Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Dominik Sumer is the founder of snappify - A powerful design tool that helps you to explain and share your code snippets in a beautiful way.
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
At the beginning of 2021, we started to be more active in the Twitter Tech community and also saw more and more people sharing their code snippets. Personally, we weren’t really satisfied with how those code snippets looked and thought we could create a simple MVP that helps to create and manage beautiful code snippets with ease.
That’s how everything started and now snappify evolved into a powerful tool for explaining and sharing your code snippets with the rest of the world. (And not only as images anymore 😄 )
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
We first launched snappify in March 2021 and didn’t have a paid version until August 2021. In fact, we only started with real recurring subscriptions in January 2022. If I remember correctly we reached the first 50 customers around April 2022, after our ProductHunt launch which gave us a big boost in visibility.
Regarding our growth strategy: we’re really happy that more and more people in the Twitter / LinkedIn and Instagram Tech communities start to use snappify and also recommend it to others who want to share their code snippets. That’s a viral effect that definitely helps us spread the word enormously!
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
snappify is a Next.js application and most of the logic is being executed in the frontend. (At least at the moment, we also want to expand our API for programmatically generating beautiful code snippets).
It’s deployed on Vercel and as a Database / Backend solution we use supabase.io (which is absolutely great for us because we have minimal backend logic and can just use supabase to store and retrieve or data + handle authentication).
This tech stack lets us move really quickly and at the same time, gives us the power to deliver an excellent user experience.
Recently we also found northflank.com as a hosting provider for our API.
So we’re really happy with our current tech stack, if you want to know more details, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Twitter!
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Splitbee - Web Analytics & User Analysis
Slack - Internal Communication
Notion - Internal Documentation & Kanban Board
Paddle - Payment ProviderFeed
Hive - Social Media Management
Figma - Creating & Brainstorming Design Ideas
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
If you want to build a sustainable SaaS, make yourself clear that this is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to play the long-term game. There will be ups and there will be downs, and sometimes you have to push through and continue iterating on your product.
But also don’t forget to take breaks! It’s normal to relax and recharge batteries and there might be some weeks where you can’t or don’t want to work on your product. That’s completely okay, you don’t have to be there 24/7, just pick up again when you’re properly recharged.
And I also have learned that building an audience around you and your product definitely helps to maintain motivation and spread the word. If you don’t get any feedback, it gets super hard and it also can be really bad for your product if you don’t have users you can listen to. So get started and make it public straight from the beginning!
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Books:
Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl
The Go-Giver
The 4-Hour Work Week
Podcasts: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
