🚪How Kyleigh built a SMS Habit Tracker with 52 paying users
The No-Code Success Story of Kyleigh and Harold the Habit Tracker
Hello everyone,
Welcome 1,032 new subscribers. 👯 Thank you all so much for your amazing support (687 upvotes! product of the day #3!) and nice words last week during my Product Hunt launch. It means a lot!
The story this week is about a profitable product made with No-Code. Learn how Kyleigh:
🌝 made an SMS habit tracker with no-code
💪 it helped her solve her own problem
🪄 created a framework to help you validate ideas
🧪 grew her product with SEO and experimenting with growth loops
Enjoy it.
🔦 Tool Experiment
Social Proof = Trust.
I wanted to display this better for No-Code Exits, so I have been playing with Senja.
Senja helps to collect and display testimonials in an easy and beautiful (very important to me 😅) way.
What I liked:
I made a form, so readers can easily share a video or text testimonial
In 1 click, I transferred all the amazing comments from Product Hunt to Senja
I added a widget with all the testimonials on my subscribe page
I added a widget with (a first) sponsor testimonial to my partnership webpage
I can turn all my testimonials on Senja into beautiful images (like the one you see at the top)
🎈 7 Cool Finds
NoCode MBA Unlimited learn how to build an AirBnB clone with Bubble, a Tinder clone with Glide, a Product Hunt clone with Webflow and much, much more.
NoCode Garage Sale the first event was a huge success. There are still some incredible deals (max $500) for sale. Or join the next event on Feb 22.
Pricewell is a No-Code solution to easily implement Stripe subscriptions on your website built with Bubble.
Micro Analytics is a simple and user-friendly Google Analytics alternative with a very interesting free plan.
Typedream is a beautiful no-code landing page builder. They now added the possibility to create custom forms on your landing pages.
Raindrop is a (free) bookmark manager. I read a lot of newsletters, and this tool helps me with saving the best resources and finding them back weeks or months later.
Creator Club shares each month the latest digital products, fascinating articles and resources from some of the best new and established online makers and creators.
*This section is a mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Kyleigh, tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Kyleigh, my background is in cognitive science, product design (UX/UI) and product management.
I've worked with early to mid-stage startups for my entire career. I've chosen to work with startups because I love bringing ideas to life and solving early stage product problems like onboarding, retention, engagement, and finding product-market fit.
And naturally, while working on these other products and other people's ideas, I had an inclination to also work on bringing one of my own ideas to life. Before I discovered no-code, I would design a prototype for my idea and beg developer friends to build it with me.
But with no-code, I realized I could start building things myself, and my life just hasn't been the same ever since!
Tell us about your product that you made?
Harold is a habit tracker you can text. It's the first SMS-based and GPT-3 powered habit tracker.
How it works:
You set up some habits
Harold texts you once a day asking if you did the habit or not
You simply reply to the text "yes or no" and it's all tracked
He then texts you with encouragement and progress reports along the way.
The idea came years ago when I read this article by Steph Smith entitled, "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably".
In that article, she wrote about the importance of being consistent with small habits that compound.
"The best way to stay committed to your goals is to a) track progress daily and b) share your progress openly."
At the time, I was really struggling to make any progress on my own ideas and towards my dream of being an indie maker. Literally my dream at the time was to launch my own product on Product Hunt, now I've launched more than 5 times.
So when I read this article, I was like great! I have the answer. But there was one problem: I had tried tracking my habits multiple before, and it didn't work. I would make a beautiful table in my journal, get all excited, track for a few days, and then never look at it again.
That's where the idea for Harold came from. I needed a habit tracker that would come to me and ask me for the data, something that was so simple I couldn't forget about it or ignore it.
Following the UX philosophy of "meet the user where they are", I had been interested in applications of SMS for a product, and this seemed like a great use case.
Which NoCode tools did you use?
Autocode is like Zapier on steroids. It allows me to customize logic and run the full back-end. They have a great customer support and tutorials that helped me.
Airtable is where I store all the data. I have tens of thousands of rows and its still working great.
Twilio is what I used to set up the SMS part
Unicorn Platform to build my website
Mailerlite to send out emails
What went into building the initial version?
I started building a solution for myself first. Then I showed it to some people. When they said they wanted to try it, I built the functionality so that other people could try it. When they said they wanted to track more than one habit, I built that functionality. I only spent more time on it as I got more validation.
There's a lot to validation, though. Even tho I've validated the solution, there are two other huge pillars of validation: Market Validation and Problem validation.
Are you solving a real problem?
Who has that problem?
Are those people easy to find?
Will they pay for it?
These are all questions you need to answer in order to truly validate a business.
Note from Katt: You can read more about the 3 pillars of the Idea Validation Canvas in Kyleigh her book.
What's your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
To be honest, it’s trial and error. So it is always changing. At this moment it is $5 per month subscription or annual.
I haven't been focusing on growing revenue quite yet, I'm focused on finding sustainable acquisition channels and growth loops. One example: recently I launched the Dry January Challenge, I used Harold the Habit Tracker for one specific habit for a limited time which resulted in new users.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
My number 1 strategy was to just keep talking, share updates and experiments on Twitter.
Another thing I tried was searching for tweets where people were talking about habit trackers, and then joining in on those conversations.
Additionally. I have been working on growing through SEO. I wrote a few SEO articles that give me some traffic via Google now. It’s a work in progress.
What are the biggest challenges you've faced and how did you overcome them?
Building a successful product and business takes a lot longer than you think. I need to treat it as a marathon, not a sprint. Thinking of it as a sprint led me to waste time on finding "quick hacks" like marketing on TikTok, rather than doubling down on what is working.
It’s important to just stick with it. Progress is slow, especially when it’s a side project and having a full-time job. Most days you don't see the progress you're making and it’s so tempting to just give up. I've overcome that by trying to be in tune with the market and the responses and feedback I get from people.
Are people or the market pulling me back to it? Then there might still be something there. Example: if I stop talking about Harold for 2 months (which I did), do people stop talking about it? Or does it keep coming back to me in some way (it did).
Can you share some numbers/stats?
52 paid subscribers
Around 50 daily active users.
Over 1000 signups total
Around $65 MRR
Over $2,000 in total all-time revenue.
What's your advice for NoCode Makers who are just starting out?
Just get started! Pick one of your ideas you are excited about, block out a weekend day, and just try to build it with something. It doesn't matter which idea or what tool you use, just get started.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your project?
Try out Harold The Habit Tracker
Check out my book ‘Honest Guide to Indie Making’
Note from Katt: I was a beta reader of this book and it is an amazing read.
Thanks Kyleigh, thank you for sharing all your wisdom and your honest experience.
🙌 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
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Congrats I will be trying it out
Love the user features! Congrats Kyleigh, thats really awesome!