From 100 to 23 000 visitors in a month
I've been working on Uneed for almost three years.
It's a simple project: a list of useful tools. I add one more each day.
Traffic has always been low on this website, until I decide to rebuild it from the ground, with a new design and a new set of features.
The idea was to make a website that is pleasant to the eyes, easy to use, and hard to forget.
Uneed is pretty straightforward: you can immediately see the tools when you arrive.
If you're a power user, you can search a bit more and find that you can create an account to leave reviews and rates on the tools.
If you dig a bit more, you'll find that you can create custom lists of tools.
Since the redesign, I've launched it on Product Hunt, and some creators talked about Uneed on TikTok, which attracted many new users.
Uneed now has more than 400 registered users.
I have two big challenges for the coming months:
- Getting visitors to come back to the site.
- To make more money.
To do this, I have the idea to create an automated newsletter that will send subscribers the list of the 5 new tools added on Uneed, every week.
I'm also thinking of adding more affiliate links: there is currently a queue to add your tool on Uneed, which you can pass by paying 15$ or by providing an affiliate link.
I'm keen to hear your feedback and ideas 🙏
The website: https://uneed.best
Our public analytics : https://app.splitbee.io/public/uneed.best
That is huge growth! Curious, how are you adding new tools to your database?
I've made a dashboard + a scrapping script to fetch the tool's data. The dashboard is just (for now, I'll handle an automatic newsletter from there soon) a simple form!
Oh, nice. What app/software are you using for the form? Where do you scrap the tool's data? I imagine it's quite unstructured? (Just being curious; no worries if you prefer not to share!)
Not at all, always happy to share :) I may write a blog post about it!
Here's what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/V5Id95e.png
It's 100% handmade, with nuxt3. I scrap the tool's data directly from their website: I enter the URL, click on "search", and my scrapping script goes into the website and fetch the data. It's not as unstructured as it sounds: I mainly use meta data like description, image, title, etc. I also scrap the social networks if I find any, and have an alert if the "affiliate" word is find on the webpage 😂.
Oh, nice! You should write a blog post about it. Thanks for sharing!
I will 😄!
I bet you can increase monetization by adding a tier where users who submit tools can have the tool sent out in the newsletter. I.e $15 for just posting and $X for sending out in the newsletter. You can limit the number of tools you can send out in the newsletter to pump up the price even further
That's valuable advice, thank you!
I'll think about it, but it seems like a great idea 😄!
I've already changed a bit how it works: the price is now $25 instead of $15, but you get a premium week with it (your tool is displayed among the first on the homepage).
Congrats man!
See you in Minecraft 😂
Thanks!! Ahahah one day maybe 😂
Really clean design! 3 years is a lot of time, now it's J-curve growth
Thank you 🙏 Not sure the curve will stay as high ahah, but it will definitely help!
Went to add Vibehut.io
"
Once your tool is submitted, it will be added to the waiting line.
Estimated waiting time : 110 days
I'm adding one tool a day, and yeah there were a lot of submissions the past few weeks! There is a paid option to skip the queue
Wow, nice!
Thank you 🙏
This is great Thomas! thank you for sharing.
You're welcome, thank you for your comment 🙏
I literally just signed up to Indie Hackers today as a way of validating my design tool idea. Spent over 30mins on Uneed and discovered 5 similar products to my idea that I wasn't aware of. So definitely great for competitive analysis.
A thought on the retention question. How about a weekly newsletter with the 5 top new tools direct to your inbox? You could even get subscribers to choose the tool categories they were interested in and throw in a 'random' as an extra. You might want to re-think your categories though. There too many and some should be sub-categories.
Oh man your comment made me so happy!! I'm glad it helped you 😄!
The weekly newsletter is EXACTLY what I'm building right now 😂. I try to automatize it so it's a bit complicated though, but I'll finish it this week-end.
As for the categories, it's a difficult decision to make 😕. At first, Uneed was divided between Design, Development, and Marketing. It didn't work well. Then I tried with a few categories, and people didn't click a lot on them. With the current version, I saw that people usually click on many different tags. The idea of making "sub-categories" is pretty interesting though, I'll see what I can do! Thank you again 🙏
Cool, I'll sign up once the newsletter is done. And I hear you on the challenge of getting categories right.
The newsletter is done 🙌 the first issue will be send next week
I can't see where to sign up for the newsletter or am I jumping the gun on that one?
It's when you create an account: https://www.uneed.best/signup
Maybe I should add another way of subscribing 🤔
Yeah, subscribing should definitely be a primary CTA on the landing page
He'll yeah. Congrats Thomas
Thank you again Michael 🙏
This is great Thomas! I remember I bookmarked it a month ago and since then I haven't opened it again. How are you planning to work on getting users back to the site?
Yeah that's the main challenge with this website 😕. I'm going to write a weekly newsletter listing the tools added during the week!
I'm thinking about putting a huge "ADD TO FAVORITES" button too ahah.
I don't have more ideas for now though 🤷🏼♂️
If you're gonna add 1 tool per day you can probably send a mail about that too (test it first though). I love consuming bite sized info. It develops a habit quickly and I would be more than willing to give 5 mins everyday to learn a new tool.
And yes! You can ask new users on the website what category they fit in: Design, Dev, Marketing, etc. It would help you customize the newsletters and mails. One time effort but worth it!
I sbookmarked Uneed because I couldn't go through everything at once and then obviously forgot about it.
Hope this feedback helps :)
Oh I've never thought about sending one email per day, it seems a lot to me... I'll keep this idea in mind and will think about how I could test it!
The idea of asking people what category they fit in is gold, thank you so much!
Your feedback helped a lot, I'm very grateful :)
Huge congrats, mate! 🙌
Oh hey Lilian, thank you so much 🙏🙏
good idea to make people pay to speed up the registration! kind of like beta list which I think makes quite a bit of money 💯
Are you the guy who was on my screen last night in "How to dominate Twitter" 🤯??
Thanks Dago!! It's working pretty well so far 💪
Amazing work!
Thank you Katt 🙏
I started checking uneed only and jumped to your other projects freesby, griddely.
You are really inspiring man!
Thanks.
🥺 thank you so much!!
Hi @zahil - just had a look, very nice project! If I may share 1 bit of feedback: the search box may need some visual overhaul. It took me more than 10 seconds (!) to find it.. my eyes were wondering around the entire screen for a while until I figured that the search box was front & center. I think a tiny bit of CSS styling might help? Just food for thought. Other than that.. all the best with uneed! Keep pushing 💪
Hey! You're absolutely right, I'll do something 😄! Thank you so much!!
Very impressive! It's such a convenient tool for indie hackers to find what they need to build up projects. Great job
Thank you 🙏🙏
I was quite surprised - just spent 30 mins or more finding & saving some useful tools.
Can you elaborate more on the growth? That's quite a sudden jump.
Glad it's useful 😄!
The first spike is our Product Launch. The others are the word of mouth, all the visitors came from Google 🤯. It seems like someone famous made a TikTok video about Uneed at some point, but I still don't know who!
After digging in a bit..(can't help it, if it's useful here, it might be useful later on in my mktg cohort) -- there's a few things that started to create a compound effect:
all those tools you've added, are giving the site a lot of long tail traffic - better way to say it in your case, you're being featured on a lot of sites that are featuring tools and those sites are being found in Google searches.
sources like this kept giving all month: https://app.designerdailyreport.com/
twitter - added much as 45 a day
the Product Hunt launch kept giving, for days and then it resurfaced later on (it was in "Yesterday's Top Products" that went out on Oct 7th...and maybe again later?)
TikTok - I couldn't find it....it may be a hashtag (cause the words are so common) - not showing as a big referrer that I could find...I did go day by day...might have missed it.
random stuff: uisdc.com - was there a link buy or some way that they may have put a link to uneed on their site..(like a submission?). It kept sending traffic...it's a Chinese directory of tools, I think?
backlinks in the google search console - should help you pin down the TikTok creator, but that's going to be your eyes only...not a long project, good to have on hand for investigations like this (where you want to see if there's a way to reproduce it again later by contacting that source, finding others that are similar etc...)
days like this one - the site would get a good amount of google traffic, it's piling on, people search for tools and then visit, or they search for the login or the submit a tool page...or the "AI" section or the "Design" section. They all pull some good traffic as people are out there looking for 'design' tools or 'ai' tools, presumably.
That's what I got...good luck to you guys!
This is pretty interesting to someone new to SEO. I'm going to implement a similar strategy for https://getcyberservices.com
Thank you so much for what you've done!!! I didn't take the time to analyze the data!
🙏🙏
Wow, this is impressive. What makes you keep the consistency in 3 years? Any tips for a new indie hacker like me?
Honestly, two things:
I don't consider myself a successful indie maker for now, but I can try:
This is something really amazing.
I feel you need to look into the font size rest is good
Hey, thank you 🙏! What do you mean by look into the font size?
Increase the font size
I'll see what I can do :) the font-size is quite small I agree!
Okay
I think, I'd rather look up tools than get a new suggestion every day. My inbox is pretty full already ...
Honestly, same for me 😅. But I've got several people who asked for this! I'll try it and see how it goes :)
Makes sense if there's a demand. Good luck, @zahil!
Thank you 🙏
Wow, almost 1095 days 😮 that's amazing. Consistency really yields results.
Thank you so much Shivam 🙏 consistency and luck maybe 😅
As they say, "Consistency increases your surface area of luck."
This is the perfect example of it.
that's really awesome and another great example that consistency is key!
it's natural for a website to take time for building up more and more traffic .. it's part of organic growth!
Thank you Dominik 🙏! I know it is, I hope to be on the right tracks!
Love the idea of the queue and monetization associated
Thank you Louis 🙏 time will tell if it was a good one 😅
A neat tool! Curious, how did the creators on Tiktok talk about your tool?
congratulation @zahil i have add my tool in @uneed and my tool is related to LinkedIn Automation https://linkedcamp.com
Can you please have a look at: https://schoenhalde.de/ and tell me how can I improve my sites traffic?
Ahah I'm really not that good in SEO, just lucky 😅
That's awesome! I've been meaning to launch limey.io on Product Hunt but want to finish a few more things before doing it.
Thank you!
Limey looks cool, don't hesitate to book your spot on Uneed's waiting list :)
Done! Was not expecting it to be so easy to submit :) Great work!
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Thank you 🙏