeling like a spammer?
Thanks for your time.
[1] http://template2pdf.com/
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2014 where @seven convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
Lawyers and accountants, accounts payable, general ledger. Anyone who needs to have a .PDF, print it, sign it, scan it back. In large quantities.
I visited your site. It is simple and straightforward. But something surprised me: I was expecting the likes of Accenture, E&Y, Genpact, someone like that, as a target market (internal solutions may exist in these companies, but I have never encountered them, always a cropped screenshot then copy-pasted document, and this has been thousands of times).
Smaller clients does make sense: your target market as smaller clients could knock the pants off larger clients (in a small, accounts payable way) in terms of style an appearance. Can you get your clients to integrate to SAP or other accounting systems?
In direct answer to your questions (Firefox on Mint Ubuntu/Linux/GNU):
I am not a fan of the typography. For polish, add a bit of line-spacing, in the bullets in particular.
Perhaps separate each section (topic area) of the front page with a different background (I know this is terribly Bootstrap, but hey).
Registration: Do not advertise a lack of credibility / assuredness. But do not demand intrusive personal information (turns off both corporate types trying something out and technologists for a myriad of reasons).
I did not detect an option for HTTPS. This is a must for any site proposing dealing or storing financial or client information.
Try a start up form on the front page, or a direct shot of a demo. Include use cases and customer comments (do not fake these, make them checkable - check with your commenters this is OK beforehand).
Word of mouth counts for a lot, especially in professional circles that do not use social media (other than perhaps talk to one's family and old friends). Get a foothold with some oldskool businesses, then when you have a little coming in as revenue seek ways to pump it up (when you've shown it is a credible service this is orders of magnitude easier, in the most unexpected ways).
I think this is a great service! However the landing page is suffering from listing the features instead of the benefits.
Obviously you/developers care that it's a cool API that will replace the values. Will the mass market? Probably not. They want to know what they have to put in and what they will get out of it. Some visual reference to this would be good.
After all it's called template2pdf not template2API2pdf :)
I can see that currently you're thinking in the developer mindset but with some tweaks you could make it accessible for those that can't just send a hash. It could be awesome for LOTS of industries. Basically any industry that has sales reps & prepares quotes/invoices on the fly.
Maybe they just get a URL bookmark that displays an input form where they can enter their changing values & a PDF e-mailed to them. How great would that be to do mid-meeting on an iPad! A professional quote done before the end of the meeting. No going back to their office to prepare it! Sales reps would love that.
I almost missed that the words Template, API & PDF were links - I only found the output example by chance on second look! The output is super important, show it straight away!
Try to find a way of showing the template/input without it being a download.
Let people test it straight away - only ask for the e-mail/payment when they want to save their finished template.
As for not being a spammer, you can easily create content that isn't 100% sales pitch. So maybe you start a blog about automating & streamlining procedures, admin hacks etc - then at the end of each post you can refer back to how great template2pdf is.
Also, you could get a designer to create some pretty sweet template designs & make them part of the paid tiers.
My 2 cents - You have software built, now comes the challenging part of actually building a business around it. There are lots of things that you can do, I would suggest making all of the below equal priorities going forward:
- Meet your customers needs: I don't really know what this means, make sure to hear from those that are using it right now, and those that will say that they will do it. You might end up getting feedback to add features like: a) Templates: You support only OpenOffice templates? I believe it should not be too hard to support more formats like RTF, Text Documents, and MS Office documents. b) API: Supporting Node.js, Java, and other languages. You might want to look at a site like Stripe.com for examples on how to structure developer documentation. c) Output: Perhaps supporting HTML outputs as well as PDFs.
- Homepage: I think your homepage looks good, but can get much better. It might be a good idea to find similar/adjacent companies and see how they do their homepage. I think you should move the 'reasons to use' further up the page.
- Pricing Page: Not sure if I really care about the number of servers running. Also, jobs per day - are you really expecting that many users? I think you might want to significantly reduce the amount of usage per day in each tier. I think you will also likely want to tier on different criteria - perhaps support, keeping a history of converted documents, and others that your users will ask for.
- Conversion: Are you tracking what percentage of visitors are converting to signup? Are you trying A/B testing different prompts to them?
- Driving Traffic: You could think about doing guest posts, blogging on your site, buying ads, and building integrations into other tools to drive traffic.
The website is nice and clean, well done! The idea is clear for a developer-type of mind.
Just a few specific remarks:
* smallest billing period is 1 month so I'd change jobs/day quota to jobs/month. Daily quota for a monthly plan is somewhat confusing and looks rather restrictive if it doesn't roll over to the next day.
* I'd drop yearly plan and "Servers" limit to keep things clear and simple. If needed, would add "contact if you need special arrangements (self-hosted, yearly plan etc)".
* To become easier to find by search, I'd find main use-cases why someone would use this template API for bulk-pdf conversion in the first place and use these use-cases for the selling, not focusing on the "template" and "API".
If it turns out that most of the users are using it for just one specific use-case then I'd focus on these and go extra mile to make it even more useful for that specific user-group.
The risk of focusing on actual use-case is that right now the site is very easy to understand, if rewriting it to tailor for use-cases then dev-minded surfer doesn't grasp what goes on.
I'd see companies use this service to generate invoices for small businesses or SaaS providers (running monthly the database query and feeding it to your API and storing the invoice in S3); tickets; vouchers; event nametags; customizing a presentation and document that is sent to the customers' user; where else?
EDIT: Ahh yes, and when logged in, please provide a way to see pricing and a way to convert to a paid account! :)
Clicketty-click: http://template2pdf.com/
I visited your site expecting exactly the same kinds of problems I've given feedback about many times before[0][1].
I was pleasantly surprised. The landing page is clean, clear, and I immediately understood what you were doing. I don't have a need for your service, but I can see that it could easily fill a need.
I don't know how easy it is to use, but if the execution is good then I think you might have something. You have identified your problem, though. Exposure. You might want to change your landing site to increase the size of the problem being solved, and reduce the links to "Template," API," etc. The visitor needs to be reminded immediately of the pain, that way you catch their attention.
Others may have more to add about the marketing problem and your pricing choices. A few questions/comments:
* How is this better than just exporting a PDF from PowerPoint?
* Some of your copy seems to be targeted at sys-admin types - they aren't the ones with money.
* I suspect you need to start getting a network of interested people.
Good luck!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857964
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839799