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.:
Ayoub Moustaid is the founder of Fastdok - Online Document Generator
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
Every day, you, me, and other people spend a lot of time searching on google or asking our friends for a template to create, a project pricing document, a privacy policy, a business canvas, an invoice, or any other document. Even when we find that template, we need to adapt it, modify it, fill it with our custom texts, and structure it.
That time, complexity, and pain of searching, downloading, modifying, structuring, and adapting a document template to fit the standard and to be ready to use for business needs, pushed us to think about building a tool that may reduce this pain and help professionals on the business documents creation process.
Fastdok offers an all-in-one document generator with a process that makes it much easier and faster to get ready documents in a few minutes. You need just to pick your document template, and answer a few focused questions, no more than that!
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
We launched on Product Hunt on December 2020, and got a lot of traction with more than 200 signups in the first week of launch, along with a dozen of good feedback, also we were in the top 4 of the day & got awarded as best productivity tool of the year by the community on Golden Kitty Awards.
Saying that a feedback from paying user is always more accurate than the one of a free user, and with the fact that we have a Saas running with a freemium revenue model, and all the signup we got were for the free plan, we needed a backlog of feedback in order to improve and make our product stronger.
To do that, we decided to run some lifetime deals contracts with LTD Dealers to get paying customers along with accurate feedback, which resulted in getting more than 200 paying customers with an important backlog of feedback and review used mainly to build a backlog of features for the next release of Fastdok.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
Fastdok is mainly built on Mysql, Laravel, Blade, and some React js.
We're happy with this tech stack because I always believe that what matters the most in SaaS world is the Why behind the tool, not what you use or how you use it.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Figma for design
Crisp for customer support
Cloudways for hosting
Notion for roadmap
Fastspring to handle payments
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
When you're an entrepreneur you're dealing every day with many challenges, in multiple fields like accounting, financial, HR, sales, marketing, ... etc not only in your field of specialty which is software engineering in my case, then if I have to pick some biggest insights as a takeaway, I will say;
- Value your health and time, they're the most precious assets you have everything else comes second
.- Always try to give first and bring value to whatever you build or do
.- Never prioritize or chase only money in your entrepreneurial journey.
- Ship and talk to customers ASAP!
- ... and One more related mainly to the SaaS field, forget about what technology to use, forget about how to build, and think more about why you will build it, why they will use it!
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Books:
-Getting Things Done by David Allen
-Lean Startup by Eric Ries
-Make by Pieter Levels
-Community: Indie Hackers
