We built a Share Sheet SDK business in 2 months
Think Spotify Year in Review for any company.
Here are stories with lessons🧵
Action: Our cold inbound customer, who was committed to our pilot, churned. With that customer, we tried to raise the price point to reflect $500–1K per 100K MAU. This was the only price point that would have supported a venture business, but it was too high for a small indie dev.
Lesson: There is a difference between an awesome lifestyle business and a venture scale business. Both business solve problems, one is in a way bigger market that sells faster.
Action: The in-pilot cold inbound customer also wanted the product to have more features to make the sharable content better. One of the requested features from the pilot customer was photos of users in the sharable content. Funny enough — Today, Our first customer, he’s in-prod, wanted user photos so badly, he implemented it in his own app himself.
Lesson: If you work with a small subset of customers and solve their problems, most customers will need the same things.
Action: We reached out / cold emailed to founders outside from our network that had iOS apps. We didn’t get any responses.
Lesson: B2B products that are in a customers core user experience is hard to get people to try — It requires an engineer. The sales cycles are long.
Action: We had more inbound leads, but they said the product “didn’t have enough features” to justify using it. They admitted, one day, they’d likely churn, since video editing is core part of the user experience. That said, they definitely would have used Share That had there been more features/ the product was more developed.
Lesson: B2B products in a customer’s core user experience require a higher quality for MVP. The product needs to match the customers vision/brand for their product.
Action: The conversion rate on our product is nothing short of unbelievable. Spotify shipped a share sheet in their application that is identical to the Share That product.
Lesson: A great product doesn’t equal a viable business.
Action: A big lead fell through. We weren’t talking to the decision maker. Our contact couldn’t buy/implement the product.
Lesson: Talking to the wrong person at a company is a waste of time. PM was the right sales stakeholder for Share That.
