One Person Business: Famewall
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One Person Business: Famewall
Social proof embeddable website widget, $150 MRR. Interview with the founder inside.
Famewall, by Goutham Jay, is a simple widget you can embed in any website to show your customer’s testimonials, and enhance your product with social proof.
Created in 2021, Famewall focus on a specific need every-single-freaking-business has: social proof. Nowadays, with the number of look-alike platforms that exist, focusing on the same type of customer or industry, it is important for businesses to differentiate as much as possible. One way they can do this is by creating trust. And how do you do this? Well, customer feedback and testimonials.
That’s where Famewall enters. With a simple, easy-to-use, embeddable widget, anyone can add customer testimonials to their websites in a couple of minutes. With little to no effort, they increase their product value just by showing what other people are saying about it. Cool stuff.
Famewall offers a free tier, that actually gives access to a bunch of stuff. After that, it breaks down as follows:
Standard, $9,99/month: unlimited testimonials, 4 testimonial walls, 5 video testimonials, and custom branding,
Professional, $24,99/month: 10 testimonial walls, 25 video testimonials, and custom wall URL,
Enterprise, $79,99/month: unlimited testimonial walls, 50 video testimonials, and analytics.
Once again, I’ve managed to have a chat with the founder, Goutham, and he gave us a bit of insight into the story behind Famewall.
Some parts of this might have been edited for clarity, and changes have been approved by Goutham.
What's your background? Did you already have the necessary skills to build Famewall, or did you have to learn new ones?
I am a software developer at heart. I learnt to code when I was 12 years old. So I had the technical know-how when I started building Famewall. But I was totally new to marketing.
I did have some experience with marketing as I worked with a co-founder on a consumer startup but SaaS was totally different as I had to get familiar with how B2B SaaS worked & the purchasing behaviour of customers. And that got me reading a lot of blogs, and books which dealt with marketing.
How many attempts (failed or not) did it take you to get to a product like Famewall?
Prior to Famewall, I worked on a consumer startup (entire journey described here). It was a recruitment platform which connected startups with talented engineers who completed their bachelor's in lesser-known colleges.
I worked on this with a cofounder for 1 year (in 2021) & we had plans of raising funds for it. Yet we had 3 pivots in the same year, & unfortunately, we had to shut it down as it didn't get traction.
My cofounder felt he couldn't face repeated failures and wanted to focus on his career instead. But I always wanted to build something of my own. So that got me started with Famewall as a solo founder.
How did you come up with the idea for Famewall?
So back in 2021, I tried out a lot of testimonial tools for my product but they were overpriced with few functionalities, slowed down page speed & also limited in customization options. That got me started with Famewall as my first SaaS.
In terms of reach, how did you get your first customers? Are you still doing the same, or have you changed your strategy? If so, why?
I got my first few customers from Twitter. I had around 200-300 followers there & I was engaging with entrepreneurs & creators on the platform. So I did a DM outreach to the people with whom I've already interacted in the past and thought might find Famewall useful. This way I got my first few customers.
What's your current MRR, and how long did it take you to get there?
I'm currently at $150 MRR and it took me 6 months to get here. It took a while to figure out marketing as I constantly experimented in the early days.
Are you still a solopreneur, or have you hired someone to help you? If so, why?
Yes, I'm currently a solopreneur. I've never thought about having a cofounder as I did have one in my previous startup. So I just wanted to experiment with this one as a solo founder. Also, I find this to be more suitable for my lifestyle.
If you could give one piece of advice to people jumping on the solopreneur bandwagon, what would that be?
It's just that things take a lot of time especially if you're a first-time founder. Always figure out the distribution strategy and figure out how you're going to sell your product sustainably even before writing a single line of code.
If you have a clear strategy in mind, then all you have to do is focus and keep learning every day. There might be days when things look gloomy but just keep going. Perseverance is actually the reason why founders succeed
Thank you Goutham for your availability to answer these questions. For the people reading this, I recommend you read Gotham’s story on IndieHackers where he talks about his first 8 months as a solo founder.
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Until next time - Guilherme
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