Bootstrapping a startup, month 3

An overview of September for the SaaS product I'm building: GenerateBanners, a solution to automate image generation.

This month, I've been focused on product. I strongly believe I need 5-10 users who LOVE the product before starting to charge. Keeping it free enabled me to learn a lot and especially to improve the UX from the feedback. We're slowly getting to the "5-10 users who LOVE the product" mark 🤩

Launch early, launch often

I used to believe a launch is a big party with confetti and champagne. Turns out you can just share your product on a specific platform to find new users.

Polywork

This month, I've launched on Polywork, a social network to collaborate with other professionals.

Like for all social platforms, it's best to read multiple posts to understand how to best present your product to the users. I've settled on a short post from my personal Polywork account, explaining the high level idea of GenerateBanners (the Polywork post).

At first, there was no activity on the post, I was worried I had invested in the wrong platform. But then some users started to comment and send DMs asking for info or sharing feedback. The Polywork team also helped by featuring the post on their newsletter and their Twitter account, which led to even more users asking questions or even trying out GenerateBanners.

Results

Overall the type of users were mostly people who already use another visual creation tool and who don't need the automation GenerateBanners is providing. The feedback was still relevant to help me make a simpler experience.

This led to having a better month in terms of usage. We had 32 Montly Average Users (MAU) compared to 6 in August. Note that I'm only counting activated users (users who generated at least one image).

Monthly update

Product

• We now have a live Zapier integration! This makes it even easier to automate image generation: https://zapier.com/apps/generatebannerscom/integrations
• The Unsplash integration is live! You can search for Unsplash images right from the editor to build templates faster.
• The core product had a bunch of UX improvements thanks to the user feedback!
• We've also soft-launched website screenshots. You can now create a screenshot from any website directly inside your templates.
• We've also released a free demo https://www.generatebanners.com/free-open-graph-image-generator, although it's very limited compared to the actual product.

Plan

• October is all about focusing on helping nocode folks use GenerateBanners, especially now that the Zapier integration is live.

Previous issue: Month 2

Thanks to the Polywork team for the help.