I have a passion of making AND breaking things which I also mentioned in my Introductory post. But I do "making" a lot more than "breaking" unless there is something in particular I want to see or figure out.
So, Last month, I decided to make use of my favourite domain which is favourite for a reason. It's called Designtack.
Why is it my favourite? Let me tell you the backstory of it.
Backstory of Designtack
In 2017, Designtack was the first domain I registered as I dreamt of building my first Web Design Agency. I was in my first year of Bachelor's. After reading so many stories of "successful" people, the "demand" which was present in the market and me having the web development skills, I thought it was the right decision. It was and It was not.
Because I was already learning ReactJS and had some grip with HTML/CSS, I was making websites as Freelancing was another thing which I started in 2017. Everything was going fine, I was working for clients as well as building my agency. Until one day, I had a realisation.
I found out that the work I was getting was mainly from Word of Mouth and people hired ME because they saw my skills and had an idea of my work style. Most of my clients came from referrals. I did found some of them from websites like Upwork and Freelancer. I learnt that people were hiring me because they found it easier to trust me rather than my work proposal which was under the name of Designtack. Although, It is always better to have a work based ToS but when you get work from word of mouth, most of the people don't care about it.
Also, There are like tons of agencies and service based companies popping-up daily whose pricing is so out of the market, it will blow your mind. Competing becomes hard.
While I did (l)earn from it, The dream of building Designtack into an agency felt like vanishing. Although, I still continued. I did everything including Cold Emailing, SEO, Hiring an Intern for Marketing "Strategies", Making an amazing portfolio site and what not. It just did not seem to work out.
Hence, In this lockdown, after thorough thinking, I decided to quit building an agency and take the Indie Maker path.
Where we are now
One of the problem I always had with Designtack was, Marketing. Because my background has always been technical, I found marketing for Designtack a lot harder. Doing sales through "meetings" always scared & perceived to me as fishy thing and myself being an Introvert is like a cherry of top of that. I lost some of the work because of my inability to speak "properly" in "meeting" with client.
That is why I decided to make Designtack itself a marketing product. Somewhere I knew Social media is place where you can get work from and because most of the internet's attention reside there.
Coming back to the main part, I created Designtack which is now an online tool to create social media content, in bulk.
It's been a month since it launched and I would like to share some statistics with you:
- We have 40+ users so far.
- Almost 2000+ views.
- Content created 140+ times.
I believe it is a little progress, considering this is my first Saas application and not just some random project like others I have built.
I have already learnt quite some lessons from its launching, like:
- When you are getting a lot of feedback for your product, It means it's good and it's bad.
- Staying in touch with your target audience before launching is the key.
- I should've done it this way rather than that.
- and a lot more but I won't be sharing them as of now.
I believe it is too early to judge. However, I will post about Designtack in the next post.
For now, The project will stay live, I will work on it as well as my next project.
Yes, This will be my iteration of #12Startups12Months challenge which has already begun.
Stick around to learn more about my journey. Thank you for reading this far. I appreciate it.
Stay safe.