Emmanuel Jégo

Now is time to do it the right way
I have an idea of the market I want to "work for". Now I need to
- build a list of businesses I can reach out to
- ask them what they are struggling with atm
- see if I can do smth about it
May be it'll be a dead end, but that's the way to do it

These are very basic guidelines, but I learned them the hard way. After spending months building a project (cool features, fun developing challenges...), I'm struggling to find clients. I'm 100% lost. I've burnt a lot of cash.

3/ Build something small enough,
to not feel overwhelmed. My latest project is very cool (as a developer), but I'm not sure I can meet all my prospects' expectations. If I want to build a indie product, I have to lower my ambitions (at least initially).

2/ Build something in a specific niche,
so that I can easily find and target people in this niche.
Marketing is 80% of the job. If I don't know who to reach out to, I've no chances.

1/ Talk to the market first,
in order to understand what people struggle with and how to fix it with a SaaS or some other piece of software. I heard it 100s of times, never really listened to it ("I'm too smart for this" 🤓).

I've been developing online products for a few years, but I've done it wrong (as a solopreneur):
- markets too crowded
- too difficult to make people pay
- too many features to build to be competitive
- market too vast
I want to try something new to fix this.
1/6👇🧵

I don't know what's going on
I've built a tool to automate i18n files translation
People (~15) create accounts, some create a project but don't use the tool, most just quit without even creating one
Asked them, nobody answered
Sth must be wrong, don't know what
#buildinpublic

People on LinkedIn: how do you DM? You have to be connected to the person or to have a Primium account, right?

I'm a LinkedIn noob, i'd like to do some cold outreach

"THESE MORONS CAN'T FIND THE FCKING BUTTON"

I have no choice 🫠

I think I should go on LinkedIn bc that's where my ICP is...
Wish me luck
#buildinpublic

From 2300 unique visitors/day to 3300/day in 1 week, here is what I did:

I don't know 😶 I actually haven't worked on this project in the past 6 months
I'll take it anyway
Follow for more growth tips 🔥
#buildinpublic

Google probably ranked higher some of my pages 🤷‍♂️

From 2300 unique visitors/day to 3300/day in 1 week, here is what I did:

I don't know 😶 I actually haven't worked on this project in the past 6 months
I'll take it anyway
Follow for more growth tips 🔥
#buildinpublic

Haven't posted a lot lately
I've been busy implementing features for my product before a demo with a prospect happening in a few hours!
It's very exciting and stressful in the mean time, I hope everything goes well 😊

#buildinpublic

Forgot to mention addition of Angular support 🔥

Made all these changes in preparation for a demo with a prospect (coming up in a few days)
Hoping to get a lot of feedback from this demo, and maybe a new customer 🤞😀

Made some huge improvements to Polygot (i18n automation solution) lately:
- create multiple workspaces
- invite members to join a workspace
- view changes on a given date (history)
- compare changes between a date and now
- search for text content

Now let's focus on marketing 💪
#buildinpublic

Lmao I received (once again) a feedback like this yesterday
The thing is I don't even use stars, I use smileys (☹️/😐/🙂) to make it VERY CLEAR, but somehow some people still click "☹️" and say "It is a very good tool" 😂

Working on adding XLIFF format support on Polygot (for Angular projects): I hate it

Good morning Dmytro 🌞

Learning: don't be shy, talk about your product (should have done this way earlier)

Just did a phone call with a former colleague to talk about my new app Polygot
Asked him if he had any problems with his translation process: turned out he has, and he's interested in such a solution (need to make some tweaks though)
Hopefully that's the beginning of something great!
#buildinpublic

Wow that's a super low config for such a price, but I guess there aren't many VPS providers in Bulgaria!

Wow that's bad!

What's your VPS provider? And what is your VPS configuration?

Are these forms static? Or is there a way for your customers to create/edit them?
How do you handle translation? 🙂

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah you might be right, my product might be more suited to businesses rather than indie devs!

Thanks for your feedback 😀

Thanks for the feedback!

I guess you don't edit the description every other day, so automation (which my product does) wouldn't make sense for your case 🙂

Yeah that makes sense

So I should probably focus on companies (SMBs) that already have a localization process

Thanks for your feedback

Interesting take! Don't you think that depends on your product and market?
Why would companies translate their apps if not for ROI then?