Why we create Hiplay
Hello world! This is an exciting moment for me and my team – we publish our first blog post. And it felt like a great idea to share why we decided to create Hiplay in a first place.
As a software developer, I was always into creating new things, but mostly working on other people ideas. And there was a growing desire to start working on something my own. The first attempt ended up as a failure because we as a team probably made all possible startup mistakes we could. We failed very fast and learned a lot.
Finding people with a pain
Despite the desire to start working on something new asap, I said to myself – the next startup idea should come from real people pain. As someone with a full-time job, I have very limited time recourses to invest in a side project development. So I want to make sure there are people who need the product I am about to help building.
No more “I have a great idea, people will love it!” and instead “I know people who need this!”
One day my friend came to me with a social media management pain. As a product manager in a small startup, she had to cover marketing as well. The most effective channel for them was Twitter. And apparently this social network is very time consuming – you need to constantly post new tweets to keep up with the flow. Small startup cannot afford to spend all day tweeting. Buffer helped to save time with scheduling, but it was hard to keep queue filled with content. So it seemed we discovered a pain point. Now we need to find the painkiller.
Inventing painkiller
By looking throw all recent tweets we saw that most of them are ever-green and could be reused multiple times. Most great content people share stays unnoticed. All for the simple reason – your followers aren’t up online on all day and they are likely to miss your posts. And since you are constantly getting new followers – ever-green content you shared before will not reach them anymore. And here a lamp bulb starts to shine in our heads – we have painkiller idea!
Painkiller idea – app that could repost your previously shared ever-green content automatically if you have nothing to share with your followers
I see how my friend starts to nod proving that this app would be a real time saver for her startup.
Deciding on MVP
We are smarter now – we know that we do not need to lock ourselves out for one year to create a useful product. But we still need to decide on our minimum viable product that will be able to kill the pain. Since creating everything from 0 would take too much effort – we decided we could build on top of Buffer platform. This way we could start reusing previously posted tweets without user having to upload any content beforehand. All user would have to do is log in with Buffer account, mark which posts are ever-green and activate service. That’s it. We then take care of user Buffer queue – if it gets empty we fill it with ever-green posts.
Validating our genius idea
It is always nice to help people, but would be awesome to know that my friend is not the only one with that kind of pain. So with her help we created a landing page. Our value proposition: Have never-empty Buffer queue. We explained how our painkiller will work and offered people to join by leaving their email address. This is a good way to validate if people want product we are about to start working on. And now we know that there are people out there looking forward to be our beta testers and use product as soon as it will be ready.
Working hard
We are now a team of three working really hard to bring Hiplay to the world. We are highly motivated because we see the demand for the product we create.
It is challenging to work on it after a full-time job. We break into other people offices during weekends (thank you Veleza) because we do not have our own place yet. But encouragement that comes from our future users really works as a doping! Hiplay is in our heads most of the time.
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower – Paul Graham
We started working on our own ideas – this is a small step forward. We will see how it goes, but the most important thing – we enjoy the process. If you would like to be our beta tester – please join us!
Assets credit goes to Freepik
