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SaaS Dialogue 2: Splitbee by Tobi & Timo Lins

David·April 24, 2021

Who are Tobi & Timo Lins?

Tobi & Timo are two brothers that are only shipped as a duo. If one works on a product you can almost assume with certainty that the other was involved as well. Similar to Max Stoiber you'll find them in the boulder halls of Vienna. Tobi's passion for the boulder community is so strong, he even build an app to track your boulder-trainings. Something both brothers have in common is their passion for React. Timo built two open-source libraries react-hot-toast and react-notion. As a duo, they were crucial for the development of Feedback Fish and their greatest product yet: Splitbee. Which will be the focus of this interview.

To kick the second SaaS Dialogue off, we have a little fact sheet of Splitbee

Can you describe Splitbee to us?

Splitbee is an all-in-one analytics and conversion platform that helps you grow your website and apps. You can think of it as if Google Analytics and Mixpanel had a surprisingly beautiful baby.

Why would users pick Splitbee over Google Analytics?

People need to spend a lot of time inside Google Analytics to understand how to get valuable data out of it. There are endless courses & certificates you can do in order to understand your data. With Splitbee your analytics are easy to use and understand. Adding Splitbee to your website is a breeze. We also don’t sell sell or monetize your data. That’s why we have to charge a premium for sites exceed our free plan.

When did you know that you’re all in on Splitbee?

After building the first version of Splitbee, we quickly realized it was going to be the tool we’ve always wanted. For our previous side projects we always used Google Analytics and Mixpanel. We ended up never checking them, due to their unfriendly UI or limited feature set when it comes to their free plan. Having an all-in-one tool that does all the things you need sounded amazing. From analyzing your apps and websites to automating the steps you need to grow.

An automation with delay that cancels automatically if an event occurs

Which Platforms did you utilise for marketing so far?

Our main traffic source is Twitter and our open source projects. We want explore a bigger variety of marketing channels like blog posts, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. … And as we do, we leverage and improve Splitbee to tell us what works.

If you would launch another product today, what would be your process?

Putting out a minimal landing page to collect email addresses and measure interest. Create a „hype“ around the thing and only give limited access to beta testers. No need to build a product if no one is interested. Once there is demand, build an MVP and invite a couple of people from the waitlist to get some early feedback that helps shape the product.

What inspired you to make Splitbee?

Splitbee started as an A/B testing tool, since existing solutions where either a pain to use or ridiculously expensive. To make it work we had to collect all kinds of traffic data. With all the infrastructure in place, it was super easy to add basic analytics. The first version was even a better fit for us than Google Analytics, which kickstarted the whole journey.

Clean A/B testing to help you understand your audience

What made you decide to build in public?

Building in public allows us to build a community around what we do. Which helps a lot with staying motivated. You meet a lot of great people that are on the same journey as you are. This is a big advantage. You can exchange learnings and get help in all kinds of situations.

What skills would you like to learn in the near future?

We definitely want to explore other programming languages outside our home base which is TypeScript + Node.js. Go, Rust and Deno are something I keep an eye on for quite some time now. I'm sure the day will come where I get to play with them in-depth.

Writing is one the list as well. Many things happen when building a company, which lead to a lot of experiences and findings. Writing sounds like a great way to process and share our experiences, so others can learn from them.