Exciting news!
Today is the big day: StreamAlive is Go For Launch!
You can support the launch by visiting the StreamAlive page on ProductHunt
Thank you!
Every day, dozens of products are listed on ProductHunt. The ones that get the most votes make it to the front page and get more eyeballs. Sharing StreamAlive’s ProductHunt page on your social channels or forwarding this newsletter also helps to spread the word.
Getting this project off the ground over the last 12 months has had the help and support of so many people and we’re so grateful to all of you who have joined us on this journey.
Behind the scenes
The last two weeks have seen a frenzied amount of activity with the team working day and night to get the product ready for its first public debut. The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” can equally be applied to launching a SaaS product 🙂
Here’s what’s been happening behind the scenes to get StreamAlive ready for its first big date.
Visitors can now sign up and create an account
A big milestone for any SaaS product is letting people register and use your product automatically. We’re delighted to say that this is now in place.
We deliberated over whether to ask people to create new login credentials or use a password-less system where a One Time Password (OTP) is sent to the users’ email address. We chose the latter because we believe that OTPs are less of a security risk than passwords.
Once logged in, users will be able to connect their YouTube, Teams, or Zoom accounts.
Brand new onboarding videos
The big challenge with SaaS products is not necessarily getting a user to sign up, it’s getting them to stay. According to analysis by AppCues, 75% of your app signups are likely to drop off between week 0 and 1.
Source: https://www.appcues.com/blog/user-onboarding-customer-journey
That’s a scary statistic and one which we will do everything we can to avoid with StreamAlive. Retention is a journey, but we took the first step by turning to our village (in this case, Swethaa, our intern who is pursuing a computer science degree, and Migma, who has built a loyal Instagram following with her fashion photo and video shoots) to help us create short on-boarding videos.
Neither Swethaa or Migma have ever created on-boarding videos for a SaaS product before, but the younger generation is so tech-native that watching these videos you would think they are produced by a seasoned team of SaaS product marketers.
There’s a big lesson here: The Gen-Z generation is probably more technically savvy than you’ll ever be. Trust your young employees and give them every opportunity.
Crypto-bros in the house
For our launch video on ProductHunt, we required an explainer video. Once again, we turned to our village and enlisted the help of our eldest son, Shaan, and his friend, Eli.
The brief was to show StreamAlive, not explain it - which I accept is an oxymoron in an ‘explainer’ video. We each came up with our own scripts and over several brainstorming sessions converged on a single idea.
Full disclaimer: The younger tribe’s script ideas were far better than mine or Tina’s. This generation has grown up with short-form video content and (I believe) intrinsically understand it better than we do.
We had just a few weeks to produce the video so we had to eliminate and combine based on several factors:
- Does it demonstrate StreamAlive’s value proposition as clearly as possible?
- Is it feasible in the time we have left?
- Does it require technical expertise beyond the capabilities of people we can call upon?
- Does it require a significant budget?
Many explainer videos are animated. We felt that this would take too long to produce and require too much back and forth with an animator - and sometimes the end result is not what you were hoping for.
Once again, we entrusted our young colleagues to produce the explainer video, and it has resulted in something you probably haven’t seen before in an explainer video.
(I’ve certainly never seen Shaan in this light before)
The price is right!
The final piece of the puzzle was to get the pricing page done. This was perhaps one of the hardest tasks because pricing can make or break your product and is something we’ll dive into in a later newsletter.
In terms of naming conventions, we’ve taken an aquatic approach. Why? Because we are a stream-ing company 🙂 The pricing packages are:
There is a lot more happening and a lot more that we’d like to update you on, but this is supposed to be a brief newsletter, not a New York Times long-read piece.
I’ll be in touch again in a couple of weeks with more news and a debrief on how our ProductHunt launch went.
Stay well!
Lux and the StreamAlive tribe
PS. “Go for launch” is an unusual phrase. When NASA launches its rockets, each team has to report on the status of their systems by saying “Go” or “No Go”. When every system has reported “Go” the final phrase to confirm the launch is: Go for launch. Just like our product launch, we have dozens of systems to check and get a “Go” from each team member.
