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.:
Kyleigh Smith is the founder of Harold the Habit Tracker - A habit tracker you can actually stick with. Harold is the first-ever SMS based and GPT-3 powered habit tracker.
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
Before I built Harold, I was a lurker on Twitter and Product Hunt. I would scroll for hours, in awe of all the cool products indie makers were building. I wanted to do the same thing myself and had a ton of ideas, but never actually made progress on them.
Around this time, I read an article by Steph Smith, “How to Stay Committed to Your Goals”, where she said, "The best way to stay committed to your goals is to a) track progress daily and b) share your progress openly."This sounded simple enough, but there was one problem. I had tried tracking my habits many times before and failed every time. She made tracking your daily progress sound so easy, but for me it wasn't. I would do it for a day or two and then fall off / forget about it.
That's when I had this idea for an SMS-based habit tracker. I had heard about Twilio and how it was now easier to program sending SMS messages and I thought if I made the habit tracking process as easy as sending a text message then maybe I could stick with it. Fast forward, I built a prototype and started using it myself, and I successfully tracked for 4 months straight.
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
I'm still working towards my first 50 paid customers! I have about 39. But I've had over 1,000 signups so I'll focus on how I got those first signups.
I started building in public on Twitter and got 35 signups in the first week. I kept tweeting and building it public and eventually reached 100 signups in ~4 months.
I was working a full-time job at the time, so I was only working on Harold on nights and weekends which meant I was growing slower. But this was my first project so getting to 100 in 4 months was really exciting to me!
My strategy was to just keep talking about Harold on Twitter and make sure to make my Twitter bio clearly point to the Harold webpage. Another thing I tried was searching for tweets where people were talking about habit trackers and then joining in on those conversations. Additionally, connecting with people on Twitter, replying to other tweets, and building relationships really helped too.
My strategy was to just keep talking about Harold on Twitter and make sure to make my Twitter bio clearly point to the Harold webpage. Another thing I tried was searching for tweets where people were talking about habit trackers and then joining in on those conversations. Additionally, connecting with people on Twitter, replying to other tweets, and building relationships really helped too.
Moving forward, I’ve been working on growing through SEO. For instance, I recently wrote this article about the best atomic habits habit tracker
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
I'm using Autocode + Airtable + Twilio. Autocode is a great low-code tool (I call it Zapier on sterorids) allowing me to customize logic and run the full back-end.
Airtable has been great too, and surprisingly has scaled really well. I have tens of thousands of rows and its still working great.
Twilio is good too, there are some limitations such as it's more expensive to send message to non-US countries and it can be hard to troubleshoot when messages don't get delivered. Sometimes carriers like T-Mobile or AT&T can block certain messages from being delivered but don't always tell you why.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Autocode, Airtable and Twilio for sure. I also use Twitter, Unicorn Platform for my website (although I want to move to Webflow), and mailerLite for emails.
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
1. Building a successful product and business takes a lot longer than you think. I thought I could take a year off from working full-time and get Harold to $10k MRR. Turns out, its not that easy. I realized it's going to take a lot more time to get it to that point and I need to treat it as a marathon, not a sprint. Thinking of it as a sprint led me to waste time on finding "quick hacks" like marketing on TikTok or running ads in newsletters, rather than doubling down on what is working.
2. Working a full-time job while working on your product can be a good thing–it forces you to only focus on the highest impact items and keeps you in a rhythm of consistent work. Harold was making a lot of great progress when I still had a full-time job. When I got layed off and focused on Harold full-time, my growth actually slowed. Now that I'm working full-time again, I feel momentum picking up again. It's counter-intuitive, but I've found it to be true.
3. If you don't talk about your product then no one will. I realized I'm not talking about. Harold nearly enough. I need to be tweeting about him every day. I'm working on that.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
My book! The Honest Guide to Indie Making (https://bagelsandgranola.gumroad.com/l/honest-guide-to-indie-making) reads like a novel of my experience building Harold. All the ups, all the downs, everything that worked, and what didn't work.
I also recommend The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Doing Content Right by Steph Smith, Indie Hacker podcast, @threehourcoffee's new podcast, The Weekly Build https://www.theweeklybuild.com/
