Computer Nerds - BREAK This Industry

[ilrein]

View attachment Screen Recording 2023-03-26 at 10.16.17 PM.mov

@Vigilante


Submitting this for review in the app store, will need a few days

This was a fun way to spend my Sunday

 

[Vigilante]

I was looking for a SAAS to automate posting to multiple FB groups that I admin. You can "share" the post from within Facebook, but in the case of an industrial user like me that's an arduous clerical task. There are companies that can do this, but their pricing is based on "per page" or "per group" and I find the pricing egregious for an automation.

Hootsuite, Buffer, OneUp or Sprout Social are examples. I want to create one post and blast it out to 50 groups that my business owns the group pages for. $1800/year. Nope.

This should be $10/$20 bucks a month. It's a one and done automation. Where these companies get complicated is they are charging you to broadcast over multiple channels simultaneously (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) and I get that but this market is ripe for disruption.

Charge $20/mo, get 1,000 users and you have a $20k/mo business of PASSIVE income. Once you build the API, it's done. Some Fastlane computer geek is just the person to disrupt this industry. You don't need 40 people in an office. You need one great programmer. The UI is easy, the connection to Facebook is encouraged by them (Log into Facebook ) so if you build it, we will come.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Another industry that needs to be disrupted are the ridiculous prices for email list management. If you have a list of 50,000 or more, prepare to pay a mortgage for these companies simply to host your list, and that's before you send a damn email. The "charge by subscriber count" needs to be wiped off the face of the planet.

 

[Skroob]

Yup.

And when you go from 9,999 to 10,000 subs you suddenly jump from the $50/m plan to the $195/m plan.

Wow, that's desperately-start-kicking-subscribers-off-your-list brutal. It doesn't seem like costs should go up with subscribers, not like that anyway. I wonder if there's some liability issue, like lists with 10k+ are more likely to get hit with automated spam filtering rules or something.

Anyway, I spent some time looking into these ideas and as much as I like the opportunities, I realized I've been trying to shift out of my core competency too much lately. I've been a mobile app guy for 15 years, I'm damn good at it, and I actually really enjoy it as well. It's a hard-earned, refined skill, and trying to jump away into web-first SaaS (or digital marketing for information products, as I've also been playing with) probably isn't the best use of it. So if nothing else, this thread has helped narrow my focus back where it belongs!

 

[ilrein]

View attachment Screen Recording 2023-03-31 at 2.13.21 PM.mov

A new video of the latest design.

Currently the logic doesn't work on production as I'm waiting for FB to approve my business. Then I'll have full API access. Any day now and I can ship.

I don't agree with a single thing you wrote @Meerten

Small projects can be finished. Unfinished projects never compound. There are thousands of Facebook apps and FB doesn't attempt to "take them". It's a baseless concern based on pure speculation.

I've learned more in this last week of building than I have in many months. I've combined Facebook API, Stripe API, cron jobs to execute scheduled functions, and a fully serverless backend architecture to make this a reality. And I just had a hell of a fun time doing it

 

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[Skroob]

Is there a sizable market segment of "people who moderate enough Facebook groups to make this a hassle"? Social Media management firms?

 

[Saad Khan]

Is there a sizable market segment of "people who moderate enough Facebook groups to make this a hassle"? Social Media management firms?

You can also sell this app to those SMM firms. They'd love to reduce their expenses and make their offers competitive.

 

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[alexkuzmov]

Another industry that needs to be disrupted are the ridiculous prices for email list management. If you have a list of 50,000 or more, prepare to pay a mortgage for these companies simply to host your list, and that's before you send a damn email. The "charge by subscriber count" needs to be wiped off the face of the planet.

I couldnt agree more!

Not only that but I'm actually building an email marketing system for the reason you listed and more:
1. Clueless support, refusing to divulge information about issues you have with an email list.
"We cant approve it",
Why?
"Its our policy"
What is your policy, what is the problem?
"We cant share such information"

Also taking days to respond to simple questions and refusing to give clear answers to things they should absolutely know.

There is an error when trying to send emails to a particular email address? Which one?,
"We cant tell you".
Can you just remove it then or add it to the unsubscrived list?.
"No, we are not an email list clearing service, you should clear the list yourself"

2. Autostopping campaigns for no clear reason.

Error while running the campaign, hmm what is the error?
"Error 1252: Cant work bro sorry, get fckt, lol"
Hello support, what is this error Im getting?
"Oh yea thats common, you have too many emails we've deemed to be untrustworthy, so we cant run your campaign. We have a list, its very extensive."
Can you ignore them, cut them from my list, or can I just send to them anyway?
"Nope, as the error suggests, go get fckt bro, lol, is there anything else I can help you with today?"

3. Insisting on opt in, opt out, integrations, JS code insertions, events and whatever else.

Hey aaah, I'm actually using my own SMTP server, you know the one I gave you the credentials for. Sooo any issues, spam folder problems, bans, none delivered emails etc. is on me, ok?
"On you? Nah nah nah, you need to add these checkboxes here, these scripts here, these forms here, these pages here, sign this agreement here add these DKIM records there... yea I know you dont need those records FU."
Ok so if I do all that, double opt in track users through your script and so on, my campaigm will work always, right?
"We've detected too many bounced emails, a grand total of 2, from the 60k email list you gave us, so we will be stopping your campaign until further notice, which will never come, cause you already paid your subscription this month suckaaaah"

---------
Honeslty I have more but after 8 services more than 10k BGN spent, frustration and problem, we just decided to solve our own problem.

Its actually sending emails for a charity website, so speed of campaigns and them going wihtout a hitch is crucial. Qe havent been able to run 1 campaign successfully in a year.

We are around 2 months away from beta.
Do you think I can post my progress for the beta on the forum? Offer discount options for and collaborate with forum members like the progress for goal sumo?

 

[Vigilante]

I was able to find a service that meets my immediate needs here. I won’t disclose it publicly because I’m using their service in a way different than the way they designed it. Eventually once they figure out what I’m doing, they will charge me or prohibit me from using the service the way I’m using it.

In short several times a day, I am able to post to 50 different Facebook groups that I am the admin of the same message that gets blasted out from the service. I haven’t been throttled yet, but I think that’s because they regulate the drip of the emails to Facebook to make sure that there aren’t too many postings to violate their spam restrictions. The key here is that I am the administrator of all of the groups we are posting to.

There must be a need for this, though, because there are several professional companies that exist in this space, I just don’t like their value proposition in their charge especially for a start up.

And I think the issues that MJ and I are talking about run parallel, and I think they should stay in the same thread. It’s a question of hosting an automation.

Both the email services business, and the post replication business have the same fundamental business flaw. Something that is automated with minimal band with restriction should not be charging thousands of dollars a year.

These businesses are ripe for disruption. In this case, you can do things more simply to meet a need, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to do better what’s already being done.

Take an existing business and make it cheaper and do it in scale. Fastlane as F*ck.

 

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[ilrein]

Interesting project, been building it most of today as well.

I'm getting to know the facebook SDK in richer detail. They won't let me use the 'publish_to_groups' API without having a registered business. So I've filled for a sole proprietorship today and submitted my documents to FB.

I've been thinking how to approach "scheduling". Looks like the smart approach is to use an 'app access token', whereas my first version relies on a 'user access token', which is temporary. Preliminary research suggests that this would require my app being installed on every group desired to be posted too.

I went a bit further today and polished the UI, and bound it to a domain: https://groupsync.xyz/ (a nice app name courteously suggested by ChatGPT).

@Vigilante I could add your facebook account as a "tester" to my app, and you can take it for a ride and provide some much needed early feedback. Might I entice you into giving it a spin? I'm also interesting in the type of content you want to produce, as I can connect it to OpenAI API and perhaps have your content be generated as well.

 

[Vigilante]

Fine. So based on what I've read, you want to make your own developer account, and then give the access token to the SaaS, and finally get UI-represented options regarding auto-posting, is that correct?

Also,
What are you going to look for in that SaaS other than bulk posting?
How many times a month are you going to post/broadcast a post?

I don’t need to have the developer account because I would just use the service like any other subscriber. The developer would want to own the linkage to Facebook so they could use it for more than just my account. We would post to Facebook only and unlimited times per month.

The app needs to be able to put postings on a timer, so they don’t flood Facebook with a batch of posts simultaneously.

 

[Vigilante]

One of the challenges in participating in a beta of this, however, is, if you do it wrong, you mess up somebody’s business. I can’t afford to have these businesses jeopardized from a business model that isn’t Facebook synchronized.

The developer would need to test it out by building dozens of Facebook groups and pushing their own data through it first.

 

[Andy Black]

I don't expect you to agree with me.

Like I said I'm not trying to discourage you.
There is exactly zero reason to be discouraged. Please keep going.

And I'm writing directly from experience not speculation.
But you don't have to do anything with it and actually I now regret sharing it. Good luck!

I liked what you wrote and I also liked ilrein's response. His eyes are wide open and he's happy getting stuck in.

You reminded me why I don't want to create a SaaS based on Google Ads (something like SpeedPPC). I build campaigns like that but better. If I created a tool and hundreds or thousands of businesses use it then Google can cut me off at the flick of a switch. I'd rather create a tool I use internally and build consumer facing brands.

 

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[Saad Khan]

I was looking for a SAAS to automate posting to multiple FB groups that I admin. You can "share" the post from within Facebook, but in the case of an industrial user like me that's an arduous clerical task. There are companies that can do this, but their pricing is based on "per page" or "per group" and I find the pricing egregious for an automation.

Hootsuite, Buffer, OneUp or Sprout Social are examples. I want to create one post and blast it out to 50 groups that my business owns the group pages for. $1800/year. Nope.

This should be $10/$20 bucks a month. It's a one and done automation. Where these companies get complicated is they are charging you to broadcast over multiple channels simultaneously (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) and I get that but this market is ripe for disruption.

Charge $20/mo, get 1,000 users and you have a $20k/mo business of PASSIVE income. Once you build the API, it's done. Some Fastlane computer geek is just the person to disrupt this industry. You don't need 40 people in an office. You need one great programmer. The UI is easy, the connection to Facebook is encouraged by them (Log into Facebook ) so if you build it, we will come.

I've used Publer for posting in multiple groups on LinkedIn on a much smaller scale. I can definitely see the pain point.

In a nutshell, whatever DFY (Done for you) service an agency is offering that just replaces time can be replaced with a program or an app that costs a fraction of their fees.

 

[LoganM]

Once you build the API, it's done. Some Fastlane computer geek is just the person to disrupt this industry. You don't need 40 people in an office. You need one great programmer. The UI is easy, the connection to Facebook is encouraged by them (Log into Facebook ) so if you build it, we will come.

I don't use Facebook, so just to clarify, the UI flow in its purest form would basically look like:
1- Sign into Facebook
2- View list of recent posts, and select the one you want to share
3- Select all the groups you want to share it to
4- Send. Profit?

Seems pretty simple to me, unless I'm missing something...
I could prototype this pretty quickly.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

have you tried ConvertKit? I heard good things about them.

Yes, I cancelled them. Same issue, charge by subscriber.

Have you looked at Sendgrid?

This is more of a transactional service, not an EMS with automations and marketing functions.

 

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[Andy Black]

Something like this MJ?

Sendy - Send Newsletters 100x cheaper via Amazon SES

A self hosted newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) at 100x cheaper than other hosted solutions.

sendy.co

 

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[ilrein]

Good stuff man! Someone beat me to it. That's cool .

So did you built a server on your home computer and opened it up the internet to post the content on Facebook using it's API?

No, the video was me running the app locally. If I ran the server myself, it would terminate whenever I turned off my computer.

It's deployed to a proper cloud provider and uses the facebook javascript SDK.

 

[Vigilante]

Interesting project, been building it most of today as well.

I'm getting to know the facebook SDK in richer detail. They won't let me use the 'publish_to_groups' API without having a registered business. So I've filled for a sole proprietorship today and submitted my documents to FB.

I've been thinking how to approach "scheduling". Looks like the smart approach is to use an 'app access token', whereas my first version relies on a 'user access token', which is temporary. Preliminary research suggests that this would require my app being installed on every group desired to be posted too.

I went a bit further today and polished the UI, and bound it to a domain: https://groupsync.xyz/ (a nice app name courteously suggested by ChatGPT).

@Vigilante I could add your facebook account as a "tester" to my app, and you can take it for a ride and provide some much needed early feedback. Might I entice you into giving it a spin? I'm also interesting in the type of content you want to produce, as I can connect it to OpenAI API and perhaps have your content be generated as well.

I’m going to be crazy for the next 48 hours but I will come back here in 48 hours to update and discuss.

 

[Meerten]

Charge $20/mo, get 1,000 users and you have a $20k/mo business of PASSIVE income. Once you build the API, it's done. Some Fastlane computer geek is just the person to disrupt this industry. You don't need 40 people in an office. You need one great programmer. The UI is easy, the connection to Facebook is encouraged by them (Log into Facebook ) so if you build it, we will come.

Way too low barrier of Entry for my taste.
And it violates Control.

On the other hand.. it's relatively low complexity and could be perfect to sell for a while.
I'd say it's a fine idea for a "lifestyle" type of business if you're not an enterprisey kind of guy.

Either way solving a legitimate need in the world is a worthy adventure.

As such I do really wish you well with this @ilrein, your landing page already looks pretty solid to me!
I think you could definitely improve a lot of people's experience with this and make a ton of bucks in the process.

That being said, for me personally the idea lacks a deeper sense of meaning to motivate me. It would feel like I'm money-chasing instead of leaving a legacy. Also the fact I'm getting into bed with the beast again. Been there done that. Dreams have been shattered. Years of time wasted.

Interesting project, been building it most of today as well.

I'm getting to know the facebook SDK in richer detail. They won't let me use the 'publish_to_groups' API without .....

So you may want to keep that in mind..
For business' sakes you may not want to grow this project so large that it starts to attract Facebook's attention.

And I will tell you why:

You and I both know that from the perspective of Facebook's top-of-the-bill development division this functionality is absolutely trivial to make. So trivial in fact, that it's been my repeated experience that it has been a management/executive decision not to feature it. (straight to the masses, that is)

In which case you're going against how Facebook wants to see things in the bigger picture.
Even if their API currently allows for these things to happen.

If your product were to gain a lot of traction, like.. going pretty much mainstream..
..then I can all but guarantee you that it won't be long until Facebook's tools division receives word of it.

In which case what's going to happen is this:
1. Facebook rolls their own functionality since you've already done the hard work of market validation for them (enterprises don't like to take risks)
2. Facebook sticks with their executive decision not to mainstream mass mailing to groups and will just as blatantly limit its API to reflect that decision

Either way.. BOOM you're out.

Ofcourse all of this won't happen as long as companies charge a stupid $1800 a year so that not everyone and their mother will be mass-posting like that.. so that has been stable so far. But guess what.. you're about to stir it.

Most definitely not wanting to be a doomsayer here (on the contrary! pretty awesome execution so far. you should keep going) .. just don't invest your (proverbial) life savings in it.

Ofcourse if you want to help out evolution by nudging Facebook in the right direction at the cost of your project getting subsumed then I suppose that, from a spiritual perspective, that's okay too. And should you hop from project to project like this then you will essentially be leading Facebook and they will try every trick in the book to get you on payroll roflolmao. It'll be fun I promise.

So anyway.

I will say just keep in mind the Commandment of Control and have a safe Fastlane journey!

 

[Skroob]

Geez. Can I pay an INE fee for these?

One of the market lanes I've been looking at is, in my notes anyway, "social media power users". Because they mainly work from their phones, so mobile apps are appealing, and thats where my strength is. I was mostly staying away from it though, because in my mind it was B2C (which is a pain in a lot of ways) and the long tail tends to not have any money at all to put into it. I didn't consider taking a step up the ladder and looking into working with the management companies. Until now.

 

[BizyDad]

Is there a reason as to way they charge per subscriber? Is there any technological limit or something they have to pay for when a user has that many people on a list?

I’m just curious as to why they charge that much? Is it really about them making profit or is it because something related to tech.

The api's cost.

The competition for coders had developer salaries increasing. With recent layoffs, maybe that will change, but I'm sure pricing won't. Many companies like this are also facing increasing costs due to leverage to fuel growth.

@Vigilante is right, these companies got fat and bloated and there is room for someone lean and mean.

 

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[John Clancy]

I recently checked out some different email marketing tools (I've created a personal site and may send a weekly newsletter at some point).

Since I'm just starting from scratch, I figure that the free tier of pretty much any of the major tools will suffice. I've gone with MailerLite for now. My needs are modest, so unless I run into some major issues along the way, I'll be sticking with that until I outgrow it.

That said, I came across an interesting WordPress-based solution that people here might be interested in: Marketing Automation For WordPress - FluentCRM

I haven't used this specific tool myself, but can vouch for the quality of another one of their products (Fluent Forms).

How it works is that you create broadcasts/sequences and manage your list via the backend of your WordPress site. The actual sending of emails then needs to be handled by a provider like Sendgrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun or others.

When you're not relying on those providers for advanced features (automations etc), the cost of using them is quite reasonable. But I guess it you're sending to a big list or mailing every day, the costs could rack up.

There are probably other plugins like this on the market too, so if you're interested in the idea, do some digging.

Likewise --> if you're a developer or have an appetite to bring something to market, you could do worse than spin up something like this and position it as a "decentralised" alternative to third-party tools like ConvertKit, Aweber and so on.

Might be a little hacky - but if you're not content with what you're getting from the big players, it's worth checking out.

 

[Vigilante]

I get what you mean, and its really a niche that can be exploited.
The main issue I see is that you nees slighlty different content for each group and social platform, based on the following.
Which makes it so any mass media distribution system comes with a major drawback.
Now if there is case where the same post can fit perfeclty into 50 FB groups I can totally see a SaaS for that.

I think that’s why the services got complicated in terms of the existing platform pricing. They give you the ability to cross post to multiple platforms. I imagine that is because once they set up the API it is easy for them to handle from a replication standpoint, however, for my purpose is all I need is Facebook integration.

 

[ZackerySprague]

I was able to find a service that meets my immediate needs here. I won’t disclose it publicly because I’m using their service in a way different than the way they designed it. Eventually once they figure out what I’m doing, they will charge me or prohibit me from using the service the way I’m using it.

In short several times a day, I am able to post to 50 different Facebook groups that I am the admin of the same message that gets blasted out from the service. I haven’t been throttled yet, but I think that’s because they regulate the drip of the emails to Facebook to make sure that there aren’t too many postings to violate their spam restrictions. The key here is that I am the administrator of all of the groups we are posting to.

There must be a need for this, though, because there are several professional companies that exist in this space, I just don’t like their value proposition in their charge especially for a start up.

And I think the issues that MJ and I are talking about run parallel, and I think they should stay in the same thread. It’s a question of hosting an automation.

Both the email services business, and the post replication business have the same fundamental business flaw. Something that is automated with minimal band with restriction should not be charging thousands of dollars a year.

These businesses are ripe for disruption. In this case, you can do things more simply to meet a need, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to do better what’s already being done.

Take an existing business and make it cheaper and do it in scale. Fastlane as F*ck.

So then we could use Facebook's Graph API to create a tool that allows you to post on behalf of all those groups if you were the admin correct?





Looks like their's not cost to use Facebook's Graph API, which allows you to access the Facebook Groups.

So if I am understanding this correctly, the idea is to build a SAAS or an APP that allows Facebook Group Mods/Admins post a message to multiple groups simultaneous at once, but with the idea of not posting so much that it would spam your account and charge a fee per month?

The app would access Facebook's API to then post a your message among the groups?

 

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[ZackerySprague]

Here some documentation on using the API itself that allows a developer to post within a Facebook Group.

Facebook Groups API Get Started

The Facebook Groups API Get Started guide explains the step to take to get started using the Groups API.

developers.facebook.com

 

[ZackerySprague]

I was looking for a SAAS to automate posting to multiple FB groups that I admin. You can "share" the post from within Facebook, but in the case of an industrial user like me that's an arduous clerical task. There are companies that can do this, but their pricing is based on "per page" or "per group" and I find the pricing egregious for an automation.

Hootsuite, Buffer, OneUp or Sprout Social are examples. I want to create one post and blast it out to 50 groups that my business owns the group pages for. $1800/year. Nope.

This should be $10/$20 bucks a month. It's a one and done automation. Where these companies get complicated is they are charging you to broadcast over multiple channels simultaneously (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) and I get that but this market is ripe for disruption.

Charge $20/mo, get 1,000 users and you have a $20k/mo business of PASSIVE income. Once you build the API, it's done. Some Fastlane computer geek is just the person to disrupt this industry. You don't need 40 people in an office. You need one great programmer. The UI is easy, the connection to Facebook is encouraged by them (Log into Facebook ) so if you build it, we will come.

I wouldn't mind trying this project. It's not very dependent on another audience. I would give this a swing. It would be a great learning experience for me.

 

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[Andy Black]

For the email marketing...

I've been looking into this for our own projects. When I worked in a startup we were acquiring 15k email signups a day. I'm pretty sure they weren't using MailCheat(Chimp) or ConvertKit to send emails.

I'm trying to build email lists we own now. I'd like there to be custom fields such as location, what they searched for, and various other data we ask via a single or multi-step form.

I'm currently looking at using our own landing pages that have a button to signup. On clicking the button they get sent to a Google Form. Upon completing the form the data is automatically added to a Google Sheet. This is effectively our customer record.

I'd then like to send some onboarding sequence of emails, and then regular alerts depending on where they're located and what they're interested in.

We already use Sendgrid to send leads to clients via email.

My task tonight is to figure out if we can use a Google Sheet as our customer list and then use Sendgrid to send transactional emails, and hopefully automations. The solution may use Zapier.

One thing I like about Google Sheets is being able to see the customer data in a table. I was playing with ConvertKit adding custom fields but can't see those fields when viewing all records from within the interface. I like seeing the data under the hood and being able to create pivot-tables to slice and dice the data.

We use Google Sheets to create Google Ads campaigns for clients. I'd like us to use Google Sheets to create the landing pages too.

Having everything in Google Sheets means we could link up all those different workflows

Whenever I've tried using landing page builders, form builders, and email service providers, I've always ended up frustrated that the basics aren't done brilliantly, and that I also pay for advanced functionality I've no need for.

 

[Vigilante]

Hey, has anyone found a solution to this problem?
@Vigilante

There are a few pay solutions out there, but nobody has really addressed this that I have followed. I did find a parallel service that I repurposed to do what I wanted it to do. A few people were looking at this right after I posted it but I didn’t stay with them.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

I thought it had automations.

Email Marketing Automation Software | SendGrid

With SendGrid Email Marketing Automation, create personalized experiences, tell stories, and invite conversations in a way that’s scalable and relevant.

sendgrid.com

Same issue, with automation, they want to charge by # of contacts.

I'm not paying some company $500/mo to host an email list.