Bullet is a platform to transform your Notion pages into professional sites within minutes. With a wide range of templates, custom domain hosting, liquid syntax, redirects, and themes, you can create amazing websites without any coding knowledge.
Can you tell us about yourself and the product you launched?
I am Aswin Kumar, and we launched Bullet at the beginning of January. We started working on the project around mid-October to November so building it for three months and when the basic MVP was ready, we launched the product in January.
In the initial days, we were we didn't do the typical product launches. Initially, we just went for some of the Facebook groups, and Reddit groups and posted daily, we got initial traction there. So we thought once we had that initial traction we could launch. It was a very good validation for us.
After that, we were preparing for our launch of products and at that time, we did not have a very good landing page or anything. We just had a very basic landing page, but we knew our product was very solid.
The landing pages were something that was scrapped very quickly for our first MVP, but people really liked the product. We got a lot of good testimonials from users and then we actually launched the product after completely rebuilding all the landing pages and everything on them.
We got very good responses so we took Bullet to the next level where we charged a recurring fee but so far, everyone except a couple of users and choosing to be lifetime subscribers. So now we are working on moving our product to the point where we charge a monthly recurring fee for users.
Can you share how you came up with the inspiration for your product?
I make my living as a Founder, and have launched a couple of times already. I've utilized some other products previously when I found that most of our time, or at least around 30% of our time is gone on building landing pages or writing blogs.
So 30% of our entire resources were used for managing everything, and people want help with those things. What we used to do for writing our own blogs is we actually wrote everything in Notion.
We would do all the keyword planning, and all the research, everything would be in Notion. So we used the platform to share or view each article and had someone to write content in a Google doc. The result was that when using Google docs we had a person converting all those Google docs, and copying and pasting all of them into Webflow or WordPress. So that's a lot of processes.
We thought when Notion is such a great content management tool, and a great place to collaborate and write content, why not build an entire product out of the tool?
Take us through the process of launching the business
We are completely bootstrapped right now, with no outside funding. We are building, we have solid SEO, and everything is working out there.
So, people come to the platform, sign up, and convert dramatically, so, we thought we might even build another product right now and kind of think about diversifying into different markets.
What marketing strategies do you use to grow and find new customers?
Pretty early on we were just figuring out multiple channels. The initial channels that worked were through our affiliates, who actually brought almost like a sales machine. Our other users came from posting in forums like Reddit but it's actually really hard to market with Reddit, as your post often gets taken down for self-promotion.
We have to learn all the nitty-gritty of posting to Reddit, replying on comments, and we found that was working better than creating a separate post in Reddit. Then on Facebook, we tried to see where we could find users and we found some niche groups where we can post about our products.
People who are early adopters seemed to really love the product and we had a good reach within those groups. So we got some traffic from there. With that and doing the product was launch last week that also gave like 30% of our paid users.
How is the business doing today?
We have around 100, paid users right now. Except for a couple of users, most of them are subscribed to the lifetime plan.
Monthly subscribers are very small at the moment, almost negligible for us right now since there are only a couple of people who are paying under $10 which is our lowest plan.
Because the Lifetime Deal is really good people more frequently choose that option over the monthly plans. So now we are through the initial launch we are looking to focus more on attracting monthly users.
Who are your main competitors for Bullet?
It would be other website building and blogging platforms like Super.so and Popsy. They are really good website builders. There's really strong competition for Bullet in the market right now.
What were some of the biggest obstacles you encountered?
The biggest challenge, when we decided to build the product was that we had a lot of competition in the market in this specific niche. Various other products and platforms offer posting, and blogging tools, so there are a lot of ways to promote or attract customers.
With such good competition what we found was for my specific product we require some things like other tools or screens to have a product that works well enough to build a professional website. There are a lot of pieces that are needed.
Some people like the website perspective, so we had to think about how to process that way to build the product. Like highlight those features, which they didn't have, or which are necessary for creating a personal website. So that's what we felt was the biggest challenge
What would be your advice to someone that wanted to start their own project?
We knew we needed to test and validate the market. A lot of people say to validate the market first, with an empty landing page. So we did that initially. What we first did was build a very basic landing page, where just people entered emails, or to receive a notification when the product was launched.
Then we took that landing page with a sign-up form and we just posted in multiple Reddit subreddits and what we saw was we got around like 100 signups for a non-existent product. We felt at that time that was a very good number for us.
We don't have like 1000s of people in our audience at all, like a lot of founders and new products will say they got 5000 signups for a non-existent product, but we felt our first 100 was a really big number when we were starting from zero audience.
So I think validation is a very important aspect of building the product, to see whether the demand was there.
It’s important to do before you even start building the product, so there no scratching your own head or wondering if there’s a need for it. You should just test and validate before attempting any building or distribution.
What sort of technical tools or software do you use?
Right now, we use Cloudflare for all the websites. So that's a very important part of our site. But other than that we use Node js, to take data from Notion and integrate it into our website.
That's what we are excited about. Seeing dev tools being used. For checking code we use Disbug for QA testing which is also a QA tool I developed and launched.
Are there any resources, on or offline, that have been helpful?
I love this book called Launch Test for validating the product. So it recommends talking to to users to figure out who they are and uncover what kind of problems they are facing.
Interviewing users like that can be really helpful. I also listen to the First 100 podcast, which helps in getting your first 100 users or subscribers.
What are your plans for the coming year?
We are going to focus more on social media marketing and affiliate marketing. So that's where we will be putting our attention. Those are the next channels that we are going to use.
We are going to set up an affiliate program for Bullet. So influencers they can use that to distribute to their own users or audience on an affiliate commission. This is one of the ways we will be testing for distributing the product.
Because our initial platform came from affiliates we want to focus more on that influencer stronghold and use it to take products and get them in front of the end user.
Where can people find you and get in touch with you?
The website is Bullet.so, or they can reach out on Twitter, and they can find me too on Linkedin.
