Getting out of the trough of sorrow?
Hey,
So we launched Bullet Train https://indiehackers.com/product/bullet-train about 3 months ago. This is like the 15th idea I've had, and it's going better than most of the other side projects we have built! We're actually getting people signing up and using the product. They are feeding back on it and like it, so that's all good.
We've had some success with content marketing, particularly on https://dev.to but we're a bit stuck on what to do next. We're just after good quality traffic to the site. We don't really have a cash budget for paid advertising, but we do have time that we can invest in things. Problem is, we're not sure what!
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ben
Your free tier is way too generous. An active user count of 2,000 is a business, and you want businesses to pay you. Also, more than 1 admin user also signifies a business that is able to pay you, so keep that in mind as well. Very seldom can an indie hacker get away with a free tier in general so I would recommend moving that into a $9/mo plan or something and killing the free plan. See if that makes a difference.
On a side note, maybe look into some of your competitors like LaunchDarkly, which might help you tighten up your messaging a bit. Like @webapppro, I'm still not sold on the real problem you're solving and for whom.
Nice, have you tried social media? Some feedback for landing page: I found the it a little verbose, and sign-up form lengthy, or too in my face before knowing what i'd be signing up for... maybe needs a video or screenshots? Best of luck!
I'm (biasly) with Michal. If you see consistent signs of life in one channel (content marketing in this case) then double down on it. I like to think of content marketing as your always-on sales team.
Not sure what exactly it is you offer (but it might be that I'm just not 'dev' enough to be target audience), but isn't you free plan too generous?
How are these 'monthly active users' calculated? Are these the devs you reference on your Bullet Train indiehacker page? What's the average number of those active users that your current 'customers' have?
BTW: you might want to try vertically aligning the identical features below your plans side-by-side, it's difficult to compare like this :)
Hi Theo,
Yeah we made the plans quite generous - maybe too much so.
Basically the product allows you to remotely enable or disable features in your product, using our dashboard. When a user of your app requests these feature flags, we count that as a user.
So basically if you use Bullet Train in your mobile app, and your mobile app has 5,000 users a month, that would count as 5,000 users in Bullet Train.
We have an internal product that is running about 4,000 users a month - that's the largest project we have right now.
Thanks for the layout suggestion - will add it to the backlog!
I heard content is king :). IIUC you did just that with dev.to - don't stop, try more targets, maybe FreeCodeCamp blog or even start quality blogging on your own page. Good luck!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
You can write this yourself, and lots of people do, but we wanted to build this :