Today I’m talking to Henry Poydar. He is the founder of Status Hero, a little SaaS app tool for teams who need to get status updates from their fellow teammates. Works like a replacement for the daily stand-up, and members get updates into Slack or email.
We talk about Henry’s story, how he bootstrapped this app, how he transitioned from working in a large corporation to consulting, and then starting up his own software business.
He coded most of the app himself and had success bootstrapping his app in the last 3 years.
Enjoy!
Episode Notes
[2:36] Extending the trial for enterprise customers.
- “The idea is to eliminate meetings. Specially with today’s remote teams across timezones, it’s difficult to get the tech right, meet everyone on a zoom call.”
- “I found that the extensions are the qualifiers. You know a bigger company is interested if a trial extension keeps them onboard.”
[8:11] Before Status Hero.
- “I was lucky. I got into the web at a time where full-stack actually meant something.”
- “Getting on a plane every week on a Sunday and coming back on Friday is a really tough way to live.”
[13:21] How working from home compares to working in a larger organization and startups.
- “I noticed that in a startup, compared to a large organization, the signal to noise ratio inverted. 9 out of 10 emails matters. I a company 1 out of 10 emails matter.”
- “It’s ironic that creatives avoid distraction to get into deep to work on software that’s designed to grab people’s attention”
[23:50] Legit MVPs and how to use Product Hunt to launch your product. Cutting features for an easier selling process.
- “You really have one shot launching on Product Hunt. You can’t afford to have a crappy MVP.”
- “The best outcome for something on Product Hunt is to get email addresses into pipeline, not trials, not customers, because you’re in awareness stage.”
[30:48] Doubling revenue when switching pricing from tiered teams to per user.
- “Pricing was very difficult because my initial users weren’t startups who were price sensitive at all.”
- “At the time and still now everybody advises against per seat pricing.”
- “I wanted the automated credit-card sign-up make-money-while-you-sleep thing to work. I wanted it to be low touch.”
[35:01] The truth about app integrations as marketing channel.
- “I think that taking on managing folks is a massive responsibility, it takes a lot of mind share.”
Links
- Henry Poydar on Twitter
- Henry Poydar’s app, Status Hero
- Henry Poydar’s website
- Josh Pigford from Baremetrics on the Productize Podcast
- Josh Pigford – How freemium nearly caused our business to implode
- Techcrunch
- Constant Contact
- Bantam Live CRM
- Ski Juice
- PokerCharts
- Product Hunt
- Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently on the Productize Podcast
- MicroConf
- Nathan Barry from ConvertKit on the Productize Podcast
- ConvertKit
- Status Hero integrations
- Slack
- WeWork
- Intercom
- ClubHouse
- Asana
- GitLab
- GDPR
- Zapier
