Do not index
Do not index
I developed a new tool for e-commerce. It’s called Angage and it’s available at angage.net
Currently, it:
– Hunts currently trending products available for dropshipping. It also returns links to source the product directly on Alibaba, Aliexpress, Amazon as well as reviews, social campaigns about the product and how much should you selling the product for. Easily view/export this data.
– Returns store currency, social accounts and social campaigns currently running, products for sale by SKUs, vendors, average product value, traffic stats, what marketing plugins are installed on the store in different categories (analytics, cart abandonment, fraud prevention, etc).
– Tracks sales for about 600+ selected stores, giving you name of the buyers, location of the buyers, time and date of purchases, what they purchased, store average orders per day, most served country, store gross daily and yearly income (prediction);
– Searches on more than 500k products (and counting).
If you are a marketer, a marketing agency or a dropshipper you can use Angage to discover hot products before they go viral, get an understanding of what a store is selling, and get e-commerce leads that you can outreach to. If you are a shop owner, you can understand more about your store and how you can improve it, see what vendors your competitors are buying from.
To build this I used free or almost-free resources and my experience. I used bulma.io, a free css framework, for the front-end and PHP and python for the back-end.
I strongly support transparency and openness by sharing our app and revenue metrics with everyone, so if you are interested you can actually see how many users the app has, how much I am making ($) and the rundown of my expenses here: http://angage.net/open
Here are some app stats:
– More than 550,000 products from ~30k stores already added;
– Adding 1 store every 10 seconds on average (planning on tracking more than 600k stores);
– Over 60k sale orders tracked;
– Adding 27 products every 10 seconds on average;
– 3 daily hot product opportunities found on average.
Traction
I got validation, my first 5 paying customers and about 200 users just by posting on Facebook groups and reaching out to friends.
Further traction has been provided by my Product Hunt launch of the product. If you don’t know what Product Hunt is, you are missing out: it’s a product leaderboard, a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.
Product Hunt Launch
Prior to the launch, I already had gathered all the material I needed for it to be at least good enough to get on the front page: logos, images, descriptions, everything is really tailored to appeal to the PH community.
Here is my page. On Product Hunt, there are two objectives: the first is reaching the front page, the second being in the top #5 products voted for that day. To do that, we need upvotes! I did a few things
- Posted on my Facebook wall
- Ask friends to upvote.
- Hassled every new visitor in the chat over 24 hours to support the project.
Of course, the best way to get upvotes is to have a great product so, that counts, too.I guess being a half marketer/half dev pays out. Here are my results:
- Reached 420+ Users (more than doubled my user base)
- 8 Paying Users (+3 from pre-launch)
- 1 Potential Job Offer
- 1 Potential Investor
- 4 bugs fixed
- Sleep
With over 300 upvotes, I made it into the top 5 products of the day. I don’t know why I’m only #5 even having more upvotes, but PH also added me to the Top Makers and Top Hunters list! That means, Angage is sure to be featured in their newsletter today, December 9th 2017! That will for sure add another burst of traffic.
On the “I would have done differently” section, I can definitely say I underestimated the traffic a little bit. I would have preferred to have a bigger server machine from the start. Here are the server CPU and Memory during the launch 😛
And these are some traffic stats during the launch:
The product was also featured in publications around the web, like this one:
What’s next:
Now I want to launch Angage on Hacker News and Reddit. I also want to launch 2 other softwares in December.
Best,
