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Marc Köhlbrugge
PRO
@marc
https://api.wip.co/v1/users/me.json?api_key=wip_sk_FOOBAR
response["streak"]
Replace wip_sk_FOOBAR with an API key from wip.co/my/api_keys
If you have a working product with negligible MRR, you’ve basically proven that the idea doesn’t work or is hard to find customers for.
That’s how potential buyers will look at it anyway.
So I think it’s very hard to find a buyer for these types of products. Buyers are better off investing their time and money into a different idea that isn’t disproven yet.
Also consider the time required to do an acquisition and the legal risks on both sides. That means there’s a starting price of a few thousands dollars just in time alone.
I hope you prove me wrong, but this is kinda my experience and makes sense I think.
Thank you for the input, I appreciate that. I took a moment to reflect on that, and it makes sense. In my case however, I think it's really just the time I don't have on growth. There are several competitors/copy cats out there like that make money. That makes me believe that it's just not getting the love it deserves and would need someone that has more experience with that phase of the business.
I think my biggest problem is converting people. I don't want to leave any details, but I don't have a terrible lot of users who use it and pay for it, but almost a thousand registered. For a micro SaaS API business I think that's fine. I think they just don't know what to build with it.
mind sharing some stats about the product?
Not publicly, but you can hit me up on twitter if you're interested: @andinfinity_eu
It might be automated. Note that they say "possible Terms of Service violation".
To @philipithomas' point, Stripe is a registered trademark and they might have had too many issues with TM infringement that they are better of automatically suspending accounts (while providing a way to reinstate legit ones) rather than the other way around where they'd face the threat of litigation.
I'd just reach out to the email address they provide and clear things up.
Eyy Marc what's up? I finally solved my ban on cloudflare and got my domain back but I just got it when I bought stripeautomail.com. I wanted to thank you again!
For your example, it might be something like this:
Goal: Reach 10,000 users (by experimenting with different marketing ideas)
Invert goal: Reduce the number of registered users to zero
Achieve inverted goal: Delete the database, remove the signup buttons, use confusing website copy, suggest better alternatives, remove the most valuable features, make it really easy to delete your account (even by accident), make the site unusable on mobile, block search engines from indexing my website, charge prices customers are unwilling to pay, only accept the least popular payment method
Achieve actual goal: [you can fill this in…]
A thing I noticed in the replies, including my own, is that many of the “how to achieve inverted goal” answers include a lot of “don’t do X”.
I wonder if that’s cheating? 😅
Because really you’re just taking your preconceived notions of what to do and inverting them so you can later invert them once again.
It would be interesting to try this exercise with the condition you can’t use the words “don’t” and “not”.
You are right. Maybe we need more examples to do it properly.
For your example, it might be something like this:
Goal: Reach 10,000 users (by experimenting with different marketing ideas)
Invert goal: Reduce the number of registered users to zero
Achieve inverted goal: Delete the database, remove the signup buttons, use confusing website copy, suggest better alternatives, remove the most valuable features, make it really easy to delete your account (even by accident), make the site unusable on mobile, block search engines from indexing my website, charge prices customers are unwilling to pay, only accept the least popular payment method
Achieve actual goal: [you can fill this in…]
Haha yes! Here's an example in a workshop I ran - it was with care nurses and the organization had major recruitment (and retention) problems and the vast majority were women because it's a low paid role seen as a "woman's job". Even more pronounced in rural areas. So we did a reverse engineering - How would we not attract any man to this position? That resulted in things like (just a few easy examples of the hundreds) :
- Pay them a low wage
- Be unflexible about working hours
- Don't allow their car expenses to be deductible
- Provide scheduling rosters 48 hours in advance
- Make them do the annoying administrative tasks
- Make them wear outfits they don't like
- Don't give them any technology to do their job more effectively
- Use job titles like sister and midwife and nurse
- Tell society men don't care about looking after people
- Use pink in the advertising for roles
- Use words such as nourishing, care provider and calming nature in job descriptions
- Only give them the nursing jobs that don't provide much progression or skills improvement such as aged care
- Force them to do rotations across all the types of nursing roles
- Tell them they can't care like mothers can
- Make double shifts seem like they need to be accepted to keep your job
- Never show them the cool professions and things nursing can do for them (assistant anesthetist for operations, travelling the world, military nurse, doctors without borders, teaching, ICU care etc)
- Don't subsidize childcare if they're with a working partner so he burns out in no time juggling the household and kids outside 10 to 12 hours shifts
- Make sure there are no personal days off, mental health support for dying patients, horrible events, reducing burn out
Then we reversed it with a goal (which I think is necessary for creative thinking). If we needed to have 50% men in the candidate pool in the next six months, what would we do? (education funnel issues aside of course). This inverted some but also added many many others that had nothing to do with the inversion as the brain is working.
Maybe that helps with an example!
BTW, I suggest implementing it in such a way that you're not tied down to any specific API provider. There are many open source libraries out there with OpenAI compatible API endpoints (which Groq also supports). So if you use that, it will be relatively easy to switch service providers in the future.
@smitmartijn pointed this out on X just now, but also highly recommend looking at Cloudflare AI Gateway so you can have automatic fallbacks between different providers, real time logs, response caching, and a bunch of other useful things that will either improve your DX or save you money, or both
Why would you want to run it yourself?
Unless you have a VERY good reason, I'd use Groq as it's fast and affordable. In the future you can probably run it on device when browsers and operating systems have built-in support for LLM's.
BTW, I suggest implementing it in such a way that you're not tied down to any specific API provider. There are many open source libraries out there with OpenAI compatible API endpoints (which Groq also supports). So if you use that, it will be relatively easy to switch service providers in the future.
@smitmartijn pointed this out on X just now, but also highly recommend looking at Cloudflare AI Gateway so you can have automatic fallbacks between different providers, real time logs, response caching, and a bunch of other useful things that will either improve your DX or save you money, or both
What does this mean? 😅
@marc You know how you can upload an excel sheet and chat with gpt about it, ask it to crunch numbers and analyse, spot opportunities ? Imagine uploading the entire logs of a product and asking wip ai anything related to it
Ah right. Yeah that's what I'm getting at with this post. What questions would you ask this WIP AI?
Will crunch numbers and find patterns, like how much time spent marketing vs building, revenue ups and downs, who are my customers, how much they spend, how often, how many recurring, from which countries, which profile spends the most, which plan has most customers, was there a spike in traffic when i tried this marketing hack, did this feature bring more customers etc etc. Do foresee might haver to upload or sync other data like from stripe or analytics to be able to answer those questions
I see. That would indeed require a many other data sources as well. Not sure that's a direction I'm willing to go, but perhaps I can provide WIP as a data source so service offering these kind of services. (I think ChatGPT will do this at some point)
Ah i see. Hmm for WIP data related questions, I can think of: how much % tasks spent on coding vs marketing, which time of year am I most productive, any patterns of highs and lows of work, which product has the best streaks, what kind of tasks i do the most, are they busy work or work that moves the needle on revenue. "I have this problem, who else had solved it or working on it before." "I have an idea, how many other WIP indies had built it, launched it, made it profitable."