2 things I learned from getting 0 returning users
I'm working with a team of three hackers. We spent a week designing, testing and launching an early prototype for a social bookmarking platform
When we launched, we sent it to friends, posted on places like IH, HN, PH and then -- pindrop silence. No one said they liked it. Not even our friends came back after they first opened it. We definitely want to avoid this in our next launch. Here are our learnings to avoid that:
Distribution > Product
Start building the distribution before you build the product. If it's a consumer product, be active on ProductHunt, HackerNews and IndieHackers. Write a blog/newsletter. Share useful content on Twitter. If it's B2B, directly talk to the initial customers before you start building.
Founder conviction
At the end of the day, don't be swayed too much by early metrics. What matters is that you have conviction that the problem exists and conviction that your solution will work for others. AirBnB built that conviction by experiencing the pain point first hand - they needed money so successfully hosted people for a nearby conference. This gave them conviction. But it took them several years to reach good metrics.
I'll be completely honest. I have conviction in the problem (finding and bookmarking good content) but I don't have conviction in our solution.
What do you think? Would love to hear any tips and advice you have.
Your idea might work but I am 99.99% sure that people don't have a clue what is the purpose of this tool, and confused people will simply leave to do something else.
You didn't explain what exactly people can do with it, at all. All you have right now are lists of tweets from several people and some categories, and now what?
What is the idea behind?
What exactly user can do on your platform?
Can user set custom people to follow and see their tweets?
What is the point of adding those people (or bookmark or whatever) if he can see those tweets directly in Twitter?
How those groupings/categories works, user can set them or your system is checking for some keywords and classify tweets accordingly?
Is it working only for Twitter, or you can add other sites?
Which sites? Social media only or any article from any blog can be bookmarked?
What is your definition of bookmarking anyway?
Can those bookmarks be saved and grouped by site or subject?
Can they be exported as links in .txt and .json?
You need to give people some context what you are trying to achieve, possible ideas and suggestions for the usage, and ways to get there as simple as possible. Nobody will use it until you give them straight idiot-proof explanation and lead them further into how to do this or that.
Dotz thanks for the thorough feedback! Next time we'll aim to launch with more context.