Hi all 👋
Excited to launch Faces today. More than 4 years in the making. Kind of.
All the way back in 2013 I created a site to showcase creatives and makers from my local community in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Ever since people asked me to create a similar site for their community. I was working on a lot of different products already and figured some other company would step in and create a service for this kind of stuff.
Few years later, late 2016, there still wasn't a simple service to create a visual overview of the people in a community. I did some quick Twitter research and it turned out more people were interested in such a page and even willing to pay.
So I created a few pages at $200 a pop (for the first year) for a handful of customers. Initially I literally just copied the codebase and did a find & replace for their community name, logo, etc. Later I replaced those with 'environment variables' so the codebase could be the same for each community, although there was still no way for customers to update those variables themselves and setting up a new page required me to spin up a new Heroku instance.
About 2-3 weeks ago I finally started working on a true multi-tenancy version of Faces. That means every community page is hosted on the same server using the same codebase. Basically it means that people can now create and manage their own page, without requiring my involvement. A true SaaS.
Anyway. That's where we are today. I'm excited to see what you'll do with it and let me know if you have any questions or feedback. 🙌
P.S.
Thanks to @espreedevora for pushing me to help her make a page for the LA startup community ( https://community.wearelatech.com ). Seeing her grow that community inspired me to turn it into a service other people could use as well.
Also shout out to @levelsio@flowen_nl@andreyazimov@oskarth for their continued support and feedback in our secret chat group. Thanks to @rpish for keeping BetaList up-and-running while I was off working on Faces. Shout out to all the beta testers and early customers @leonpals@itsakeller@mindaugaslt and countless other people 😍
@marckohlbrugge Great launch story - good to hear how you got to this point with Faces. How did you find people on Twitter who'd be interested in this? Search, or just through your followers?
@ramykhuffash Thanks Ramy. I found them just through my followers, by tweeting about the idea. Key element is that I followed up by asking for payment. It's kinda risky asking your friends/peers for feedback as they tend to be overly positive, but if they are willing to pay for your prototype that's a very good indicator there's real demand.
@marckohlbrugge I love this story. Letting demand dictate build and only going all in when it's clear people will pay for the solution.
Having watched the build on Twitter, I love the care and attention Marc puts into the little details. Super neat app 👌
@marckohlbrugge Awesomesauce! Congratulations on launching the SaaS! We have been talking about this a few times. I think it's a great way for communities to show off their members.
I'm actually part of the Startup Foundation group, and personally I have not 'got anything' from it just yet. So I guess, even as a really active member in many communities, I still have my doubts for the benefits of the user... From my experience in (online and offline) communities, the strength really lies in the 1 on 1 / face to face interactions. Being part of something bigger than yourself is great, but I found every time again that discovery and serendipity is way more important than lists or search.... (you talk about discovery, but basically it's filtering and search).
I know it's just a cool thing to ship, and I salut you for that, but I'm wondering what's next to 'showing off', how do engage the 1on1 exchanges? :)
@marckohlbrugge Looks great...any possibility to see a payment integration and auto invitation. See a lot of slack communities with payment fee and tools like slackpass....build that for Faces and I think you have a super nice feature imho!
Seems like a very cool idea. $29/mo is pretty steep though fora lot of uses. Thoughts on tiered subscriptions? I think there's lots of smaller interest /friends communities that would use this if it had a cheaper option.
@dplakon What would be a reasonable price point for you and how many profiles do you plan on adding? Right now the $29/mo plan is for up to 100 profiles.
@dplakon@treggify Hi Tregg. Same question for you. What would be a fair price point and how many profiles would you expect to list? I'm collecting data to see if it would make economical sense to support a cheaper, limited plan.
@marckohlbrugge I think up to like 50 should be around $10/mo to hit a wide enough use case. I wouldn't expect to pay $30/mo til around 250 or so.
Also, it really depends on the use.
Honestly though, have you thought about making this integratabtle as a team page for companies? Those things are a nightmare to keep up to date and if you have a plug and play API that companies could plug their team pages into, that'd be very very useful and totally worth $30/mo. Slack is usually up to date with who currently is working at the company.
@dplakon@marckohlbrugge Thanks for reaching out. I think a $10 plan would be a pretty good deal for something like a slack channel. I'm not exactly sure how you're determining pricing, so I'm not sure how many users that should include.
@aaroniclee Yep. Imagine my surprise when I saw Ello's logo ;). I designed mine over 4 years ago. It's somewhere in my Instagram feed if you're curious. I might change the logo at some point, since Ello is better known now. That said, it's not a priority at the moment.
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