How would you grow this?
This is an opportunity to get and give help in growing (your) indie hacker products.
Here's how it works:
👉 Post a link to a project and provide a few words of what you have been doing to grow your product. It would be helpful to include challenges you've had and what has or hasn't worked.
👉 Because this community is about giving back too, please comment on someone else's post with support and ideas.
Over to you!
Sitesauce generates static sites from dynamic websites, and keeps them updated.
I've been building in the open, tweeting about every new feature I build and logging all milestones here, on IH. I've also been using it as an example on my IH answers, dropping a link when it's relevant. While this has definitely driven some traffic to the landing, it has only given it a small bump.
First of all: who is your target audience?
I'm not technical and I don't get the benefit of your product 😅
At my previous job, our main product was a semi-dynamic site (lots of purely informational pages, with some dynamic features). One of the fallbacks we had was that if our site ever went down, we would immediately serve up our static version of it, while we fixed the issues on the real dynamic one. That's definitely one use case I see for this product.
Site does look good, but I'm also trying to understand the why (why do I need this. When you answer this question, try to ask why additional 4 times, you should get to the core reason). I mean, I can assume and fill the gaps (of a non-tech founder), but I need it more straightforward like "save money on your servers by converting your dynamic site to a static one" or "enjoy the hosting costs of a static site while keeping your dynamic site". Also joining @andreboso question: who is your target audience. That's actually the first thing you need to figure out, and then tailor the message to them. After you do that, there are so many different tactics you can use (would llove to share ideas here once you figure out your audience). Good luck!
I'd recommend making live examples and showcasing them on relevant subreddit/communities so we can see what Sitesauce can accomplish
Fantastic looking site. If you are not happy with your growth and/or conversion rate, the problem may be the value prop. Not in the way how you write your value prop, but in the actual value you provide. Specifically:
.. Your plan is $19 per month, but i did automation for the exact same thing you offer in about half an hour (crawl local WordPress site using wget and upload). Plus there are lot of guides how to DIY this, even if you are fairly non-technical.
.. Alternatively, there are tons of free or cheaper than $19 per month options in hosting market, so your first point of "save in hosting costs" is simply not true; for majority of users your solution is actually more expensive.
Have you experimented with pricing?
I do know that you can DIY your own solution, but the point is that you can offload it to Sitesauce to avoid manually doing it all the time. That way, when you update your content, you can let Sitesauce handle the regeneration instead of doing it manually every time (and there's also a lot of edge cases to handle, you have to rewrite URLs, etc.)
Like i wrote, I did automation for it in 30 minutes. Same functionality as your $19 per month product. Which is why I was recommending you to consider if your pricing is right.
Great idea.
On Growth:
Again, great idea! And good luck!
You might find the audience first and see where they are more active, what time they are more active and try to showcase the benefits .
Try discord, slack communities beyond IH that this product might help.
I think twitter personally is a bit hard unless you have a good following.
Also depending on your investment I would consider sponsored posts on different social channels.
If no financial investment will be done then follow the free route, for example helping people on stackoverflow, posting on dev.to and other platforms where you actually help people which indirectly would create traffic, so what you need to be careful is how your profile will look so make clear you are the creator of sitesauce app.
Also why not try and make a codepen and codesandbox where you add a static site and showing the benefits and how it was generated.
Maybe a simple example use case would help people understand the value of your service. I'm still a little unclear on why I would want to make my dynamic site static.
PS YOU'RE 17!?
Color me impressed. You're going places, my friend.
How is user-generated content such as comments handled?
Great question. Also how the forms will work if you think about WP which is 100% PHP .
If i understand correctly you act like a cache in front or parallel to a dynamics site. My suggestion is to find 2-3 mid-size sites that need this exact solution (learn how you can position against cdns, caches etc.) than showcase them as a usecases on the site. It requires a bit of traditional sales.
Once your site has been converted to a static site how does the user manage new content as I assume it is no longer linked to Wordpress etc and their in-built editors. I was looking on your site and could not see anything.
You have to configure integration as the second step describes brifely.
www.emailatscale.com is a done-for-you newsletter service. We write and design weekly newsletters that increase your sales.
I've done cold email to try to book calls with solo-founders that have poorly designed email newsletters, ( I sign up for them first to make sure).
That's a clever way of finding your customers. Have you tried sharing example of good designs via twitter/blog to get some traffic through searches?
Haven't tried content yet since I haven't nailed down my ideal customer/target market yet
Understandable. Sharing examples like you have on your homepage of email templates (real or created by you for the content) would be a great way to build authentic interest.
https://css.gg is a minimalistic CSS-only icon library with NPM, API and direct download availability. I also display the code directly on the icon site for the sake of learning so people can see faster how the icon has been built to just give some context.
So yesterday I made https://css.gg public and I am trying to build traffic as much as possible before going to post on product hunt or promote it , since I need to prove that people would actually use the product.
Since yesterday what have I been able to do:
This is ok when it comes to community based platforms how ever I suck at social media mostly because I don't like using them and never built an actual audience for my self where I can share the product.
Any tips and tricks that would help me out on twitter would be much appreciated.
What did not help and I understand to a point was reaching people directly via E-Mail and other channels for feedback, either I am doing something wrong or is just something people hesitate to do.
Really cool! Might have to give it a try in flowist.io.
I am definitely not an expert - but as far as building interest around a design/style product Steve Schroger started a trend of sharing design tips that led to a large audience for his (and Adam Wathan's) design book.
You could do something similar with CSS/Icons/Communicating information through design, etc.
Please let me know if you do I would love to see how it turned out.
Also let me know if you need any assistance.
Will do!
Flowist.io allows teams to share daily tasks, coordinate, track goals, and share team successes - without the hassle of standups, slack pings, and static Kanban boards.
So far, I've been interacting here, as well as trying to grow my twitter following - I also just started blogging on jwbaldwin.com. I've seen some increased traffic to my personal site (where I post blogs, as well as X-posting to medium.com and dev.to) and some indirect traffic to flowist.io.
My biggest struggles are:
Solfej (https://www.solfej.io/) is the best new way to learn music theory and ear training
Things I've been doing growth wise:
My target audience is guitar/piano players, producers, and beginner musicians (for now).
Any help specially with SEO is appreciated.
Ok my first question would be why blog posts about design in a app for music if I understood correctly what the app is trying to do ?
I have a somewhat background on SEO and you need to be very careful in this area since you might attract some traffic that you don't really want, there is a big difference writing about humans and writing about Google bot.
What I would try instead is create landing pages specialized and hitting the request from guitar/piano players and producers and then promote that so you have a more specific audience .
This would also help to understand who is caring more about your app.
Also If being honest I did not like to have the Get Early Access 4 times in a single page which is too much .
You might focus more on the home page and make it standout instead of paying for blog posts.
Please don't hate this is my personal opinion , and I do like the idea.
This is valuable feedback! The blog posts about designing the app are because I simply enjoy writing them :)
Can you expand on the "attract traffic that I don't really want" can writing blogposts like this hurt my SEO?
The specialized landing pages make sense! I'll look into that.
I also agree with the 4 buttons. I'll be iterating over that so only the hero and the header have get early access
Not that it would hurt your SEO directly so much but depending on how your host is setup it will use resources which would be better to share with potential customers.
To put it simple If I go there for design and understand what the app is about I would close it and that factor would increase your bounce rate which I am pretty sure you track on Google Analytics and Google maybe just maybe might take that into consideration when ranking.
Also this would mess up your analytics in general .
Like why do I have 10k visitors and 2 conversions and you try to tweak the site but nothing happens, A/B testing nothing.
Just focus on your real audience if I did not obliterate the entire question.
Ah that makes a lot of sense! Appreciate the advice
http://influencegrid.com/ helps brands and marketing agencies find TikTok influencers.
Cold emailed about 10 journalists resulting in 1 article, 1 promise of an article, and a lead that will probably sign up next year. Also posted on a few subreddits and milestone here. I've also been working on technical SEO.
I've also spent about $100 on Adwords (but pausing this until I start tracking it effectively).
So far the best driver of customers was the article from the cold email (https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-app-lists-tiktok-influencers-by-engagement-topic-and-audience/568736/).
Let top influencers know they are in 'near the top' of a list. Is it possible to message/DM/Tweet them?
Reaching out to TikTok users might be helpful - if they share it that's a form of viral marketing
Yeah I'm gonna do that soon. "You're the number #1 beauty influencer right now!" type of thing
(Album Daily)[https://albumdaily.com] is a music newsletter that recommends an album per day (or all the weeks albums on Monday).
I have been doing a lot of posting on IH, Reddit, Quora, Product Hunt, etc...
I'd try contacting music online publications to see if they'd be interested in covering your newsletter.
I'd also add amazon affiliate links to buy the albums/songs
Great ideas, thanks @shawnjavadi
Are there more music-specific places that your brand hangs out? Could you split up the product into music genres so you can market to fans of each genre and it would feel more relevant (basically niching down)?
That's a good point, and is definitely on the long term road map. Curating multiple genres will be tough as a small shop, but hopefully as we grow I can break it out
https://www.sendhoney.com makes it simple to schedule flower deliveries for life to your loved ones. I'm really just getting off the ground with launching this week and going live so I'm just sort of setting up shop on the normal channels: FB, Twitter, Insta, Medium, etc. I've written a couple stories on Medium, posting to HackerNews, Reddit, etc. and have been fairly active on Twitter. I think our product is particularly useful for men who forget to order flowers for special occasions - but it could be useful to women, too (maybe they want to set up a flower delivery schedule for themselves, or their mothers for mothers day, or something along those lines)
Thinking of a #freeflowerfriday campaign to get people to retweet one of our tweets to generate some traffic where we'll give away a flower order - but for that you probably need followers =-) maybe we can pay to promote the initial tweet to get some impressions. does that make sense?
Hi Brian! I'd consider incentivizing users to initially sign up. This could happen one of two ways:
*Give a discount that stretches over a certain period - For example, If you buy a recurring 4 time delivery, get your first free
*To grow your social media following, consider doing a giveaway. Something that could work is to give away a free flower delivery, but to enter the giveaway the users must:
* Follow your account
* Tag a friend (or any number of friends that you decide on)
* Like the post
We did the social media giveaway for Album Daily and doubled our followers (even though it was only 100 -> 200 :) )
Ahh, i like it - more than just a retweet. Thanks Garret. I'll play with pricing a bit, too.
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Maybe take a graph and write something relating to it, Portland and what it might mean?
e.g. why is there a big spike in cannabis stores?
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