Figuring things out after Product Hunt

Yes, my Product Hunt (PH) launch on Jun 7th seems to have had a visible impact: see the chart above? ☝️🙂

But then, a couple of days go by, and the question comes back: Now what? 🤔

For me PH launch was an important threshold: I implemented enough functionality to do most of the fundamental things, including accepting payments. I just couldn’t make myself announce it without having the fundamentals “almost there.” Yeah, I know there is this popular saying that if you’re not ashamed of your product when you announce it to the public, then you’re doing it too late, but that too is nuanced… 😁

Now, stepping back after the PH launch, I’m thinking that for a service like my FeedSubscription.com, the steps to making money look like this:

1. Get people on the website,
2. …of those, get some to register for a free account,
3. …of those, get some to switch to the paid plan and provide them value so that they pay me money for as long as possible.

Of course even with this three-step simplistic “plan,” there are nuances: for step (1.) I imagine it’s best if people that come to the website are interested in the service, otherwise I’d just be playing the number game, and spinning my wheels without moving the needle.

So yeah, I think at the moment I need to focus on activities around step (1.) — this post here is one of those activities 😉, but I need to figure out more. One idea is to find communities of related services and participate in relevant conversations, but from the experience so far, this can be very time consuming. Maybe that’s an appropriate price to pay, but I’m still curious if anyone here have tried other approaches to finding prospects.

One fun fact I mentioned in my most recent weekly update, is this new
“investigation” activity where I study the user action logs and try to elucidate confusing things in the UI. 🤓

For example, one of the facepalm moments was when I realized that my blank slate was not obvious enough: after a user would register, they couldn’t figure out what they need to do and went in circles for a few rounds. 🤦🏻‍♂️

It was not obvious that to get the Subscribe Form they needed to first register a blog feed. My guess is that my public Subscribe Form page mislead them, because I saw how they were going back and forth between that page, and the after-login screen. 🙃

My “solution” was to make the after-login greeting clearer about what is to be done next:

First things first: Add your blog feed. 🤓

Once that’s done, you will be able to set up your Subscribe Form and register your subscriber list.

That’s better! 😇

This new phase is fun, and I’m enjoying this exploration even I find myself disoriented and frustrated. 🙂

I loved how @clarysage candidly commented on a previous post of mine, and I’m hoping for more of that here: I would highly appreciate if you would point out flaws or opportunities for improvement in this little excerpt of my thinking process. 🙂

Have a productive week! 👋🙂