Hopscotch.club
Cam Sloan was a full-stack developer earning just over $125K CAD annually when he was laid off in 2019. Rather than immediately seeking another job, he saw it as the push he needed to pursue entrepreneurship—something he'd been wanting to do anyway. "I wasn't quite ready," he recalls, "but I feel like you're never really ready." He had saved between $40-60K CAD and knew he could keep expenses low, giving him the runway he needed.
Instead of jumping straight into product development, Cam took a strategic hybrid approach. He announced on Twitter and LinkedIn that he was available for freelance work, and it paid off better than expected. His former employer hired him for contract work, and through his network he found additional clients. By working about six months per year on freelance projects, he surpassed his previous full-time salary—by June of the current year, he was already on track to exceed it again. This approach gave him the financial flexibility to build Hopscotch without burning out, which he'd experienced trying to work full-time while building side projects.
Cam used Figma for design and started building quietly, focusing on understanding the market gap. Existing tools like Pendo had become too expensive and feature-heavy for startups, with pricing starting at $300-500/month. He saw an opportunity to build something more accessible while solving a real UX problem: product tours that appear at the wrong time and feel intrusive.
Cam's first three customers came through two channels. Most came from his public Twitter presence—he'd share development updates and progress publicly, and followers would refer others asking about the problem he was solving. Additionally, he started ranking organically on Google for keywords like "interactive product tours" and "product tours," generating inbound interest with minimal SEO effort.
His approach to pricing was methodical. Rather than guess, he launched quietly with manual onboarding, testing different price points: one customer at $20/month, another at $99/month, and a third in between. This gave him real data about what the market would bear and how different company sizes valued the product.
With three paying customers in early access and a handful of pilots, Hopscotch is pre-revenue but validating the core thesis. Cam is bootstrapping, hasn't raised, and continues to balance freelance work with product building. He's working 4-8 hours per week on the product, varying based on stress levels. His long-term vision is clear: once he reaches feature parity with competitors, he'll differentiate on UX by building intelligence into when tours appear, making them contextual and non-intrusive. He's at a pivotal moment—validating that the market wants a cheaper, better-designed onboarding solution while maintaining the runway to build it properly.
- •Public transparency about development progress on Twitter created a self-reinforcing referral loop where followers became advocates, eliminating the need for paid acquisition channels.
- •Building financial runway through contract work before full-time product development prevented burnout and allowed deliberate, market-validated iteration instead of forced rapid scaling.
- •Targeting an underserved market segment (cost-conscious startups priced out by $300-500/month tools) with a simpler, cheaper alternative created immediate product-market fit signals without complex sales.
- •Testing multiple price points with actual customers rather than guessing revealed real willingness-to-pay and enabled confident positioning before scaling.
- 1.Share your development progress publicly on Twitter at regular intervals, focusing on the specific problem you're solving and the gap you identified—this attracts both direct customers and referral sources from your network.
- 2.Establish a hybrid income model by leveraging your existing professional network for contract or freelance work, securing enough part-time revenue to fund 6-12 months of product development without external funding.
- 3.Launch with manual onboarding for your first 3-5 customers and test different price points with each one, documenting their company size and feedback to establish data-driven pricing rather than assumptions.
- 4.Target a specific market segment underserved by existing expensive solutions, then position your product explicitly as the cheaper, simpler alternative—this clarifies your differentiation without requiring feature parity upfront.
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