Quick story of soft-launching Polar over the last month.

Love indie hackers. The community is tight and lots of great original content.

I wanted to contribute my story of our launch this month.

https://getpolarized.io/

Polar is a document repository for managing PDFs and web content - annotating them and keeping what you've annotated long term (think 30 years or more).

It's also designed to integrate into 3rd party apps like Anki to add additional features like spaced repetition.

One key area that I'm trying to improve on is marketing and distribution.

With Polar I've been doing a ton of experimentation to learn what works.

Long story short. We flunked on our Product Hunt launch - and nailed our Hacker News Launch.

The Product Hunt was probably skunked because I needed better graphics and a better landing page.

This is definitely not my strong suit. I'm working to improve this... it might have also been due to the inability to refine the pitch.

We nailed Hacker News. They REALLY get why Polar needs to exist.

We had about 12k pageviews and about 2k of those converted to weekly users. We have about 300 daily users now.

The user base is REALLY passionate.

What I need to do now is build in a better distribution model. Without press Polar won't grow and I can't rely on press by itself.

My next plans are to build in public sharing of annotations on the web to benefit from SEO and allow users to discover us that way.

We're also planning on a cloud storage framework for a revenue model.

The base product will be freemium. They HAVE to publish openly if they want the freemium model I think. This way the SEO helps us grow the user base. I need to think about this though as maybe it's too short sighted.

Either way my prime focus now is distribution.

I have a core set of users that are using the product so if I make them happy they can help us grow.