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Interviewing indie founders about their journey and their products. itslaunchday.com
Dagobert (00:00)
Hey André, nice to meet you, welcome to launch day.
Andrii Romasiun (00:03)
Hey, nice to meet you too. Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today to present my story, my product to people.
Dagobert (00:10)
Yes.
Yeah, you know, I try to really select people who have an interesting story and so, you know, that's why I brought you in. So, but like, before starting into that, like, where are you from? Where are you located?
Andrii Romasiun (00:25)
So originally I'm from Ukraine. I started building my ⁓ startup in Ukraine and now I live in Scotland in UK. Small town of Dundee but pretty.
Dagobert (00:38)
cool.
Dundee, it's famous,
I mean it's a... I know this name. So I guess it's small but maybe it's a bit famous.
Andrii Romasiun (00:46)
It's famous,
I think, because Rockstar started from here, like the GTA franchise started from this city. Like, game dev is super popular, yeah. Yeah.
Dagobert (00:56)
⁓ wow, okay. Amazing.
GTA started from Dundee. Scotland you said or Ireland? Scotland.
Andrii Romasiun (01:06)
Scotland. Yeah.
Dagobert (01:10)
And so what's your story, man? So like, did you, you what's your journey to becoming an indie maker?
Andrii Romasiun (01:18)
I think I wanted to like build my own stuff like for a long time. I think even since school like, but, but I was like 50 50. Yeah, maybe it works out. Maybe not. Then I found a job like experienced. How's it to work for someone like to jump on constant meetings to build a product.
Dagobert (01:43)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (01:46)
Like for someone but you won't get any like, you know equity or something just a constant salary That and that's it And then I was like, no hell no. I don't I don't want to do it for like whole life and yeah, that that's when I Like yeah beside that I want to build something myself my my own stuff Even if it does not work out like at least to to try to do it. It's fun
Dagobert (02:15)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (02:17)
Yeah. And that's when I launched Sweatrix.
Dagobert (02:22)
So
you left the job right away or you built on the side? How did that go?
Andrii Romasiun (02:25)
⁓
I built on the site because like, well, I started building it when I was like junior. I just started working in software engineering, like my first year. And during this time I decided, no, I want to build something myself. And like, ⁓ I'd not really have much experience back then to like, ⁓ quit.
everything and just ship products. Like, yeah, maybe kind of was scared that it will not work out.
Yeah. And yeah, back then I launched my product, ⁓ Sweatrix it's web analytics, ⁓ web analytics tool. ⁓ yeah. And since then I was, I'm building this product. also launched a few other ones. Some work out some not.
Dagobert (03:16)
Yeah.
And did you start making
money right away? Like how did it go?
Andrii Romasiun (03:34)
Um, so for the first two years, I think it was making me lose money. Like, um, I paid a lot of like, for me, it was a lot of money for, I don't know, domains. I also found a guy who helped me with like some development tasks. also paid him and, uh, yeah, I was.
Dagobert (03:45)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (04:04)
pretty much losing money, but you know, the idea that building something of my own, was like making me to go continue doing this. then, ⁓ yeah. And then started slowly growing. I remember the first customer. I got them from a site. don't think it exists anymore, but like basically people.
Dagobert (04:16)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (04:34)
pitched their products every week and like they pitched what they worked on during this week, any updates they did to their products and like other people got to upload these updates.
Dagobert (04:47)
Was it like a
text-based? I think I remember a website like this. Starting with K or something. I remember this.
Andrii Romasiun (04:55)
It was, yeah, text-based. was like yellow, yellowish style. And like the idea was that you pitch what you worked on. You connect with other people and this website was run by some angel or VC investor and they randomly pick whoever they like. like maybe, yes. So first customer was someone who like upvoted.
Dagobert (05:13)
Yeah.
and you got your first customer this way.
Andrii Romasiun (05:24)
the product like they liked it.
Dagobert (05:27)
And what convinced
them? What do you remember? Do know what made them commit?
Andrii Romasiun (05:36)
I hope that the product myself was so good that they decided to use it. But yeah, I don't know. Honestly, I've not talked to them, probably, hopefully the product itself. So the first customer, yeah, it was $15 a month. Like after like a year of nothing.
Dagobert (05:41)
Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (06:05)
getting this customer, was like, nice. Yeah, that can work out. I should like keep doing that.
Dagobert (06:12)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (06:14)
And then, yeah, and then I got another one.
Dagobert (06:18)
So at this point,
how do you make money? Is it making enough money or you're making money with your job on the side? Are you still studying at this point? to so I got it clear.
Andrii Romasiun (06:29)
So, I have a job on the side. I live in immigration in the It's pretty expensive. I cannot yet sustain myself with side projects. But it makes good money. Right now it makes about 1,000-1,100 monthly revenue. Super nice side income.
Dagobert (06:39)
yeah, UK super expensive.
Nice.
And it's super competitive analytics. There's so many analytics products, it's insane.
Andrii Romasiun (06:59)
It's insanely competitive industry.
It's super, super competitive. Like you have to have some like 10 killing features and a lot of luck to make it.
Dagobert (07:14)
Can you show a little bit what you have? I'm just curious to see what the features are that are helpful for you to stand out.
Andrii Romasiun (07:23)
Yeah, of course.
So here's the product itself. We now have 1500 people who signed up. I think 90 % of people, of these people like signed up for trial and never come back. But like a good chunk of them are using the product and the dashboard itself. looks like this.
Dagobert (07:55)
That's really cool value proposition to say that it's about understanding the story behind the data, know. Really interesting, because I was actually wondering how you stand out. Well, that's a good way. So how do you focus on the story then? That's what is interesting.
Andrii Romasiun (08:00)
Yeah.
Yeah, I spent like many iterations coming to this. ⁓
positioning of the product that there were there were a lot of other landing pages like some some did not convert at all then I change something it converts better and then again and again and now I have this and the core product is like simple easy to use traffic analytics
Dagobert (08:27)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (08:45)
You get like how many people, how many unique visitors you have on your site. You can see like other metrics. Maybe you want to see how long the people stay on the website. Like all the core metrics accessible, easy to use because I know many people complain about Google analytics. Google analytics, they even have like a, like a certification, you know, you have to go through a course.
Dagobert (09:02)
Yep.
Yeah, I was thinking about it.
Andrii Romasiun (09:15)
on how to use Google Analytics. Like it does not make sense.
Dagobert (09:17)
Yeah, the new version is a nightmare.
You need to be an expert basically.
Andrii Romasiun (09:22)
Yeah,
it's like, I don't know, flying a Boeing compared to driving a car.
Dagobert (09:29)
It's cool, at least they opened the whole market for indie makers because now Google Analytics used to be the default but now there's also all the privacy things so everything combines now.
Andrii Romasiun (09:33)
through.
Yeah.
True, yeah. So yeah, and I started with this simple traffic interface and then I started building features on top of it, like something that I found cool myself, maybe some feature that people asked for. For example, this... So this performance feature, no one asked for it, but I was like, wow, like no other competitor has it, it's super cool.
Dagobert (10:00)
Like what? What do you think is cool? What's the coolest thing?
That's awesome,
that's awesome because it's like somebody actually, you know, for ICO and everything, we all check it, but it's never in analytics website and it makes sense to have it.
Andrii Romasiun (10:22)
Yeah. Yeah. Like I, I thought, yeah, it's easy to implement. No one has it. Why not? Why not to do it? Like, I think it's pretty cool. And yeah, some people who, who is inside, I think they like it. We also have this feature. understanding people's clicks and scrolls, it's probably, it probably can be done with this sessions feature. You can.
Dagobert (10:50)
Yeah, the main
value prop. Yeah, okay. You see their journey, I guess. Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (10:54)
Yes,
yes, the journey, what page, what custom events triggered, like I can see that someone visited.
Dagobert (11:00)
And all of this is done kind
of automatically, I guess. Like you just put the JavaScript on your website and then it calculates all this.
Andrii Romasiun (11:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, one script and yeah, and you can see that. Yeah. Yeah. From, GitHub.
Dagobert (11:10)
That's cool. Because you know, like I set
this up with Mixpanel in the past or Amplitude, but you have to set everything yourself, which is cool because you have the control and everything, but you need to be quite technical. But here what I like is like, if you're not technical, you put the JavaScript and you still can see some user journeys and everything. So that's awesome. Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (11:32)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah. And just one, you set up at once and you can use any, any feature you want, like forever. I tried to make it pretty easy, like so even I pitched it to my dad. So he's, he's not a programmer. He's like an average internet user. And I pitched him the product and like asked him to give it a try.
and then see like how would an average user interact with my product. And then I tried to like later to update the designs to make it easier for people to use it.
Dagobert (12:05)
Yeah.
That's interesting. remember trying, I don't know, 20 years ago when I was very just starting, making one of the website I had made. I made it try to my stepmom, who was like 60, and it was 20 years ago. And she didn't know how to scroll, so it made things so complicated, because, you know, she just saw the homepage and she didn't realize she could scroll. So she was like, what can I do?
And then I learned to put things above the fold, as they tell you, in the first ⁓ part of the page before scrolling. So yeah, super useful to ask people who are not tech to try your product.
Andrii Romasiun (12:59)
Yeah,
I think it's there's even a term for it like mom test or something mom test. Yeah
Dagobert (13:04)
Yeah, yeah, that's the mom testing. Yeah, kind of. Kind of,
yeah. Step mom test, maybe even harder, but yeah, I see your point. I see your point, yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (13:12)
Yeah.
Dagobert (13:15)
And so where are you going with this? Where's the vision? What's the sweat tricks? Where do you want to take it? Do you have big ideas still you want to build? Anything?
Andrii Romasiun (13:15)
⁓
So originally the vision was to add as many features as I can. Like, you know, I go to my competitor's site, plausible, for example, and I see that they have like traffic analytics and that's it. And my original idea, like to out-compete them was to add...
as many features as they can that they don't have. And then like an average user would come to Plazible then come to me and think that yeah, Sweatrix it's much better. But, ⁓ Plazible makes 100K monthly revenue. I make 1K. So this strategy, it's, it's not the best. And I decided to like pause new features development and maybe focus on, ⁓ like.
fixing whatever issues I have with my current website, optimizing, redesigning something. And overall, I want to now go more into marketing. I want to do proper onboarding, add some exit intent pop-ups, do marketing stuff now more.
Dagobert (14:44)
Yeah, I see.
Not just focus on features and also the positioning, you said. Your homepage is quite strong. Yeah, know, good positioning and everything. So I see you did. Yeah, you worked a lot on that.
Andrii Romasiun (14:48)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So like, I think, yeah, the features it's done. Like that's enough. It's time to work more on marketing.
It's pretty hard. I don't really have that much experience with marketing. easier for me, it's easier to build a feature or like build a product, not do marketing, but yeah, got to learn how to do it, I guess.
Dagobert (15:26)
Yeah.
So what did you do for marketing so far? Can you stop sharing your screen so I can see you also,
Andrii Romasiun (15:39)
Yeah. Yeah.
So for marketing I've read ⁓ an article I think John Youngfuck is the guy who written it. It's ⁓ One Week, something like One Week Building, One Week Marketing. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's amazing way because
Dagobert (15:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, marketing week and coding week or something. Yeah, yeah. It's a good way to do it, yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (16:13)
For me before it was, I am doing 90 % of marketing, then maybe post a tweet on Sweatrix account and that yeah, I released something. And then I think, yeah, good job, well done. I can go keep building stuff, but this way one week marketing, one week building. like marketing week, I focus only for marketing. ⁓
nothing else and then coding week I focused purely on coding it helps helps a lot I started
Dagobert (16:45)
And what did
you did you notice something that was good with marketing that you did? Did you notice some what was the best thing you did so far? I mean, the most effective.
Andrii Romasiun (16:55)
⁓
I think effective thing I did was, there's a thing called programmatic SEO. Basically you generate like 100 pages on the same topic. For example, like Google analytics, it's illegal in some countries. Like I think in Germany, it's a gray zone in law.
And like I did create ⁓ an article about if Google Analytics is illegal in some country. And then I create like 15 pages is Google Analytics illegal in Germany, in Sweden, in UK, in Ukraine.
Dagobert (17:40)
Yeah, with maybe just some small
changes for each page related to the country.
Andrii Romasiun (17:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
with like minimal changes and like each article it gets like two, three visitors per day, but collectively combined. Yeah, yeah.
Dagobert (17:56)
Nice. Yeah, yeah, no, that's not bad. Yeah, yeah. And especially
that's probably quite a good type of intention people have because they need, know, so.
Andrii Romasiun (18:07)
Yeah.
Yeah, they, they, yeah. Like people already like have doubts about GA.
Dagobert (18:14)
Yeah,
they have the pain already, so you can just solve it.
Andrii Romasiun (18:17)
easier
to upsell. Yeah.
Dagobert (18:20)
And that's interesting
that you said it's just two or three per day, but if you have a hundred, like let's say you did this for, I don't know how many countries, but like, let's imagine you have 50 people per day coming from these pages or a hundred.
If it's high intent and you convert one per day, it's huge. Maybe you don't, but like in general, like we think, we need to have 10 billion visitors on our website, but it's bullshit. Like if you have high intention, like you can have, you know, hundred people or like, I don't know, like just like a thousand visits per month. If it's high intention, you can grow fast. You know, like, I mean, maybe not scaled like crazy, but it can be huge. Like if you're an Indie maker, that's a lot.
Andrii Romasiun (19:04)
Yeah, true, Yeah. So I think I want to try to maybe double down on it, make more, ⁓ programmatic SEO pages. I've heard somewhere that Google like is cracking down on this. They, they, they don't like ⁓ this content. And some of my pages, they were also like marked as a duplicate and they're not showing up.
Dagobert (19:05)
You know, so... ⁓
Yeah, that's the risk,
you need to make it different enough I think, so you need maybe a bit more work on that to be sure.
Andrii Romasiun (19:34)
Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, to make it good, it takes some time. But I think it's worth it. If you find the niche, like, it's totally worth it.
Dagobert (19:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's worth investing in something even if it's just like gonna bring you a few visits per day, but if it's high intent, you know, because it's hard, know, just finding one customer per day is hard. if you can.
Andrii Romasiun (20:02)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, like find the funnel of already interested people. Just drive them to your website somehow and yeah.
Dagobert (20:08)
Yeah.
Yeah, so SEO for you, like programmatic SEO. Yeah, that's always been my dream to find like a product where like you can do easily programmatic SEO. Like, you know, when you see these like Zapier, like the SEO of Zapier, it's just like, you know, the integration between two products. They have a page for every two products and it's like 10,000 pages. That's like.
Andrii Romasiun (20:27)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
that's, that's even if, even if just one person visits a page combined 10 K that's, that's huge.
Dagobert (20:40)
That's 10,000 per day. Yeah, that's
it. That's awesome when you find that. Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (20:47)
I think
with AI, like if you, of course, if you, if you write, you should like, I should write the article like myself without AI, but like making the skeleton of the article and then using AI to tailor it for each ⁓ page, like automated somehow. I think it can be huge.
Dagobert (21:09)
Yes.
Yeah, I agree. That's smart. Always need to be on the lookout for things like this, know, things like... Like, for example, for me, with launch day, I'm starting... I focus on social, not SEO yet, because I think if I focus on making this cool and valuable, then everybody will make links to it, you know. I will be added to all the lists of places to launch, which is my main goal. So I should just focus on making it...
get sales to founders and make it cool. If I do this, that's already, that's the most important. But then I'm thinking, okay, how to get backlinks? And for me, for example, like when you have a product hunt type platform, you can just create a badge and every founder can put the badge on their website. So that's SEO easily. There's always ways to do that somehow. And it's always good to think about. Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (21:48)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, like, like
product hunt does with product of the day or something. Yeah.
Dagobert (22:10)
Yeah, that's it. I don't like this idea of competition, but I could do
something like...
It could be still some validation ⁓ type badge. On launch day, people can ⁓ upload products, clap for products. could just be, you had 500 uploads for your product, and it can be a badge, maybe it's cool enough. don't know. But yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (22:35)
I
launch day is like entire different concept to product hunt because they compete for like, you know, uploads, traffic. Like you, you want like people to get sales. They want to get backlinks or traffic. It's, it's a different thing. Yeah.
Dagobert (22:43)
Yeah, it's actually very different, yeah.
Yeah, that's true, that's And you know you were
saying something interesting, you were saying that when you started you were just looking at your competitors and doing all the features and then more. And now I do differently, it's like I literally don't look. I don't use Product Hunt personally, except if I want to support a friend or something, but I don't use it. I don't use any of these platforms, I don't go there. And I didn't look at them, you know, I just look at them a little bit.
Andrii Romasiun (23:06)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dagobert (23:26)
But I haven't, you I don't look at this because I'm thinking more like I'm trying to solve the problem and maybe the problem I'm solving is different, you know, than them. As you said, my goal is to get sales and it's super hard, but it's a different problem. And so I built for that. like, because what I noticed is when I use like years ago, I was looking more at competitors. And if you look too much at competitors, basically closes your thinking because then you think what they did is the norm.
Andrii Romasiun (23:36)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dagobert (23:56)
And so you don't think outside. You know what I mean? Because then, and like the more you look at them, the more you think this is the way to do it. And everybody does this. Every competitor does this. So every website looks the same. You look at all these Product Hunt competitors, they're all the same. They all have upvotes. They all have just an icon, a text, and a link. Because they all think because Product Hunt is successful,
Andrii Romasiun (24:00)
True. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
True, true.
Dagobert (24:22)
And it's still a good platform, by the way. I still think Productant is good. You can still try. It's worth trying because you can get a lot of traffic if it works, it's great. And you get a backlink, so it's cool. But like, because it was so successful, people think this is the way. But if you just stop looking, and I didn't look for months and I was just working, and then what I have is very different, and then you have a better chance of doing something interesting, I think. But it's harder. But yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (24:48)
Yeah, makes sense. Like
it's, yeah, it's, it's yeah, because I think I see that many, not many, all of, all of the product launch platforms, they pretty much like same as product on same concept. You, you, you launch a product, upload, get product of the day badge, maybe get a backlink and that's it. Like, and like hundreds, hundreds of platforms like this. It's insane.
Dagobert (25:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
But it's with every product category. You my previous product was this logo generator. And actually, when I say logo generator and make it seem so cheap, but it was so high quality, man. But anyway, it's like you look at all these websites do the same. They just have the same process. But us, we did. started from scratch and did a different process. And so, So that's what I like about your website. When I see that you still had some different shaders, like you had like this.
like this performance thing, really cool. And also this other thing like this, you know, focus more on the journey. I guess some people do that, but the way you present it is different. And I think, yeah, there's like, there's like this marketing and then there's also, it's also easier to market when you're different, when your product is a bit different. So, yeah. And focus on the differences, you know, like you did, like focus on the story or like on the journey, focus on the differences.
Andrii Romasiun (25:49)
Hmm.
Yeah, Finding and...
Yeah.
Dagobert (26:17)
Yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (26:19)
Finding a niche, like I focus more like on cookie less privacy focused things, probably European users would find it more interesting. But like if, if, if, if, if finding like a small niche, it's probably easier to promote in it.
Dagobert (26:26)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, also.
Well that's cool man, thanks for being a part of this launch day.
Andrii Romasiun (26:46)
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me for having me on this lunch date. It means a lot. Thanks.
Dagobert (26:54)
Oh yeah, for sure man, and I'm really going to try to, I'm really obsessed with this. I need to get you sales. I want to get everybody at least one, which would be like 10 times better than any product launch thing, except product hunt. But yeah.
Andrii Romasiun (27:06)
⁓ It... Yes,
it would be awesome.
Dagobert (27:10)
Yeah, okay cool, well, you know, good luck man.
Andrii Romasiun (27:14)
Thank you. Bye.