Who successfully launched their startup in 2020?

Ruslan
16 replies
Covid gave my team a big push and we successfully launched a new project https://en.nwicode.com/ I am interested to hear your story about the successful experience of launching your startup in this difficult year for all of us. How did the pandemic affect your project, how did you deal with it.

Replies

Patrick Sullivan
Hey, 👋 here is our story... I quit my job at Shipt in April to start a company, Linq, with my co-founders and then the pandemic hit 😳. Once the lockdowns started we had a stressful few months iterating and experimenting and trying to find something people needed and would pay for during the pandemic. We had some funny launches that we learned a bunch of "what not to do" from. We eventually launched an experiment to test out selling nfc enabled physical products for networking and it was successful. We focused there and grew that significantly in the second half 2020. We then launched a subscription inside of our app and have grown that well leading into 2020. Needless to say I'm excited about 2021, connect with me if you want to keep in touch 👉 linqapp.com/patrick
NwiCode 2.0
NwiCode 2.0
@patsully88 It sounds great, you were able to overcome the problems and quickly find the right path.
Cica-Laure Mbappé
Hi, thank you for this thread. It has been an exciting year! We launched the beta version of keypup.io ( a development workflow streamlining tool for developers and tech leads) in October. As we grew our users' database, we had precious feedback that allowed us to upgrade some features and app integrations. We have exciting projects coming up in 2021!
Jeremy Cleverly
"Successful" is a subjective term my friend lol, but after a long time in development and beta, we did launch in 2020.
NwiCode 2.0
NwiCode 2.0
@jeremy_cleverly "Successful" it's not just a term, it's if you really succeeded in your project right in the midst of a pandemic.
Bart Melton
I launched mine (https://www.centipenny.com) at the end of the year. It was successful in that it launched. Successful as a business is still TBD. Honestly, the pandemic didn't really have an impact.
Matthew Page
It's been a tough year, I'm plan to launch my product on Jan.6; hope to get some good feedback at that time.
Travis Elkins
!r4nkt (https://r4nkt.com) was opened up for early access just before the Christmas holidays. I agree with @jeremy_cleverly in that its success is subjective. But, imho, it was successful. 2020 allowed for that little bit of extra time that made the difference. It made it possible to reach a modest MVP status that is now ready to be introduced to the world. I think the next steps will be a bit more difficult. Getting people to take a look and see what !r4nkt can do for their app/game/website is the next goal. As a developer, blogging and marketing and sales are interesting and even a lot of fun, but they're also time consuming and require their own sets of skills to do well. So, we're hoping to reach people who are interested in gamifying their app/game/website as part of our early access program....*or*, simply providing feedback on the site itself. If you're interested, take a look and share your thoughts: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Jeremy Cleverly
@telkins Congrats on the MVP! I would agree, 2020 did bring many challenges, but with challenges comes opportunity. We were fortunate in that we did not have to pivot as many companies did; actually, the remote / work from home trend along with other changes helped highlight the need for our product. I checked out your company website. We have toyed around with ideas of how to both gamification for our app and in our advertising as well. Given that this is your area of expertise, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how HomePage might either incorporate gamification or benefit from it.
Travis Elkins
@telkins @jeremy_cleverly Thanks...! Yes, "with challenges comes opportunity"...! :-) Thanks for checking out !r4nkt. Any feedback you might have is welcome. :-) I took a look at !homepageapp, too, of course. This is actually an idea that I think has great merit...and one that I know I've spent some time thinking on before. It would be nice to see something like this gain enough traction to become more mainstream. With that being said, let me try to quickly let you know my thoughts on how HomePage might benefit from gamification. First, you may want to check out this article that explains some of the benefits of gamification: https://r4nkt.com/blog/why-gamif.... It gives a birds-eye view, as you can imagine, but it should be enough to help you to understand a bit more about how and where gamification can help. To be more specific, though, and without knowing all the ins and outs of HomePage, I would think that the main areas of benefit would be in guiding and motivating your users. I think the guiding area is mainly to help educate your users on what can be done with your app. When they know that they can earn badges by doing different things, then they're more likely to look a little closer on how they can go about doing them. This is a great way to educate your users on what's possible within your app/service. As for simply guiding your users through your app's features and such...there are limits. If an app or service isn't terribly complex/complicated, if it has an already-educated user base, or if it's sufficiently intuitive or well-documented, then the benefits here are limited....if that makes sense. As for motivating your users, you can use gamification to encourage your users to do certain things. As I mentioned before, this is an idea that I've had for quite a number of years now....so I know a few things that might get in the way of success. One of those things is traction, as I mentioned before. The more people use it, the more valuable it will be for each individual user. So...you would want that for your users *and* for yourself/HomePage. This means that you would want to encourage your users to refer/invite others who aren't yet HomePage users. You can have achievements related to invites/referrals, as a simple example. You could have several that are incremental in nature, meaning that they can relatively easily accomplish one, which might whet their appetite to try to achieve the others. To take this idea a bit further, you could show your users how they *rank* against their contacts, encouraging a little friendly competition between each of your users and their respective contacts. If you did this with *all* of your users, think of the extra incentive that each one would have to get another invite/referral...? :-) On a related note, some of the new features we hope to add in the next few months is around groups/friends. This will make leaderboards/rankings between groups/friends very easy...adding more more way that your users can enjoy the app and HomePage can enjoy further success in growth, usage, a happy/satisfied customer base. Some more quick thoughts....since businesses likely (will come to) play an important role in all of this, you can provide bigger incentives to business-related activities. Referring/inviting another contact might earn 10 points, but referring/inviting a *business* contact might earn 50 or 100 points. Whatever it is, you might look for ways to more strongly incentivize the behavior that will best help HomePage. I think that's about it. Sorry for the Wall of Text. Hopefully it's something you found helpful. I'm sure if I were more familiar with the app and your goals then I might be able to provide more concrete and varied suggestions. Whatever the case, thanks again for your feedback/interest. If you have more feedback, I'm all ears. :-). If you have more questions/interest, I'd be happy to help you more. Perhaps we could continue our discussion in a more suitable forum...? Just let me know. Take care.... :-)
Travis Elkins
@jeremy_cleverly Hey, Jeremy....in case you're still interested, I just recorded/posted a video showing a basic walk-through of r4nkt:
Check it out and let me know what you think. 🤓
Jeremy Cleverly
@telkins Checking it out now!
Travis Elkins
@jeremy_cleverly Cool...! Let me know if you have questions/comments. 🤓
Travis Elkins
Well, I "launched" in late 2020, but as of today, https://r4nkt.com is officially open for business...! 🥳 Check it out and let me know what you think. 🤓
NwiCode 2.0
NwiCode 2.0
@telkins I think it's a great idea. I checked your site, but I didn't find any usage examples. My company provides a mobile app development service, how can we combine our services? Thanks!