Hi everyone 👋!
Me and my partner Stefano co-founded 2 startups together.
A little background about ourselves: I'm a self-taught web developer and CRO specialist and he's the real geek.
The first startup we founded didn’t get any traction, we made a ton of mistakes.
But we learned along the way.
The second one has been much more successful (running at around 700k € ARR).
It’s a real-time lead generation marketplace.
We generate leads for our clients at any stage of the funnel.
This means we constantly are in “test mode” to improve the CR of our landing pages.
Everyday we run multiple campaigns for our clients and we need to know which pages are performing better.
Of course we do A/B/n testing, but this kind of testing has some big limitations, since you can only make minor changes to the page (for example editing the color of a button, or the copy).
In order to improve performances in a solid way, you need often to test out significant design or backend changes (say a single page checkout flow vs. a multi-page flow).
Entering split URL Testing.
Split URL Testing is the technique to test multiple variations of your website hosted on different URLs.
The difference here is that you can really test out completely different landing pages (or website pages) and see which one is converting better.
To resume:
A/B testing —> client side
Split URL testing —> server side
And here are 2 other big differences:
client side tools suffer often from the flicker effect (when the visitor is shown the control quickly before seeing the correct variant), which is hurting badlt the user experience
client side tools are not optimal for mobile traffic, because they take too long to load. And that’s a big thing, considering that the vast majority of your traffic is coming from mobile today.
So for us the way to go is Split URL testing.
And here came our problem (and opportunity).
We’ve tried many tools but we’ve always found the same issues:
they are not straight-forward to set up
they are way over-featured, so you end up paying hundreds of bucks every month for using just the 20% of them.
even the low-tier plans are quite expensive and support just very low-traffic websites. For sites with medium-high traffic you end up paying many hundreds of bucks each month.
At the end, we couldn’t find the tool we were looking for.
That’s why we decided to build it ourselves!
And we decided to do it in public.
Entering Splitstack, a server-side split URL testing tool at an affordable price and with easy-to-read analytics integrated.
All in one.
How we want Splitstack to be:
easy and simple to use, even by a non expert;
cheap (2 tiers: free or 19$ per month -unlimited usage);
actionable, meaning you need to understand clearly which page is performing better, without the need to integrate it with other analytics tools.
That’s it.
OUR TIMELINE
We are planning to have and MVP ready in about 20 days. Then using it for our own campaigns and, in the meanwhile, reaching out to 30 beta testers to use it and give us feedbacks on the product (people that are running tests in their daily jobs and that might be interested in our tool - if you think you’re one of them just reach out).
Why we decided to build it in public?
Well, we think there might be people out there interested in knowing how the process of building a tech product from scratch and finding your first users might look like.
We are sharing our journey on Indiehachers and with our newsletter here on Substack (our brother in name 😋 ).
Thanks for reading and feel free to share your feedback!