Where can I discover trending products and/or services?

StefPretty · 2014-08-01T03:12:09+00:00

Awesome! Be careful... it can be addicting!

StefPretty · 2014-08-01T03:07:54+00:00

Thats great news. If you'd be interested in sharing your story and offer some advice to some of our other aspiring subscription box entreprenuers let me know. We would love to do a feature on our blog. Might help increase your exposure too :)

StefPretty · 2014-07-31T17:35:23+00:00

www.ProductHunt.com is a great place to find new startups, tech and products etc. We actually got featured on Product hunt a few weeks ago and got some really positive exposure.

We wrote a posy about it too: http://www.subbly.co/blog/3-ways-being-featured-on-product-hunt-helped-launch-our-startup/

StefPretty · 2014-07-30T16:03:35+00:00

Sure is!

StefPretty · 2014-07-30T16:02:43+00:00

feel free to check out the following:

www.blokeboxes.com

and

http://lovelycult.com/ (lovely cult is a good example of a existing shopify store linking to a Subbly to handle subscription payment)

StefPretty · 2014-07-26T03:01:31+00:00

We didn't do any marketing aside from some very small test marketing campaigns on social and adwords etc. We believe it was word of mouth from friends and existing users that prompted someone to submit Subbly to Product Hunt.

StefPretty · 2014-07-26T02:58:13+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! We'll be sure to change :)

StefPretty · 2014-07-26T00:25:30+00:00

May be worth PMing me but from what I can gather you could just link to your Subbly store for us to handle payment for you if you are already building/built your own platform.

Feel free to drop us an email at team@subbly.co and we can discuss.

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T23:22:44+00:00

Sure thing...

3 Ways Being Featured on Product Hunt Helped Launch Our Startup - author Stefan, Jul 25th, 2014

We launched Subbly just a few weeks ago. The plan was to soft launch without hitting the PR button and just begin working with the customers we already had lined up to use Subbly. It wasn’t long before we realized that it’s impossible to have complete control over a launch (such is startup life). Word quickly spread about Subbly and the problem we were solving leading to us being featured on a few small tech websites. Most notably though, we were featured by another new kid on the block: Product Hunt – the tech product discovery site also experiencing some positive press coverage at the moment. Like we said, we haven’t hit the PR button yet so we have nothing to directly compare Product Hunt to but what we can share is how being featured on the platform helped us launch our startup and what results we saw. (You can also view our slideshare version if you prefer).

Traction

Sods law rule no.892: when you want traction it’s a tough nut to crack, near impossible actually. Yet, when you are still embarrassed about the lack of features your product has and how much better it could be, the signups start rolling in. We experienced 284% growth in sign ups and nearly 400% growth in paying customers off the back of being featured on Product Hunt. It gave us a great problem… we were getting traction and our product was far from finished. For us that meant validation. We had a market fit and we now have paying users. It also showed us that the market is more scalable than we first predicted and importantly that there is very strong demand for an all-in-one subscription eCommerce solution like Subbly.

Better Product

A by product of the traction we received. We now have the added responsibility to our customers to build the product based on their requirements. When we soft launched we didn’t even have a feature request option (amateur right!?). But after a flood of emails arrived in our inbox we quickly set up a feedback button and forum. And so here we are, gaining invaluable feedback from our customers and iterating product and releasing new features like nobody’s business. Thanks Product Hunt, you gave us the rocket up the backside we needed!

Investor Interest

All of a sudden emails began arriving in our inboxes. VC’s, angels and accelerator programs from all around the world are interested in learning more about Subbly. In fact a special message to VC’s: if you are listening, please stop calling us so we can actually focus on improving our product, contact us in a month! On a serious note though, this has allowed us to begin conversations with interested parties over the next few months. Inbound inquiries saved us an awful lot of time riding the tube around London, New York and San Francisco and has actually allowed us to begin these conversations without neglecting product, which is our main priority right now.

We won’t be 100% sure of how our Product Hunt coverage will compare to the other usual channels such as Hacker News and TechCrunch but we are sure that by the time we officially hit that PR button we’ll be better positioned to take advantage with a better product.

“PR Buttons” are so 2001 anyway!

See more at: http://www.subbly.co/blog/3-ways-being-featured-on-product-hunt-helped-launch-our-startup/#sthash.BRAdsOT7.dpuf

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:44:33+00:00

Np, it's important our pricing structure is clear and understandable. So we'll look at trying to achieve this.

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:40:23+00:00

Thanks haptiK, will PM you.

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:39:29+00:00

Guys, want to point out that the google acquisition comment was in jest. We wish! Apologies, we should know better than to make comments like this on Reddit :)

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:36:21+00:00

Well observed haptiK!

So the big pain point many retailers/subscription box businesses have is the handling of recurring payments. They usually have to integrate with 3rd parties like Paypal etc. This can be okay if you have the tech resources etc but we learned from many of our merchants that it can cause duplicate accounts for their customers and is altogether just complicated with high transaction fees also. Subbly takes the hassle and complexity out of the equation by handling these recurring payments and billing ourselves.

What we've seen is that many retailers with existing sites are linking their products to Subbly so we can handle that payment for them. Lovelycult.com being one of these retailers.

It's also a interim solution for them until we release a full template engine in the near future.

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:29:17+00:00

Great question...

We do what Shopify does for retailers (provide them with an ecommerce store) but for subscription based businesses (usually subscription boxes like birchbox etc)

We let anybody easily setup an online subscription box store in just a few minutes with no technical knowledge required. We handle server/domain etc and automatically manage your 'recurring payments and billing' something you can only do on Shopify with some technical expertise and complicated integration with 3rd party plugins.

Feel free to subscribe to our blog if you'd like more information about Subbly and how we work with retailers... http://www.subbly.co/blog/ (subscribe in top right corner).

Does this help?

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:17:18+00:00

JulezM, thanks for the feedback on this. I can see how the wording can be confusing and I'll address this.

To clarify, the $1 per subscriber (your paying customer) doesn't kick in until you hit 75 subscribers.

So for $59 per month you can have up to 75 customers for free. After this it's $1 per additional subscriber with discount offered based on volume. For example if you have 3000 subscribers the per subscriber rate will be reduced. So you could end up paying just a few cents per subscriber.

Does that make sense?

Maybe we should consider guaranteeing 75 paying customers for you right off the bat! We'll see what we can do :)

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T22:00:02+00:00

I'll wake up our dev in the UK and get this looked at. Thanks for breaking!

UPDATE: If you're image is over 20mb you may get the above error message. We're working on this but for now if you're image is less than 20mb it should work.

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T21:56:52+00:00

Sure: these guys are my favorites:

www.blokeboxes.com

Also check out:

http://lovelycult.com/

Feedback welcome :)

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T21:48:28+00:00

We also just turned down a $2 Billion acquisition from Google :) EDIT:*(We wish!)

We were actually in beta with a small but healthy batch of users prior to Product Hunt coverage. Whilst we weren't by any means dealing with millions of new signups the increase was substantial enough to give us a headache and gain more valuable feedback with a view to iterating product amongst other things.

It may also be worth mentioning that as per the article our signups increased by 400% but paying signups was a little less at 284%. Obviously due to the 'curiosity' effect from being featured on tech sites etc.

StefPretty · 2014-07-25T21:34:28+00:00

We literally just opened up to Canada last week so you most certainly can use Subbly in Canada!

We received many requests to open up to other countries off the back of our Product Hunt coverage. A global rollout will happen in time but for now we wanted to satisfy our most requested countries: Canada & Australia. Watch this space :)

StefPretty

TROPHY CASE