Maor Shlomo: preference

Transcript context

…Just begging people close to me that I feel like that they have really good connections with to use it. I feel like there's no other way. And maybe there are other ways, but, again, I was very new to like B2C, like to consumerish-type of product. And so I grabbed, well, I started with even three users, like really close friends. Two of them back at the time, I caught them in a part of their life where they were unemployed. So I was like, "Hey, why don't you try build a SaaS business or something like that?" So three really close friends. Well, somehow I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table, and they would use the tool. They will try to build something, it will break. I'll take a look, I'll take a look at the logs, I'll go back to my computer, try to change it, push into production, and then just build it for them. I feel like plenty of people are lucky to find maybe a method that consistently works for your like 10, 100, 1000 users, and then from there. But I try to look at it as like milestones. And so, first, I was like, "I'm not going to try and scale anything before I know that users enjoy it." And the best metric to seeing them enjoying it, or at least making value out of it, even if they're not enjoying because there are plenty of bugs and slowness and so on, is that they're starting to share it with someone. So I haven't invested anything in marketing before I felt like, "Okay, for the first three or five or 10 friends." At some point, they started sharing it with their friends. They're like you'd see, okay, there's one new users today and then two new users today and so on. So once it started happening, even on very low percentages because Base44 turned out later in its journey to be very viral, but back then, it was like an okay product. People loved it and all liked it and started sharing it with that. And so once I started seeing that this works, and we got to like 10 users where all my friends, and then the 11th user or something like this started seeing people that don't really know me, that's why I knew, okay, now it's time to invest in marketing or try to launch this thing or try to get more people to use it. Because if you try to do it beforehand, I feel like you're going to waste a lot of time and resources on just having a very revolving door. Like you get users in and users out, you not be able to. And unless you have a lot of money to invest in paid so that it makes sense, then it's very hard. I knew that I'm not going to do that. It's like a product that I'm building. I want it to be profitable from the get-go and not feeling bad for investing too much money into paid and so on. And so I knew that it has to be viral. At some point, I saw it's starting to look like it's viral. Then I did a very failed, very bad ProductHunt launch, but also now looking back and saying, "This is completely fine." it has to be viral. At some point, I saw it's starting to look like it's viral. Then I did a very failed, very bad ProductHunt launch, but also now looking back and saying, "This is completely fine." I feel like people sometimes treat their launches, like product launches as like make it or break it for the company. This wasn't the case for me. I was like, "This is a tool for me to get to my next 30 users, my next 50 users." And that's exactly what happened. And so first ProductHunt launch, we got like 50, I got like 15 new users. By the way, the second one broke ProductHunt. They thought that there's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month, of the week, but it's a different story. And so we got like 50 users, and we got the first user to pay. This was an insane feeling because I'm an entrepreneur coming from like the enterprise space. I was thinking that this is insane. Why would anyone pay for my product without meeting me, without looking me dead in the eyes or trying to get a discount and so on? Obviously, this user churned in like a few hours, the product wasn't good back then. But from there, I started seeing some very slow growth. So I got my first 50, and then 20 left, and then the other 30 started sharing it with like other users that were really good. And then I tried a bunch of marketing things, didn't work, influencer post or paid or something like that. And then one of my friends was also a founder, in a different space, told me, "Hey, you know what? I think it's really cool that you're building it on your own and that you're trying to like take a very different approach than the usual VC-funded way. Why don't you share content about that? At the end of the day, it's like you're going to have the same, like your audience or builders, they're trying to build their own products or maybe even businesses, and it will likely resonate with them." And so I started sharing the journey on LinkedIn, and I remember seeing posts like, "Okay, there's this nice concept of build in public, and people get really interested. " And I think here in Base44, we had this really nice synergy between the build in public and also my audience was like builders, right? If I was building, I don't know, a product to attorneys, and probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense. Once I started sharing what I'm building in public and then getting more users and improving their product tremendously, I was so lucky. The community around Base44 is nothing like I've ever seen. It's so supportive. There's so much feedback and so- [inaudible 00:46:00] is so supportive, there's so much feedback. And so from the loop of improving the product, this is exactly how people say it should feel like is like people asking for features before you can actually build them. They're getting so excited about your product. They're writing the nicest things. People have started writing like, "Hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build. I had those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers." People have started writing like, "Hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build. I had those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers." And then the other thing that I did, it worked really well, is I've noticed that people really like sharing what they're building on top of Base44. They would write posts. I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, "Dude, how much are you paying those people to write posts about Base44?" I was like, "I'm not paying anymore, honestly." So what I did is actually I did this program inside Base44 saying, "Hey, if you share just about the process of building the app or the app itself, it doesn't even have to be about Base44, if you share it in social, you'll get extra credits to build." So those two, build in public and giving out credits worked extremely well and that's how we got growth going.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.