2020 is the first year of Hyvor Talk. As a newcomer to the commenting system market, we could achieve a lot. This is a short review of what happened throughout this year.
January - Improving the Personal Project
Since 2018, I have used Hyvor Talk on my blog to allow visitors to comment, but it was simple, with no subscriptions. In January, I worked on this personal project to make it good enough for others to use.February - Becoming SaaS
I wanted to make the product sustainable. In February, I added subscription plans to Hyvor Talk.March - First paying customer
Since the start of this year, we were waiting for our first paying customer. On March 23rd, we got one!April - Our largest customer
This should be luck. We got our largest customer (till now) in April, which helped us to be profitable in just one month.May - Our First Hire
Until May, I developed everything while Ishini helped me with graphics/designing. Rohitha joined our team to help us with marketing.June, July, August - Improving Product and Growing
In this period, we added new features to Hyvor Talk, such as embedding links, katex support, nested comments, and more. Along with that, we could grow our platform and find new marketing channels.September - Removing the free plan
This was a hard decision to make. Many of our users were free plan users. As we had plans based on monthly pageviews, it was extremely hard to convert free plan users to paid even they exceeded the limits (due to fluctuations of pageviews each month). So, finally, we decided to give up on the free plan and only focus on paid customers. We thought this might negatively affect the business. However, sign up rates never went down.October - Accelerated Growth
Removing the free plan accelerated our growth. We could provide premium-level support for all of our customers while improving the product each day.November and December - New Features + Best Brands using Hyvor Talk
In the last 2 months, we released an API and webhooks support. And, some highly reputed brands started using Hyvor Talk.
Our Plans for 2021?
Many customers have asked us to move our servers to the EU region (currently in NYC) for privacy reasons. We are planning to do this migration in January.
Hiring our first developer. We are currently discussing with some great developers in our country to join our team. Making the best hire is our primary goal in the next few months.
User badges & new moderation options. This is a feature we are now working on (80% developed). Stay tuned, moderation will be easy and powerful soon. You'll be able to assign some beautiful badges to your users soon.
Social widgets: Custom reactions, review widgets, and social sharing. While our primary focus will remain to provide commenting features, you will be able to use additional widgets without any extra costs.
Enterprise plan with SAML-based employee SSO, invoicing, vendor reviews, and more enterprise-level features.
After all of that, our main goal is to make Hyvor Talk the best commenting software out there in the market.
Finally, we wish everyone a happy new year! If you have any thoughts, greetings, or anything else, comment below and share some love.
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