The Story of One Side Project
Hello friends! For more than a year we have been developing a new project in the global market and I want to share with you our experience of launching the so-called side project (third-party project), which is now growing by 30% per week and serves as a source of users for the main product. Welcome under cat.
Just a couple of words I will tell about myself and our new product so that the context is better understood. In 2010, with a friend, I launched the SaaS service to create customer communities with my 600 thousand rubles, which I wrote about 5-6 years ago on Habré. In this project, we have attracted more than $ 1 million investment and tried to bring it into the international market. At the end of 2014, I was the initiator and business angel of another - HelpDesk system for small and medium businesses. This project was closed a year later, when the 4th CEO was changed, losing several hundred thousand rubles.
And so, at the end of 2015, with the new team, we launched WhatsHelp , a platform for sales and customer support via WhatsApp messengers, Viber, etc. This project launches initially on the global market and now the majority of platform users from Italy, Spain, Taiwan, Brazil, etc. Just for this project we decided to try launching our Side project: a widget for chatting with clients via instant messengers on the site.
')
Why did we make this product? In my opinion, launching a side project can be useful in three cases:
So, we initially wanted to use this product to understand the market (p.3) and test the idea of ​​lead generation (p.2). I want to immediately say that everything turned out even better than we expected.
Following the golden rule of any startup - make it from shit and sticks, but this week we launched the first version of the widget with support for only Facebook Messenger. It was decided to place this experimental product on a third-party domain ( http://msgus.io ), so as not to waste time integrating into the main service and in case of failure simply close the project.
At that time, I did not know where to start promoting in the global market and, without inventing anything smarter, I simply posted a link to Hacker News in the Show HN section. There are usually post new projects for feedback. Having collected about 12 apvotes and a couple of comments, we received explosive growth in ... Taiwan.
The first few days from the hieroglyphs flickered in the eyes, but after the hundredth viewed site with the widget installed. for a second it seemed that I had even begun to understand something. I do not know how useful it is, but now I can surely distinguish the hieroglyphs of traditional Chinese and, for example, Japanese =).
As it turned out, a link to Hacker News was noticed by the editor of the most popular tehnoblog in Taiwan and published an article about the widget. Further there were reposts of the article on other resources and forums. So we got over 200 widget installations for sites over the month.
Thanks to this simple steps, we learned a lot about the market of Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines, talked with local entrepreneurs and made sure that this product needs to be developed further.
After the launch of Emsgus (where we call this project among ourselves), we realized that the world is not full with FB Messenger, and businesses often use several instant messengers at once. So the idea was born to rework the widget and add support for all popular platforms: WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, VKontakte, Snapchat, Line, etc.
No sooner said than done! And after another couple of months, our side-project WhatsHelp Chat Widget is born. We have long thought whether to develop a new widget on a separate domain or make it part of the main product. Since item 1 (product hypothesis check) and point 3 (market exploration by force) worked, it was necessary to quickly and easily try to generate leads. The easiest thing to do was to place the new widget directly on the main product site. This is how the widget constructor appeared on our website ( http://whatshelp.ru/widget ):
Since the launch of the first version of the widget, dozens of articles have been read on launching projects on the global market, and this time I decided to try my hand at Product Hunt (abbreviated as PH). Recently, a lot has been written about this site, but still I will explain for those who do not know.
PH is a place where some people (hunters) publish new products, and other people (community members) vote for them. Every day the list is updated and voting takes place, according to the results of which, at the end of the day, TOP projects are formed. Entering TOP 5 is very difficult and very cool. For a place in the sun, you have to compete with Google, Apple and hundreds of other companies with really cool products.
After some preparation, we published our PH widget. As it was - another story and worthy of a separate article, but after 18 hours of struggle, we still got into the coveted TOP 5! I certainly did not cry with happiness, but it was a great result. In the screenshot below, we are second to the top.
Then there were 100,500 posts on Twitter, several posts on third-party portals and blogs in Italy, Portugal, etc. But you are probably waiting for the numbers, and I have them (by the state on October 28).
The numbers speak for themselves. Of course, not all third-party projects are successful, but if you do not spend a lot of resources and experiment, then such projects can more than pay off.
I hope it was useful and interesting. I will be glad to questions in the comments.
Successes!
Prehistory
Just a couple of words I will tell about myself and our new product so that the context is better understood. In 2010, with a friend, I launched the SaaS service to create customer communities with my 600 thousand rubles, which I wrote about 5-6 years ago on Habré. In this project, we have attracted more than $ 1 million investment and tried to bring it into the international market. At the end of 2014, I was the initiator and business angel of another - HelpDesk system for small and medium businesses. This project was closed a year later, when the 4th CEO was changed, losing several hundred thousand rubles.
And so, at the end of 2015, with the new team, we launched WhatsHelp , a platform for sales and customer support via WhatsApp messengers, Viber, etc. This project launches initially on the global market and now the majority of platform users from Italy, Spain, Taiwan, Brazil, etc. Just for this project we decided to try launching our Side project: a widget for chatting with clients via instant messengers on the site.
')
Why did we make this product? In my opinion, launching a side project can be useful in three cases:
- Verification of the product hypothesis. When it seems to you that some option may be useful in the main product, but you are not sure so much to immediately embed it in the project.
- As a source of leads for the main product. This approach works great when you offer customers something for free in exchange, for example, for their contacts. To get something, they fill out a form.
- To "feel the market." Do you know which messengers and how are used by wedding agencies in Taiwan? So I did not know before the launch of the widget).
So, we initially wanted to use this product to understand the market (p.3) and test the idea of ​​lead generation (p.2). I want to immediately say that everything turned out even better than we expected.
First experiment
Following the golden rule of any startup - make it from shit and sticks, but this week we launched the first version of the widget with support for only Facebook Messenger. It was decided to place this experimental product on a third-party domain ( http://msgus.io ), so as not to waste time integrating into the main service and in case of failure simply close the project.
At that time, I did not know where to start promoting in the global market and, without inventing anything smarter, I simply posted a link to Hacker News in the Show HN section. There are usually post new projects for feedback. Having collected about 12 apvotes and a couple of comments, we received explosive growth in ... Taiwan.
The first few days from the hieroglyphs flickered in the eyes, but after the hundredth viewed site with the widget installed. for a second it seemed that I had even begun to understand something. I do not know how useful it is, but now I can surely distinguish the hieroglyphs of traditional Chinese and, for example, Japanese =).
As it turned out, a link to Hacker News was noticed by the editor of the most popular tehnoblog in Taiwan and published an article about the widget. Further there were reposts of the article on other resources and forums. So we got over 200 widget installations for sites over the month.
Thanks to this simple steps, we learned a lot about the market of Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines, talked with local entrepreneurs and made sure that this product needs to be developed further.
Develop the idea
After the launch of Emsgus (where we call this project among ourselves), we realized that the world is not full with FB Messenger, and businesses often use several instant messengers at once. So the idea was born to rework the widget and add support for all popular platforms: WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, VKontakte, Snapchat, Line, etc.
No sooner said than done! And after another couple of months, our side-project WhatsHelp Chat Widget is born. We have long thought whether to develop a new widget on a separate domain or make it part of the main product. Since item 1 (product hypothesis check) and point 3 (market exploration by force) worked, it was necessary to quickly and easily try to generate leads. The easiest thing to do was to place the new widget directly on the main product site. This is how the widget constructor appeared on our website ( http://whatshelp.ru/widget ):
Launch
Since the launch of the first version of the widget, dozens of articles have been read on launching projects on the global market, and this time I decided to try my hand at Product Hunt (abbreviated as PH). Recently, a lot has been written about this site, but still I will explain for those who do not know.
PH is a place where some people (hunters) publish new products, and other people (community members) vote for them. Every day the list is updated and voting takes place, according to the results of which, at the end of the day, TOP projects are formed. Entering TOP 5 is very difficult and very cool. For a place in the sun, you have to compete with Google, Apple and hundreds of other companies with really cool products.
After some preparation, we published our PH widget. As it was - another story and worthy of a separate article, but after 18 hours of struggle, we still got into the coveted TOP 5! I certainly did not cry with happiness, but it was a great result. In the screenshot below, we are second to the top.
Result
Then there were 100,500 posts on Twitter, several posts on third-party portals and blogs in Italy, Portugal, etc. But you are probably waiting for the numbers, and I have them (by the state on October 28).
- The total number of installations of the widget - 1079
- The number of registrations in the main product - 300+
The numbers speak for themselves. Of course, not all third-party projects are successful, but if you do not spend a lot of resources and experiment, then such projects can more than pay off.
I hope it was useful and interesting. I will be glad to questions in the comments.
Successes!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/313838/
All Articles