Am I making something no one needs? My Fail story and how I am going to change it.
Hello, everyone!
I joined Indie Hackers just a few months ago and I've quickly grown to love this community. I've been a web developer for nearly 20 years and recently, I decided to venture into creating something real of my own. I had some projects before but they were mostly some education project without any afford to make them profitable.
Five months back, I stumbled upon an idea and thought it would be interesting to develop. It was a concept for a platform similar to YouTube and TikTok, but for mini-courses – a place where you could learn something new every day and also create and share your mini-courses like YouTube videos.
Balancing this as a side project with my full-time job, it took me about three months to develop a simple MVP. This was sufficient to test the idea. I launched it on Product Hunt, but my lack of knowledge on how to properly launch meant I just posted it midday and ended up with no significant results.
After two to three weeks, I realized the idea was too complex. Creating a hub for mini-courses and attracting course creators who would produce useful content seemed daunting. However, I didn't give up. I created a couple of simple GPT wrappers to draw some attention. They were 'AI Course Creator' and 'AI YouTube2Course.' The first is a tool for creating courses on a given topic, and the second allows adding quizzes to any YouTube video, making it more like a course with knowledge tests.
A few weeks later, I recognized these additions weren't enough and decided to pivot completely towards a SaaS B2B model.
I introduced more features for teachers and companies, such as:
- Creating personal hubs where people can join your hub and access your private courses.
- Enhanced tools for sharing courses and quizzes.
- Additional interactive components and quizzes.
- Pricing plans.
Currently, I have:
Google Ads running daily, generating 40-50 clicks per day with a $5 budget, leading to 8-10 daily sign-ups.
About 30 monthly clicks from organic Google searches, and this number is increasing.
The Problem:
I'm not seeing any real benefits from these registrations. People sign up, try creating a course or two, then disappear. I suspect something vital might still be missing.
What's Next?
I'm contemplating two options:
-
Devote another year, or at least six months, to enhance the platform with more interactive features and business-oriented tools like password-protected courses, personalized links, and Slack integration. My goal is to reach $1,000/month to justify continued efforts. Concurrently, I plan to improve my sales and marketing knowledge, as I recognize a significant gap in these areas.
-
Abandon this project and move on to another idea.
I know this community is filled with wise and experienced individuals, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on my journey and what steps I should take next with this project.
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
The site looks cool. I write about Micro SaaS to my subscribers every week and we covered this in one of our niches and we covered some good products as well. In this case, you may just have to reach out to some influencers (by promising a good affiliate share) as you already have a working product.
Thanks a lot for a great idea! Adding an affiliate program sounds reasonable. I will definitely add it to my list.
Hey, your site looks pretty good! I would echo what others have said here - understanding your customer base is crucial for every business. Here are some ways you could do that:
Create Customer Personas: Develop detailed customer personas based on research and data. This helps in visualizing and understanding different segments of the customer base, their motivations, and behaviors.
Conduct Interviews: Engage with existing and potential customers through interviews. Ask open-ended questions about their needs, pain points, and what they expect from a product or service like yours.
User testing and prototyping: Before shipping a whole new feature make sure that your customer base actually wants the feature. Observing how users interact with the product/service can reveal a lot about their preferences and pain points.
Creating Customer Personas is something I will definitely put in my todo list. Thanks for ideas!
Dude, there's a massive market in a course platform.
Kajabi charges like $200/mo for their lowest plan IIRC.
So it's very lucrative.
If people are lukewarm towards your product, it's most likely a product-market fit issue, not a market issue.
"there's a massive market in a course platform" that was the exactly my first thought when I started making the product :-) Thanks!
Hey there! This story is really inspiring, what a great way to see the learning process in action - and making something no one needs sounds like a great way to find the things that we do need. :)
Thanks!
I went back to the page and tried to scroll down then I got this error message:
CourseCrumbs
Login
Oops!
Looks like page you are looking
for doesn't exist
Click here to return to the homepage.
[GET] "/_nuxt/builds/meta/7a3ab08a-2466-4dbe-a44d-3571b1b4e4f3.json": 404
Thanks for the message. As usual forgot to purge cloudflare cache after deploying frontend. Need to automate this thing one day :-)
Awesome products I must confess. Have you tried Facebook video ads? With the ads you can explain in details what the product is all about and walk them round the dashboard. With good creatives and ad copy I believe it should scale through. Kudos!
I tried but with just a usual post. I am thinking about making few videos for a product to showcase how it can help in learning process. One for teachers, one for companies and one in general. After probably will try facebook ads and youtube as well. I don't have much money in my pocket but definitely worth to try. Thanks for advice!
Speaking to your users should clear a lot of this up for sure! Here are a few quick wins for the website you could consider:
Clarify the Unique Selling Proposition (USP): The header should immediately communicate what makes CourseCrumbs unique and why a user should choose it. I'd drop the "AI powered" users don't care about about the tech, they're hiring your product to solve a problem. Tell me how you solve it and what's the benefit.
Visual Learning Journey: Use graphics or a flowchart to visually represent the journey of discovering, creating, and sharing courses, which could be more effective than text alone in conveying the process.
Testimonials and Success Stories: Include a section featuring testimonials from content creators and learners to build credibility and showcase the community aspect.
Feature Highlights: Instead of "Many Different Components to Make any Mini Course or Lesson Epic," use bullet points to highlight key features, such as "Interactive Quizzes," "Easy Video Uploads," or "Community Engagement."
Benefits Over Features: Focus on how the features benefit the user. For example, instead of just listing "Interactive Quizzes," explain how this feature can enhance engagement and retention of material. Show stats!
FAQ: You manually onboard? Create an FAQ with the things you repeat to new users the most
Engaging Video Content: Record a quick demo, poke around the product, show how fast and seamless the process is. A quick and dirty loom video would do it. Where you show product shots, maybe swap them out for gifs?
All the best with your next steps!🚀
Wow! Thank you for such detailed analyzes. I will use it as a roadmap for my next steps. It is a great example how useful it is to get advice from a try professional!
I would say it seems like a lot upon opening the site. I have no experience in web design and I am just now starting my own web development company, but from a graphic design standpoint, you may benefit from making it easier to just click right into a course from the jump. Make sure to space your copy so people don't have to read too much. Everyone loves audio and video now; captions are huge. Would love to connect and talk with you though!
Yep, that is a really good point, less text more video. I am thinking about making a small video (1-2 minutes long) about the idea of mini courses and quizzes. Thanks for your comment and if you want you can write me on email (in the footer on the website), It is my personal email. I would be happy to chat.
Have you tried to reach out to some of the customers, especially customers who are actually actively using your app?
If you didn't, I recommend doing that, you'll most likely get some of the answers on why people are churning
Yep, I was thinking about it and I am planing to reach some of them in couple weeks because the end of the year is not a perfect time. I was planning to make one automated newsletter to ask for feedback all registered users and also send personalized emails to 10-20 users who created the most of courses.
Thanks!
Wow, you did a fantastic job!
I'm curious about the stack you used.
Thanks :)
Pretty simple stack: Typescript. NestJs + MongoDB on backend and NuxtJs on frontend.