Open Startup Report - June '24
The marketing tactic for shy developers
I keep a Trello board of marketing ideas, some of them are pretty wild…
Anyway, I’ve had “Free Tools Marketing“ on my list of a while. Though I’ve built some free tools (coupon generator, invoice generator, usage-billing tool), I’ve never actually used them as a pure marketing play.
This month I decided to change that. I constantly see a bunch of tweets (yes, still call them tweets) complaining about Stripe invoices.
The main complaints are:
Stripe charge you up to $2 per pdf invoice.
You can’t change the customer details (if you’ve ever had a German 🇩🇪 customer you’ll know how frustrating this can be).
You can’t generate invoices for Payment Links (as they have no invoice in Stripe).
I had already built a tool that solves these problems by pulling the data from your Stripe account and creating the invoice pdf in code.
The problem was it was hidden inside the PriceWell app. A potential user would have to find it on the website, register an account, connect their Stripe account and finally use the tool to generate their PDF invoice.
The plan to turn it into a marketing lead generator was simple:
Make the tool accessible directly on the website. No login, no credit card yardy yar.
Promote it (Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, your mums best friend Jane who’s good a keeping secrets).
Email leads who used the tool to promote PriceWell (the main product).
To do that, I built out a simple landing page on the website
The landing page links directly to the tool. The only hurdle is that prospective users have to connect their Stripe account (we need the Stripe account in order to access the invoice details). Apart from that there’s no login required. We create a PriceWell account in the background so that it’s easy to use the full product later on without having to connect Stripe again.
I’m in the process of promoting it via the usual channels so watch out for a Product Hunt launch in the near future.
The Obstacle is… bloody annoying
I’m in the process of reading The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. The gist is that obstacles in our path are inevitable. We can see them as disasters or we can see them as challenges and learning opportunities.
Ryan gives the example of John D. Rockefeller (oil baron, my third favourite type of baron) who started as an accountant in 1855. Two years later the 1857 panic hit but our John didn’t panic with the rest of them and abandon his fledgling career in finance. Instead he saw the opportunities while prices plummeted to make some shrewd investments. And the rest as they say, is history.
The trick, as the book puts it is three-fold:
Control your emotions: I find this the hardest part. Turning off the front brain and not immediately panicking when something bad comes up is tricky.
Change your perspective: Try and flip the perspective from “this is a disaster“ to “how can I turn this to my advantage?“.
Discover the opportunity: Like Rockefeller, who was a crashing market as an opportunity to pick up cheap investments.
So it’s my challenge to you this month to see obstacles as opportunities.
As always, let me know your thoughts.