I asked founders what they actually want after launch. The answer wasn’t more traffic.
I’m building IndieNeed (https://indieneed.com), and over the past few days I’ve been asking founders what would make them actually care about another product discovery platform.
I expected:
“More traffic.”
Instead, the same answer kept appearing:
“Tell me why people saw my product… and still didn’t try it.”
That surprised me.
Because most launch dashboards celebrate:
1,000 views 🎉
87 upvotes 🔥
But imagine this instead:
1,000 people saw your product
73 clicked your website
927 didn’t
The interesting number might actually be 927.
What stopped them?
Didn’t understand the product?
Wrong audience?
Pricing?
Missing feature?
Didn’t trust it?
Simply didn’t need it?
One founder told me something that stuck:
Analytics tell you what happened. Feedback tells you why.
So I’m changing how I think about IndieNeed.
Instead of:
Launch → Upvotes → Disappear
I want it to become:
Discover → Click → Feedback → Improve → Update → Get discovered again
But there’s one part I’m still unsure about.
If you landed on a new product and decided NOT to try it, would you actually answer a 5-second question explaining why?
Something like:
Why didn’t you try this?
A) I didn’t understand the value
B) It’s not for me
C) Missing something I need
D) Pricing
E) I don’t trust it yet
F) Other
Would you answer that — or would you just close the tab?
I’m genuinely curious because the answer changes what I build next.
This matches what I'm seeing right now, literally launching this week. I structured my own launch post around asking people to argue with three specific decisions instead of listing features, and the replies that actually moved something for me were the ones pointing out a blind spot, not the upvotes. Views tell you people looked, they don't tell you if you're wrong about something that matters.
I think if you want to improve conversion, you eventually have to understand why users drop off.
For the “why didn’t they try it?” question, what I usually do is add more granular event tracking first and see exactly where users stop. Then I look at whether there’s something wrong with that step. If the data still doesn’t explain it, I’ll try talking to some of the users who dropped off.
To me, analytics and user feedback work best together: one shows you where people leave, the other helps explain why.
This is measurement signal clarity at work. Most founders celebrate views/upvotes (observational metrics - what happened), but you're asking for signal metrics (why it happened).
The 927 who didn't click aren't noise - they're the loudest signal you have. Views tell you reach. Non-clicks tell you if your positioning/landing page/hook is working. Those two numbers together tell you everything about product-market fit.
The founders who want this feedback understand something crucial: your measurement system determines what you can actually see. If you only measure conversions, you see "0 signups." If you measure "why people don't convert," you see 927 specific failure modes. That's not more metrics - that's actually useful signal.
Will people answer why they didn't try it? Probably some will. But the ones who do just gave you your measurement latency reduction - the difference between "product isn't working" (weeks to realize) and "people don't understand the value prop" (immediate). That's the real unlock.