For the next few weeks, I’ve decided to share with you the journey of building Limpid.cloud.
Once a week, I intend to present a feature I’m working on and answer questions such as:
- Why did I choose to work on that?
- Who needs this feature?
- How did I build it?
- Which challenges did I encounter?
- What’s the initial feedback from my users/customers?
etc...
Committing to doing this once a week will push me to ship features & iterate FAST, which is absolutely key when building a startup.
As I wanted to make SaaS/Cloud savings more accessible than ever, I spent this week putting Limpid.cloud in self-serve mode with a Free plan.
When I say "self-serve" mode, I mean enabling my users to go from "I'm interested in trying this tool" to "The tool is now operational for me" within 5 minutes and without having to involve anyone from Limpid in the process.
To achieve this goal, I had to build 3 different components:
- A robust account sign-up experience, using email/password OR one-click signup using Google
- A proper onboarding to let the user add data sources and configure the tool according to the company's needs.
- Add a quick tour of the app so that the user understands the features available and isn't lost when he/she arrives on the dashboard.
🧐 Why I prioritised this: Within the next 5/10 years, I'm convinced that nearly all startups & SMBs will need help managing their SaaS / Cloud. The current actors are a real pain to configure, so I wanted to turn Limpid into the easiest tool to use on the market!
👨💼 Who is this for: Mostly CEOs, CFOs, and IT Managers of companies who use a lot of SaaS / Cloud services and who want to save money + monitor their tools. These people are usually pretty busy and don't want to waste hours of their time understanding/configuring a tool.
🛠️ How I built it:
- For the account sign-up, I already had AWS Amplify installed because I initially started building my app from a Next.js template. I did however have to write a few Lambda functions on top and configure Amplify to accept signups via Google.
- The onboarding is a series of 5 pages that prompt the user to add data sources and answer a few basic questions - I made sure to limit the amount of necessary clicks as much as possible to make it quick.
- Upon onboarding completion, I used the "react-tour" library to add a tour of the app for the user - took me less than an hour to configure!
- Finally, I had to do A LOT of testing to make sure the entire flow works correctly. To do this, I tried to think of all the potential scenarios my users could get into and tried every single one of them.
🤯 What I struggled with: AWS Amplify is really not straightforward to configure if you're not familiar with it. Unless you're already familiar with the AWS ecosystem, I wouldn't recommend that you pick this identity provider because it's a real pain. I previously used Auth0 in the past for a client and it SO was much easier!
🔜 Next steps: I'm now focused on onboarding as many users as possible to get feedback + improve the onboarding flow and the app itself.
I'll see you all next week! ✌️