Launching with $6k MRR from private beta
After a deadly 💀 entrepreneurial sin (and some good parts), we've finally released Automations.io after a very very long 10 month private beta 😮
We I made a mistake staying in private beta for too long, even though we've been making almost $6k MRR while in it. Hear me out.
There's a saying I love:
If you're not ashamed when launching, means you're launching too late
I love it. I keep saying and commenting it to everyone on IndieHackers and reddit and encouraging everyone to launch ASAP. But I'm also the one who ignored it, and kept "perfecting" and tinkering on the product for too long.
When we launched our private beta, we had few interesting enquiries from various industries. However, the MRR numbers we have now came from existing work network. What do I mean? It's people and companies I used to work with, either directly or indirectly, but in similar industries.
What we've done is, approached them with an idea that can be rephrased like - "Look, we know your business pains inside out, we've got an automation platform that can fix them and improve your results. Let's work together." And we did! And because of a very hands on relationship, we charged them higher than any prices we have now.
We've worked closely and been building business automations for them. Everything we were building had to be done through Automations.io (except browser automations in rare cases). No bespoke code, nothing. Everything has to be done through the platform. This lead us to use the product everyday and to keep reiterating and improving pains we encountered ourselves. We had to re-imagine many things from scratch, but we also landed huge new features as a result too, such as a built-in form builder and "Human Tasks" for things like requesting and waiting for manual approvals in the middle of the workflow.
So while we got lucky and we're not at a bad place today, I think we should've done things differently.
What we should've done better?
- Get the product earlier into more people hands, even in beta
- Launch ashamed much sooner 😄
What we've done well?
- We've been generating good enough MRR during our private beta
- While crunching on "perfect", worked with businesses to solve real problems
It hasn't been a smooth ride, and we don't have a perfect product. But we're finally brave enough to release it :) yay!
Now need to record a new landing page video, but we're there. Here's the beta video if anyone's bothered https://automations.wistia.com/medias/uga3rxrnyr
EDIT: I completely forgot, I highly recommend this insanely great video from Y Combinator on "How To Launch (Again and Again)"
If you're not ashamed when launching, means you're launching too lateI completely agree with this. I pushed myself to launch open beta while I was still deeply ashamed :)
Pretty cool from the first view. I recommend to built a section with templates/use cases with real-world examples. That would make me think of implementation to the daily workflow and how it can help the business.
Yeah and that would be great SEO, similar to how Zapier uses their automations 'marketplace.'
That looks like an interesting product.
I was thinking of incorporating something like your flow builder into a thing I was building, but I didn't find any nice JS libraries for it at the time.
What did you use for that?
No JS library to render the workflow. It's all bespoke written from scratch.
The workflow is stored as a linked list, where each item points to a next item. To render it, we convert the list to a "tree" structure, and then go through the tree and render it as HTML.
I'll tell you, it wasn't easy 😰 We have a working internal solution for more advanced things like loops and parallel branches, but we're delaying it for the future as these are more advanced features. Otherwise we'd never launch
We're considering to release this some day as something to embed in your own apps and tools, so you could have a "workflow builder" for your customers.
Thanks for the description.
That is exactly the code I wanted to avoid writing.
I'd say keep it under your hat for now to reduce competition!
Thank you, all the best! If you ever need any help, feel free to ping me on Twitter or LinkedIn
Appreciate the reflections although I must say that "Launch early" while I makes sense is basically what you have done in a way.
I think usually what happens is that people procrastinate their launches completely and not working enough with customer feedback to make their products better and you've clearly done this even tho it just being in beta.
The whole point is to get to learnings fast and you've done that and are clearly successful with it to some extent.
Would have been much worse to spend 10 months and launch it then get 0 traction
Exceptional, and wonderfully timed. Automations were just opened up to my eyes. And I'm really not a coder (sadface), so the opportunity to incorporate automations like this at an affordable price is just amazing. I'm looking forward to trying it in the future when I really know how to make the best use of it. Best of luck to you.
And that quote about being ashamed when you launch is great.
Thanks Samuel! Sure, if you ever wanna chat or throw some ideas around what you could automate, feel free to ping me anytime.
it looks pretty neat what you did.
seems very similar to a BPM tool, the market seems a little bit crowded, on simple google search I have found https://kissflow.com/workflow
What is your niche? How do you plan to grow and expand?
Yes, we're somewhere between an iPaaS (Zapier) and a BPM tool (Kissflow, Nintex, etc). We're also looking at adding browser automations (RPA) and intelligent automation/AI features, just not right now.
Right now we're focusing on selling to financial services companies (that's my background), e.g. lenders, mortgage providers, etc. They're heavy on manual adhoc processes, both internal and customer facing, and there's a lot of huge improvements we can do.
But outside of selling directly to those companies, we're planning to grow along with indiehackers, product hunters, solopreneurs and people starting their own businesses.
thanks, wish you best of luck
This comment was deleted a year ago.
It was from IndieHackers, a little bit of LinkedIn and most inquiries came from BetaList. (I highly recommend LinkedIn for B2B startups with higher price points)
I completely forgot to mention this, we applied to BetaList, forgot about it, then ~2 months later started seeing some activity on Twitter and we realised we got featured on BetaList and then they've stickied us on top as "Trending Startup" for 2-3 days.
Originally, we had "GET A DEMO" call to action everywhere on our landing page, leading to a form to capture an email address, then once that's completed, lead to a Calendly page to book a call.
We had about 10-15 calls booked from BetaList, with people from financial services, HR, retail stores, solopreneurs, etc. We didn't convert anyone to a paying customer at the time for various reasons, but those were very valuable calls, understanding their problems and doing personalised demos how our automation platform can help.
The way we've done those calls is, we had the first short discovery call to understand their pains. After few days or a week we had a 2nd call, where we did a very personalised 20min demo specific to their needs. This lead us to add new integrations, that while didn't convert those exact customers, are now available to anyone else.
We'll be approaching them again now - we have an existing relationship with them, we've matured since then, product greatly evolved and we're now a better fit.