Feedback on the new product directory so far?
👆 This is still a work in progress, but I'd love to get your feedback on the new Indie Hackers product directory. The goal is to make it easy for you to find relevant products and learn from how they've grown.
What do you think? How would you use this? How can I make it better? Is it fast enough? Does it work on your phone? Any bugs? Feature suggestion? Happy to hear any and all feedback.
By the way, here are some ideas I'm already thinking about:
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Letting all of you create your own product pages, too.
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Connecting product pages to forum threads, to provide context. (This already works, actually. Note the link to the Indie Hackers product page below, next to my name.)
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Leaderboards to see who has the highest or fastest growing revenue, traffic, etc.
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Get updates from the people and products you follow on Indie Hackers.
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The ability to ask the founders of any product a question.
@csallen Thanks a lot for building this! Looks great.
Would it be possible to add filters like the following
"Looking for beta users"
"Needs help with UI/UX"
It will be very helpful for products that are early / recently launched.
Interesting, I like that idea, basically advertising ways that other people in the IH community can help out. Thanks!
I think it's brilliant. I would skip the leaderboards though since this is almost all self reported it will just encourage people to lie about their data.
@csallen I have doubt about the leaderboards as in what value does it bring? I think leaderboards give false impression as in who is the "best". Or unless we want to promote competition among indie hackers for some reason.
Connect your product page to both Stripe and Google Analytics is nice, maybe a "Verified" tick?
Partly discovery. It's useful to be able to see what kinds of products are growing quickly, especially in combination with being able to ask the founders questions.
Also, to incentivize the right things. Product Hunt, for example, gets more people to launch more products. It'd be great if IH could get more people to collect their first dollar in revenue, increase their existing revenue, etc.
Finally as a reward system, to give people kudos. Even when you're kicking butt, being a founder can be lonely and thankless. Part of the reason IH works and successful founders are willing to share with everyone is because it feels good to be recognized.
You have the option to connect your product page to both Stripe and Google Analytics, so the leaderboards would only include people who did that.
Good stuff, sounds like a great solution to the problem.
Something non-specific to this but a request would be to add a floating button on the bottom right to disable continuous scrolling. I don't know if its just me so you might want to survey it first but I find I often hit a site and want to check the footer but can't because of continuous scrolling. The option to disable it temporarily would be brilliant. Though obviously a very low priority feature request.
Yeah and I don't like the competitive feeling that it brings
It would be sweet to be able to filter by some sort of initial customer acquisition tactic such as cold calls, PPC, whatever-other-common-ones. That's one of the first things I look at on interviews since I feel like getting your first customers is the hardest part, and I need to make sure I can attempt to duplicate that with my limited passion for marketing.
I like it! But what I would like to notice: previously we can see how many people are in the company, when exactly it was founded, maybe something else and now this information is not shown. Well, obviously we can find it in the article but it's not highlighted as was before. It would be nice to have it back.
Noted, thanks for the feedback!
As per the filter/sorting criteria on the left, I would prioritize
Category
Business Model
Monthly Revenue
Agreed, will do
Looks sweet!! can't wait to make my own product page!!
Another idea... would be cool if a product could be listed for sale. With all the transparency available, it would be a nice way for other indie hackers to find a profitable side project to buy. Perhaps, sell verified buyer memberships to see which products are for sale.
Two things I'd love to focus on eventually: helping founders sell their companies, and helping founders raise small amounts of cash.
Those would be great features. This directory seems to open doors in several directions. Maybe even finding technical/business partners or hiring employees.
Awesome, just spend 20 minutes clicking a reading!
Feedback: Just clicking around I found that I was looking for a "remove all filters" option.
Added to my to-do list 👍
This is very exciting. After a quick look on mobile, would be nice to be able to sort as well as search for keywords. I’ll take another look on desktop later.
Edit: never mind just saw the sort is within the filter dropdown. And I’m guessing the search at the top menu will eventually include the directory.
Some good feedback here already.
I'd like to hear a bit more about the goals/vision for the product directory - seems a bit counterintuitive to me to build something and then ask how others would use it (although I'm sure that's not how you meant it).
It's primarily for discovery, so people can actually find the new product pages. Also, having powerful filter tools should help with people doing targeted research, which happens a lot on the existing interviews list. I'm curious to see if there are any quirky or unexpected use-cases that people will bring up, filters they want to see added, etc.
Makes sense. I wonder if it will result in the kind of spam I see from angel.co / crunchbase etc.
On average we get 4-5 spam emails per day offering development services (despite never having advertised online for technical hires).
Genuine question, not a pre-emptive criticism ;)
Definitely a possibility. I know there are some people who make the rounds and email everyone who's done an interview, for example.
looks really good. nice one.
asking questions about products is something I'm excited by.
only caveat is not everyone who did products are on the forum a lot.
you could do a vareint of 'trending products'.
if a founder is willing to answer all questions / verify revenue on stripe + analytics with google there product becomes more valuable to the community. So it would be nice to see a spotlight being given to them.
(as opposed to someone who posts a high revenue product and doesn't use IH ever again)
Thanks for the suggestions, agree that it's important to encourage people to be helpful over the long term.
I absolutely love this, Courtland!
I am really looking forward to see the leaderboard too!
This is great @csallen
Any information that can be used as a template is very helpful for folks like me. Sometimes we generate new ideas from other success stories.
As I’m using this more, it would be nice to sort by recently created products so we can see when new products are added to the directory.
Good idea, added to my list!
If you open it up to the public, please keep it moderated so we don’t end up with a bunch of spam sites like affiliate marketing blogs. Hopefully the quality is upheld.
Yeah that's a great point.
We'll moderate submissions heavily in the beginning, and I'm sure we'll continue to do some moderation indefinitely. In addition, I'll build some automated safeguards to limit the number of spammy submissions, as well as limit their visibility in the directory.
Beyond that, crowdsourcing really helps on the forum, so I think it can help with the product directory, too. That means allowing you all to do things like flag products.
Hi @csallen this looks great. However I think it puts too much emphasis on the revenue figure.
First, revenue !== profit as we all know. So people with marketplace products, or high-volume low-profit sales will always be at the top of the list.
Second, since most self-report their revenue, revenue !== revenue! We are all eager to get noticed, so the temptation to fudge a bit (or a lot) means I have no idea if these numbers are real (I'm sure some are) or if they are completely made-up.
Finally, there are far more interesting metrics than revenue: years since launch, number of full-time employees, number of founders, customer LTV, ARPU, etc... I would emphasize those instead.
I think instead of placing a dollar figure in large font for revenue, I'd have a field for a link to the company's Baremetrics (or equivalent) dashboard. That preserves the openness for the companies that want to share, and the data found there is far more interesting than a single "revenue" number.
I didn't know how to get there from the landing page (https://www.indiehackers.com/) Would he helpful to make the link prominent!
It's not linked from the homepage yet ;-)