Day 94: March Review

status

For my monthly review, I’m using the following template:

  • What went well?
  • What didn’t go well?
  • What would I like to do differently?
  • Metrics
  • Overall reflections

What went well?

💜 Friends love Intention

I’ve had lots of friends tell me that they find Intention extremely helpful and even ask how they can throw money at me. I’m really happy with how well the product works in helping me stay focused and not get sucked into distractions, and I think it’s going to help a lot of people.

🌅 Moved to Santa Cruz

The Hacker Fellowship program I was doing in NYC disbanded due to the coronavirus, so I ended up booking a plane the next day to stay with Stedman, Zain, Cathy, and their partners in the mountains of Santa Cruz. I’m super thankful that they invited me, and it’s motivating living with them because they’re working hard on their startup, Relephant.

📣 Started Show & Tell

I started Show & Tell, a micro-community of makers to sharing their work and exchanging feedback. There are 8 people in Show & Tell so far, and it’s been awesome having weekly demo sessions and discussing questions in a safe environment (e.g. the weirdness and discomfort around publicly sharing product updates given everything that’s going on in the world with COVID-19).

In the introduction email, I set April 20th (4 weeks from the start date) as the natural end date of Show & Tell with the option to continue. My friend David suggested having a fixed duration so that people can participate fully without worrying about committing indefinitely, and I thought that was a great idea. We’ll see whether Show & Tell will continue in a few weeks!

What didn’t go well?

💥 Hide Feed launch on Product Hunt

Hide Feed lingered between 10th and 11th place throughout the day so it sometimes showed up on the front page and sometimes didn’t. It resulted in 310 visitors to hidefeed.com on the day of the launch and 113 visitors the day after, which was much lower than I expected. For comparison, Killed for Food got a similar number of upvotes but got 1,919 visitors on the first day and 2,190 visitors the day after.

The launch obviously could’ve done better, but I was happy with putting it out there. This was also a great lesson that I need to invest in marketing beyond posting to Product Hunt and crossing my fingers.

🤔 High uninstall rate for Hide Feed

People uninstall Hide Feed at an extremely high rate, with the most common reason being that they don’t want to pay. Given that Hide Feed has a free option, I think it’s not clear enough that people can continue to use Hide Feed on the Basic plan once their 14-day trial is over. It’s really concerning that over the time period I looked at (3/9 - 4/4), Hide Feed had 168 installs and 100 uninstalls. I’m hoping that the clearer messaging around the existence of the free plan changes that.

What would I like to do differently?

📢 Focus on marketing

I’ve spent all my efforts on making Hide Feed and Intention into products I love, and it’s time that I shift my focus to marketing. I’ve been talking about doing this for a while, but I actually need to bite the bullet and invest time and effort into having people discover my work rather than continuing to stay in my comfort zone of just writing code.

Metrics

Alrighty, y’all. Let’s look at some numbers:

The subscriber growth is mostly from more of my friends subscribing (although there are also several people who I don’t know!) so I expect that that to stay mostly the same unless I do a better job of marketing.

Overall reflections

I feel a lot of uncertainty, and it has a paralyzing effect. I want to work on mobile solutions because that’s where tools like Hide Feed and Intention can be the most helpful, but I know that I’ll disappear into another phase of writing code, and I want to try marketing the tools I’ve already made before doing that. Marketing is outside of my comfort zone and it’s hard to know what would work so there’s some discomfort there. I also know that I need to decide on a pricing strategy now that I have multiple tools, but I’m having trouble thinking big picture right now as well.

Things feel murky and sometimes a bit overwhelming, but I know that I just need to focus on one thing at a time and remember that taking an imperfect step forward is much more important than trying to get everything exactly right.

Note to self: Write down notes on things as they happen throughout the month because it’s really difficult to remember when things happened a month later.