We Got 3 Paid Signups Within a Week of Launching

My cofounder Swee Kiat and I have worked on five ideas in the last few months. One of our ideas is an instant search widget for websites. Swee Kiat took a day to build the backend to index a website’s pages (partly with Supabase’s help!) but spent several days building the product dashboard for users to use the product.

When we were reviewing our product ideas at his house two Saturdays ago, he complained about the hassle of building the product dashboard when it didn’t add much value to the product.

Why not build a tool to help other developers build product dashboards more quickly?

We did a quick research and found many boilerplate starter kits online for $200 to $1,000. Developers seem willing to pay for tools to help them build their products faster. But to us, boilerplate code isn’t a good solution because it still requires so much work understanding and tweaking the code. Swee Kiat built a simple prototype in five days.

Dashibase was born.

If you use Supabase for your backend, Dashibase allows you to create a no-code product dashboard for your end-user in just a few minutes.

Then we put up a landing page with a $29 Stripe payment link for three-month beta access.

Within three hours, we had our first paid signup. In the next few days, two more strangers paid $29 for our beta.

Then, we decided to refund all of them and make Dashibase free.

Why we are making Dashibase free

We are now confident Dashibase is solving a problem that people have. We want to open it up so that more people can use it and tell us how we should improve it.

Our goal has always been to build something people want. And if they are willing to pay for it, there’s a good chance this is something they want.

Initially, we wanted to get at least 25 paying beta users to validate our idea. But upon self-reflection and speaking with fellow developer friends, we realized that getting developers to pay without trying anything was a high bar to set— yet three strangers paid us before even getting to try Dashibase. Also, we spoke to other founders, and they were surprised we already have three paying customers—in less than a week. These encouraged us to move ahead faster.

Also, Dashibase is built specifically for Supabase users, and the Supabase community has been nothing but supportive, especially Supabase’s Paul Copplestone, Ant Wilson, Thor, as well as folks like Zernonia (creator of madewithsupabase.com and supadb.dev). We are excited to keep building for the Supabase community.

Dashibase will be free for the foreseeable future.

But for it to be a sustainable business, we do hope to monetize it fairly in the future. We are currently thinking about having a free plan for one dashboard and a paid plan with premium features and additional dashboards.

If you have tried Dashibase and have an opinion on this, please let us know. While we just started, we know a big part of our success will be because of our community—you.

Help us help you?

We would love your help. If you regularly build apps, we would love for you to give Dashibase a go and let us know how we can make it better for you.

And if you could help spread the word about Dashibase, we will be grateful to you.

We will be hanging out in our new Discord server. Hit us up if you have any suggestions or questions.

• Discord
• Twitter: @dashibase
• Email: hello@dashibase.com