How do I get "real" users?
So I posted my blogging platform (https://fwiw.me) on Product Hunt a few days ago, and I'm awaiting approval for Indie Hackers. On Product Hunt, it has 94 upvotes, and according to the statistics endpoint in the fwiw api, 113 accounts have logged in (using google or github), and 94 sites have been created.
While this may seem like good news (sure, it's got more users than most of the stuff I've built), I feel like the project won't go anywhere. This is because I built myself a directory of all the sites, and took a look at them, and I didn't find a single one that is actually using it as a blogging platform, they all seemed to just be called "Test Site" or something similar, and on the few that contained a single post, they were just testing posting too.
How would I go about getting people to actually use it as a blogging platform, instead of people who just make test sites? Is the solution to try and get more attention, and some of the people will inevitably use it properly?
Well it looks like you have 113 users! You've just got to turn them into real users.
I'd email every single one and say:
You want to look at this problem bottom-up and not top-down. If you somehow get another 1000 people to your landing page exactly the same thing will happen. A load more people with unfinished test blogs.
There's got to be some blocking step which is meaning people aren't converting properly. It could just be as simple as there wasn't much on-boarding and people gave up.
So focus improving conversion and not on increasing awareness.
I've wrote about this in more depth here. Good luck :)
I followed your advice and emailed all the customers that I could find the emails to (eg. from github profiles that they've logged in with), last night I sent 12 emails, and I've sent a few before, but I haven't received a single response.
Has conversion gone up at all?
As in to paid users? We don't have a paid plan yet. I don't believe we've got anyone using the service properly either.
Maybe they are just trying it out in order to evaluate whether it could be a good fit for a real project they have, and some of these might convert?
That is, seems like they would need to do a test before doing anything for real.
I like the marketing process John Jantz (Duct Tape Marketing) talks about:
know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer
This is what I think. If I'm to commit to publishing somewhere, I like giving it a quick spin / nosey about first. Often I won't proceed to use it, but sometimes I will.
I also personally would want a certain level of trust that the service will be around for a while.
Maybe send them email updates on how others are using your platform or provide some examples that you mock up?
We didn't get our first "super user" until after our 350th user. Sometimes it just takes time - and it could be a numbers game.
Hello Archie,
I've just created test post. And now I have couple questions
It's not theoretical questions.
Why would I use FWIW over Wordpress.com or Medium?
Wordpress is overcomplicated and messy, fwiw is minimal and free. Medium doesn't allow custom domains and has links to other people's articles, so it's not so much your blog as it is Medium's. Trust me, I did consider those options, but they didn't seem good enough imo, so I built this!
It might solve the problem of getting active users but you can post your project here if you like https://launchpropeller.com/#/list
Do you think drip marketing would work for your user base?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_marketing