IH Story: Coming out of the shadows and a launch
Hey Indie Hacker,
I've been in the shadows here on IH for a long time opening the forum to check on what you are up to and also listening to the podcast regularly. Never actually participated in the conversation, but I think it's about time.
Today was going to be an exciting day. I launched a project I've been working for the past few weeks and the launch was a FAIL.
I've been creating small projects for a long time, mostly just fun projects that I find interesting . They also help me develop new skills or actually fix a problem, and today was no different. I've been using other platforms for doing A/B testing and I just find that they lack some features that would be interesting or they are actually just way too expensive.
There is so much potential for a product like this and I think it's just patience to getting it of the ground. I had never actually created a product with payments before and ignored some of the suggestions from friends on how to make it better. From adding a trial period for subscriptions (which I did about 10 hours after the launch, only took me 30 minutes to implement) to some other minor adjustments.
So much happened today, from a failing to appear on the Product Hunt's Today section, for one hour and a half to getting hammered on Hacker News for posting with a new account just for the project. And there are lots of lessons to be learned here.
I expected today to result in my first self-made cent, and, in a sense, it will, just not today. I've learned a lot, so it was exciting after all. I know it shouldn't be a sprint. The product will live on with new updates and features over the coming weeks and months. Maybe some day someone will find it interesting. Until then, I will just continue updating it, in silence, unnoticed.
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If you want to actually check out the project go the https://www.indiehackers.com/product/dual-kind or directly to the site at https://dualkind.com
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Thank you if you read this far. See you around.
Hi Andre,
According to https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Dualsided there are 24 sites using your technology after less than 7 months. By comparison https://www.uclusion.com just entered beta after a year and a half and we are not even attempting to charge people yet (and there are two of us full time bootstrapping).
I say you use your own technology and play around with giving a 3 month trial (some in your space do 30 days but that's not enough to get to seeing value) or even a free tier model. What do you have to lose?
Anyway Uclusion will certainly be willing to try out your technology except that your docs https://dualkind.com/docs don't explain how we see the results of the test. Also I think you should make an email address available - maybe I'm old fashioned that way.
Hey David, thanks for your message and for taking a look at Dual Kind.
That's not my website. No one actually signed up for it yet.
Giving a 30 day trial is something I want to do in the future. I think I was in the wrong mindset when launching this product. I really have nothing to lose but I don't think I can take on a massive amount of traffic anyways, so it would be better to have a lower number of customers.
The documentation was focused more on the technical part of using the script. I will certainly improve it in the future as I add more methods for statistical analysis and extend the API to different platforms. All the results for the statistical analysis are displayed inside the experiment page available through the dashboard. The support email is available on the Privacy page and there's also an email when you click the custom pricing option. I will certainly improve this with your feedback. Thank you.
I've just looked at your website andvideos. It seems really interesting, but since I'm solo doing this product I don't know if I'm the target audience for this, because from what I gather it would be most effective for teams. It seems like a really great project anyway and a different take on what issue trackers offer.
Also you need to at least support GMail login on the register https://dualkind.com/account/register. Each barrier to entry is another place that customers will fall off of your funnel - the lack of free trial, screenshots of dashboard without logging in, login method and then the strength of your onboarding.
Yes I knew you are not ICP for Uclusion but I can see you are actually trying to do something useful with your product as opposed to a lot of cynical MVPs. I'm sincere in Uclusion being your first customer but you will have to fix all these things first - otherwise its too risky for me to spend the time on integration.
Amazing. I will be fixing some of these things over the coming days and weeks. Initally I thought of doing authentication though other different providers (ex Twitter) but ended up deciding to just go with email, since everyone has one, and it would take some time to integrate all those providers.
My marketing skills are not the best so its good to have valuable feedback like this. I will certainly ping you when I get all those issues sorted and offer you a couple of months free ;) Thank you so much.
I haven't looked at your onboarding yet but Uclusion does have an article on using wizards https://dev.to/uclusion/wizards-aren-t-just-for-hogwarts-14kd We also embed an explainer video and have dismiss text.
Your onboarding will be different of course but for sure you should include your own web site's usage of your product - see what https://plausible.io does with their Live Demo button - you should do something similar and show how your website changes with each click of a Live Demo button you expose - and maybe link in the corresponding stats.
Nice. I will take a look. Thanks.