EverClients

Pain to Solve:

To find leads for digital freelance work reliably, and in a controlled, sustainable way.

Tools/Skills Used:

• Data-Acquisition (scraping, analysing, profiling, organised worker-bots)
• One-page JavaScript app front-end
• PHP LAMP on AWS
• Bootstrap
• WordPress for knowledge sharing
• Stripe for payments
• Campaign Monitor for email marketing
• Custom SaaS platform, including billing

How it went:

Achieved some momentum, but ultimately got shelved as I ran out of cash and energy. I’m happy that a lot was executed well. EverClients reinforced to me that launch timing is important, that I’m not super-human, and that it’s hard to educate and sell, (especially alone).

There have been many side-benefits from this project, apart from the experience, such as a solid SaaS code-base, a fuller knowledge of AWS, and Stripe.

Things that worked:

• Email Funnel – the course of articles guiding freelancers to better bidding was really well received, with many replies thanking me
• Branding – created a short memorable name and achieved reliable style narrative  which people repeated (Assisted by Miz Rahman)
• Data-acquisition – The app worked, absorbing the first ~1million leads fairly quickly
• SaaS Platform – I wrote this from scratch, using various scripts I’d written over the past few years. This was a solid test of my self-taught coding 🙂

Lessons Learned (Post Mortem):

• Team Up or keep it small – One-man SaaS is heavily reliant on that singular person & their state of mind
• Six months is too long – … of a dev cycle pre-launch (high risk, lack of energy when feedback actually arrives)
• Lower hanging fruit – Building something that has to educate as well as deliver makes things harder
• Perfectionist – I have the tendency to want to perfect things I make myself

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Lead Feed Web App Page:

Lead Feed App Homepage: