This time I thought to try something new: doing a review of a indie hacker project.

I will break down the problem they target, the solution, the first impression, the business model and my recommendations for this indie hacker business.

The business I’m going to review today is: Blog2Doc which is an online tool for converting a blog of your choice to a Word document.

I already provided some of this feedback to the author itself via indiehackers.com and email, and I’ll be as realistic as possible. I can’t stand the fake “friend feedback” where all you get is encouraging words but no actionable feedback and instead I prefer to get and offer more realistic feedback that helps an entrepreneur to move forward.

First impression

Upon accessing https://www.blogtodoc.com/, the first impression isn’t great: the design is kind of rudimentary which makes me think it’s a bit sketchy, but the copy is clear and concise. It is a tool for exporting blogs to Word, and it makes that clear.

My only problem with that is that it doesn’t talk about the problem (it mentions that you don’t have to click CTRL+s anymore on blog pages), it talks about the solution.

But it fails to tell me the “why”.

Why would I use it? What problem does it solve and how does that translate in value for me? Hitting CTRL+S is faster than using a 3rd party to achieve the same thing.

It seems that the problem isn’t there, and as an owner of two blogs, I can’t find any reason to use a tool like this.

Pivot idea

But then it struck me: why would you want to download a blog? The clear answer to this is “to do a backup”. And then it started to resonate with me. As an owner of two blogs/websites , one hosted here on substack and one on Ghost, if any of these platforms just decide to ban me and delete all my content, I’m f****d because I don’t have backups (I should get some though).

What if, instead of just exporting to Word, it would back it up to a format that can then be restored?  Or better, a format that can be used with multiple blog/publication hosting services.

When I moved some of my articles from Ghost to Substack, it took me like 10 minutes for 5 articles, and I didn’t move the embedded media or the subscription CTAs.

And I thought: “it would really help to have a service that performs daily backups, and in case some automatic system decides to ban me for some reason from one platform, I could migrate ALL my content, including the subscribers list and media, to another platform and have it up and running in under a day, with just a push of the button.

So my recommendation for pivoting is to steer it into becoming a more complete backup system that also offers a compatibility layer between various popular hosting providers (probably Wordpress would need to be there in the list of the supported providers, since it is the most used and popular, but then, to nice it down, it should also include proprietary services such as Medium, Substack and Ghost).

Pricing structure

The service as it is, doesn’t have a pricing structure in place, but I would assume that once the idea got validated, it would have become a SaaS (that’s the trend). Although I don’t see a reason why people would need access to this kind of service on a longer period of time, continuously, which would justify paying monthly for it.

So, for the way it works right now, even though I strongly advise to do a pivot, probably a “pay per use” would be a better fit for this kind of business.

If it were to pivot to the daily backup service I mentioned above, then it would indeed justify paying a monthly fee to keep it backed up every day until you decide to cancel. It could have a per-blog pricing model, maybe something like 10€/month/blog.

Conclusion

Although it’s a simple enough example, I think it would help to create a mental framework for validating ideas, by starting from the customers, then get to the problem, and then come up with the tool as the solution.

This tool feels like it has been started from the last step, and then it tried to find the problems and the customers. But I can’t see the use cases (but of course, I’ll add the disclaimer that I also don’t see the purpose of an Auto Swiper for Tinder or other dating apps, but somehow there is, and it found enough demand to bring in ~5000€).

So take what I say with a grain of salt, this is just my personal opinion about this specific subject, and it’s impossible for anybody to predict what the market will do. If it would be possible with a certain degree of confidence, everybody will be rich and all the world’s issues would be already solved.

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