Free "press" is probably the main selling point for these kinds of "build in public" things. Although I agree with you it's not that compelling... although it's similarly a little tricky to point out the downside (especially considering theres no real validation of the numbers) so kind of a wash imo. Not sure if that validates or invalidates your idea OP!
There are many clear and obvious downsides. Competitors who know whether your side of the market has value. Employees who will suck your margins. Providers who will adjust their prices if they know you have margin. At the minimum, they’ll reject rebates.
And all of those people will leave you once your figures aren’t rose.
We use it to generate automatic insights from survey data at a weekly cadence for Zigpoll (https://www.zigpoll.com). This makes getting an instant response unnecessary but still provides a lot of value to our customers.
It's funny that creating a twitter clone has been a "hello world" kind of project for most web frameworks over the last 10 years but here we are without any feature-complete alternatives.
It doesn't have to do with feature completeness but rather the network effect. Even if you build a pixel-by-pixel copy of Twitter how are you going to convince everyone to move there?
Great looking project. IMO it's good to see AI being used to teach as opposed to just plucking out the answer or generating a first draft (better if AI can add jobs rather than destroy them!). I hope you're on to something...
I've been building Zigpoll [1] over the past 4-5 years as a solo project. It's a micro survey platform (Saas) that can live on any website and can be triggered at key moments during your customer journey. I found a niche in post-purchase surveys for Shopify which helped get me over the 2K mark and build a meaningful customer feedback loop I could iterate on to find a tighter product market fit (very meta for a survey platform I know). This took about three years to hit and it helped greatly to be on an app store since it's a full service marketing channel which 1. is my weakest skillset and 2. you want all the leverage you can get if it's a part time project.
The post purchase survey angle is growing steadily but the platform was built to be flexible so I'm looking for other use-cases to focus on what competitors don't currently service for a phase 2.
Also recently it's been a great way to experiment with OpenAI and see what all the buzz is about. So far the ChatGPT API has been very impressive at spotting trends in user-provided data to share with our customers. Honestly this feature alone makes me consider focusing on it full time; but it would be a bit of a leap financially given current circumstances.
TLDR: I recommend building something, keeping your head on a swivel, getting feedback (being on an app store or marketplace makes this easier) and adjusting as rapidly as possible if you want to get paid and have a shot at bootstrapping bigger.
I don't think I made it clear the last couple of submits that it's a purely solo effort which upon reflection is one of the more interesting things about it!
Nicely designed site! Some unsolicited feedback/idea: I like the examples page but it's a few too many clicks away for the average internet attention span. Could you have a couple interactive examples directly in the hero on the front page? With a button to see "More examples". I'm imagining something like how https://tailwindui.com/ presents their front page.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree the examples page is dated and, aside from the examples actually not being that useful, the list is too long and too far away. I'll update it soon and will definitely use that example as inspo!
Flexible surveys are an incredibly broad challenge both from the client side and the analytics/dashboard side. Since it's by nature solving long tail problems the level of complexity is such that you have to have several different user paths which "just work" under the same umbrella. And entering into different markets ensures a constant flow of new features to roadmap. I am focused on e-commerce currently but it could continue to branch out into multiple sectors given enough polish and tighter integrations with relevant third party providers.
> ...You could just as well bootstrap a tiny, successful internet business selling Wordpress plugins or Shopify themes, believing that ‘startups shouldn’t raise capital’. You would then never need to update your beliefs, because those are perfectly sufficient for a small, independently-run business.
At the scale of a one or two person show the up front costs for building and selling your software are pretty reasonable. This setup rearranges how much cash you need up front to 1. be competitive and 2. win over new business. True this has a cap on it of say... ~1-2M ARR but that's a very reasonable game for a lot of smart people to be playing. I didn't read the original article he's arguing against, but if that's the style business they are discussing then the "don't raise" argument holds up. Frankly given the original article's conclusion of "don't raise money" I suspect they weren't focusing a post-IPO cable business...
As a solo founder I have a couple of startups[0] and I built Zigpoll[1] to help with this problem. It lets you embed a non-obtrusive micro-survey / contact us form directly into your website. You can use our javascript API to make it appear based on sign up, time on site, exit intent, etc... it's up to you. You could also email it out to your customers if you prefer.
Also I have to point out there are other competitors in this space you could also use like Drift, Intercom, or even an automated email flow with Calendly for example.
Wow Jason! That's so cool. I might want to use that for my website. I'm kind of upgrading it XD. My peers from Founders Cafe might also want to try Zigpoll. We're a bunch of founders that help each other with problems and we even share stories about our startup journey. You might want to join too so many people can use Zigpoll :D
