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.:
- What other products are you working on? (if any)
Goutham Jay is the founder of famewall.io - a tool to collect & embed testimonials on customizable walls of fame entirely with no-code!
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
I began building a lot of businesses 1.5 years ago but ended up facing failures in a lot of them. I then followed the approach of validating before building. So that got me interested in researching problems in the user onboarding space in the month of February.
I tried out a lot of testimonial tools but found that they were quite slow & had limited customization options along with brand appeal. I wanted to innovate entirely on that front & as a solo founder, I started building Famewall -A tool to collect & embed social media, video testimonials on customizable walls which can be embedded on landing pages in under 1 minute with no-code!
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
At the moment, I have 4 paying customers. I launched the product in the month of March 2022.
I was building in public on Twitter, Indie Hackers so that garnered some attention for my product. But I got my first paying customer only in the first week of April who was kind enough to give me some feedback as well :)
Since then I started doubling down on social media marketing on reddit, twitter, IH, Product Hunt since my product provides integrations with most of those platforms. I then started getting even more paying customers a month later.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
I'm currently using the MERN stack to build my project. I haven't found technical limitations as such since most of them could be solved with the help of online forums & it's been working smoothly
But the biggest challenge for me is to manage each of these stacks as a solo founder. Since my time & attention are limited, I'm only able to work on those frontend/backend/DB tasks which are absolutely necessary :)
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
I'm using unicorn platform, Pirsch Analytics for page view analytics, stripe for payments, sendgrid for emails but will soon be switching to my own product -> mailboat.io :)
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
The biggest takeaway for me as an entrepreneur is to hone & practice a lot of patience. While this sounds so simple, practically it's really hard.
We're living in a world of instant gratification where we're used to getting everything we want quickly. That affected my entrepreneurial journey too where I was getting stressed in the first month when there were no sales
I lost a lot of confidence & spent those time feeling low. But the fear of failure kept me going & I put myself together when approaching people about my product. Luckily I got my first paying customer in the second month which instilled a lot of confidence in me.
Ever since then I've always seen patience & tenacity as the highest virtues for entrepreneurs :)
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford was a recent read which I found insightful for the SaaS journey.
My all-time favorite books are Alamanac of Naval Ravikant & Skin in the Game
Indie Bites Podcast & Wannabe Entrepreneurs Podcasts are really great for entrepreneurs
What other products are you working on? (if any)
I've currently started building mailboat.io after facing a problem when building Famewall. At that time, I found it quite difficult to send emails to my customers who were using the SaaS product - Famewall.
Mailboat is an email tool that makes it extremely easy to send email campaigns to customers using a Rich text editor & setup email automation
Mailboat.io is currently under development. Will soon be launching the Private Beta for the product in a month :)
