Hi fellow hackers,
I'm Kshitij, founder of Sideway (looksideway.com). I announced my platform for designers in June last year https://blog.usejournal.com/introducing-sideway-the-first-step-towards-a-different-kind-of-design-community-ef43ae9d62b3.
To my surprise, the article did pretty well and I got about 3000+ designers signed up on the waiting list. These included pretty amazing designers from the biggest companies like Metalab, Facebook, Slack, Netflix, Google, Ideo etc. I started rolling out my platform in small batches.
Out of those 3000 users, I was able to get around 1100 users onboard. I guess people didn't like the platform that much. Since then, I simplified the platform a lot and launched a public beta in January 2020. I had a good amount of traffic from PH, got featured in places like DesignerNews, Muzli, etc.
Now I am struggling with the growth which is about 30 users/week right now.
Here's how I am trying to tackle this problem:
If you guys have more suggestions on tackling this problem in a better way, please hit me up :)
Kshitij,
looksideway.com
Hey! I see you mention the growth rate, but not the churn rate. Do you have metrics on how engaged your users are, and how many are leaving?
So right now, I don't have paid subscriptions so I don't exactly know how many are leaving. I want to validate the product first.
I have about 1400 active users a month. These include 37% new users.
I'd think of this as a funnel. Is the leak at the bottom, and you're seeing people drop off the platform or stop using it at the same rate people are coming in? Do people post a couple times then stop completely? Or is the problem sign-ups? Or is it simply exposure, and not enough people are seeing it?
Do you have any metrics around to help answer these questions? Here's the ones I think would be important:
Also, likely next steps based on the problem:
Basically, the best solution is to talk to users who are not doing what you expect to see what's wrong, or talk to users who ARE doing what you expect and see what's right. Do you have the systems in place to do this?
This is some really good actionable advice. I don't think I have the systems in place to track everything right now. I am getting on it this weekend!
Also, following you on twitter :)
You are awesome Kevin!
Glad to help! Let me know how it goes, or if you have trouble setting it up :)
Hey Kshitij, were you able to get those metrics in place? I'm curious to hear if you've found anything interesting.