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Indie Hackers Company takeover session

I thought that on such a glorious Thursday we could take some time out of our busy calendars and help a fellow indie hacker with an issue that he/she is facing today.

The format will be:

You post your issue and the rest of us should imagine that we are now the CEO of your company and to the best of our ability try to come up with ideas that could solve the problem or any previous experiences where we have solved something similar, or people in our networks that could clearly help overcome this issue.

Hopefully, we can help each other get one step closer to our goal!

  1. 3

    The challenge I am facing right now is that in a few weeks we will be inviting some of our 500 waiting list sign-ups into our platform, which we are very much looking forward to. However, everyone in the team's to-do is completely filled with important tasks and I we have not yet set up proper tracking so we can follow our users' behavior on the platform.

    The question I want help with is how important is it to set up proper analytics on our platform and is it worth taking value time from core features to implement proper analytics on our platform?

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      I find it very useful to have https://clarity.microsoft.com/ installed in my project because it tracks how the users navigate my site, what they click, and where they enter text. That gives me insights into what to improve in my GUI and UX, or what help texts add.

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        thanks a lot. I gonna take a look and see if its something we can use

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      For your first users, qualitative feedback is better than quantitative. So, I don't think you need to set up analytics, but you do still need someone to make time to talk to these users.

      The value to you of this waitlist is 100% in the things you can learn from these users. If you're not set up to actually learn anything from them, you are wasting resources by letting them in. (Same is true if you let in more of them at one time than you need for that round of learning. You'll change things based on what you learn, and then you need to let in another batch to see if you've actually improved things.)

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        Thanks for the reply Matt, it was really helpful.

        Do you have any ideas on how I should gather the feedback without having too much bias in the collection phase?

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          Ask them to pay real money right now for the product. Very little noise in that signal!

          If that's not doable, then I probably need to spend more time understanding the nuances of your business. Feel free to email me through my profile.

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            I mean that's always doable and the gives the best answers :-D

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              Cool. Almost forgot: Let them talk for a long time first. Like, leave awkwardly long silences when asking them about things. Hit them up for money at the end!

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                alright, thanks! will keep that in mind!

    3. 1

      Seconding some of the comments below. We're still at an early stage with our startup too. I set up a series of auto-triggered emails along the user journey sent from a real email account that encourages users to respond with their feedback/thoughts on a particular part of the process.

      In those emails I've also thrown in links to a few co-creation surveys to let users collaboratively tell me what the biggest things are that they all want changed on the product (split by successful and unsuccessful users).

      So far that's proving a lot more helpful than analytics beyond just a high level view of our product.

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        Awesome Daniel. This is definitely something I want to look into.

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      is it to set up proper analytics on our platform and is it worth taking value time from core features to implement proper analytics on our platform?

      This is just my subjective opinion - I don't think you need this yet. Also, proper analytics can be quite time consuming to implement. You should definitely plan to implement it, but very likely not needed this soon.

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        Yes, I found out. Maybe as others write, it makes better sense to get some quality data first and then when there is more time for it to try to set up some analytics.

        Would you recommend that we code our own or are there some good low-cost solutions out there?

        1. 1

          Yes, I found out. Maybe as others write, it makes better sense to get some quality data first and then when there is more time for it to try to set up some analytics.

          Yup, agreed :)

          Would you recommend that we code our own or are there some good low-cost solutions out there?

          It's definitely better to use something that already works. I used mixpanel a while ago - that may be perfectly suited for you (it certainly was not suited for me since I'm not web based). I wouldn't call mixpanel cheap, but compared to rolling your own, I'm pretty sure it's worth the price.

    5. 1

      I'd also consider doing 1-1 user testing. Analytics can give you quantitative insights. User testing can give you qualitative insights about how your users feel, what their thoughts are, etc.

      Here's a YouTube video hosted by a fellow indie hacker and friend of mine, @jimzarkadas, which shows you what a user testing session looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUKNTA9zFiU

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          Always glad to help. Good luck with your launch!

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      Install full story to track everything, then retro actively filter for paths of interest and analyze those from the bottom down

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        It seems like a good solution. However, I hate when SaaS does not disclose their prices. It is impossible for me to plan a budget and it is valuable time that must be taken out to book a demo. Do you happen to know the prices on their plans?

  2. 1

    The challenged I've been faced for quite a while now is: is my copy strong enough?
    "Edit videos 5x+ faster than before!"
    I want to convey that we focus on speed, simplicity and joy of use - but not sure how I can convey that in a simple and powerful way. I did have quite a few attempts, and apparently this is the best I came up with :D

    1. 2

      My reaction to that copy is that there are several time-consuming things in video editing, and I'm not really sure whether you're talking about saving time in a specific part of the process or the whole thing.

      I have some documentary-style projects where I shoot hours of footage, and I have to review all of it when I get to the edit. Can you save me time there? (This would be huge.)

      I do most of my video editing in Final Cut Pro X, and I know I could get faster at a lot of things without changing software, just by learning more keyboard shortcuts. Are the features easier to find in your software?

      Does your software render the final video faster than FCPX?

      1. 1

        Thanks for the feedback!

        My reaction to that copy is that there are several time-consuming things in video editing

        ** I'd love to know what you think are the time consuming things. Care to share please? **

        I agree there are several time-consuming things in VE. I am kinda' talking about the whole thing (except rendering, see below).

        I have some documentary-style projects where I shoot hours of footage, and I have to review all of it when I get to the edit. Can you save me time there? (This would be huge.)

        Doesn't Final Cut do this? I mean, when you import a video (once the proxy generation is complete), it should give you instant preview as you hover over the video. Or are you talking about something else?

        I do most of my video editing in Final Cut Pro X, and I know I could get faster at a lot of things without changing software, just by learning more keyboard shortcuts. Are the features easier to find in your software?

        I would say so, but I guess I'm biased :)

        Does your software render the final video faster than FCPX?

        I would say it's comparable -- could be slower at times. My best features come into play at editing (making your editing very very fast). Rendering (at Export) will always be insanely slow, due to having to process the raw footage (as opposed to the many optimizations we can do for editing).

        P.S. My editor is Windows-only for now, but I did take inspiration from Final Cut in a few aspects of it.

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          re: reviewing footage before editing, a hypothetical major breakthrough would be if AI could tell me, eg: "It seems like these eight clips are takes of the same thing", etc. The time saved would be that I would know how the clips are organized before having watched them all. I haven't seen any software that does this yet.

          I think this problem is tractable. There are already APIs that can turn audio into a text transcript, and I think you could use those transcripts to detect substantial overlap between clips and use that to give an editor some very helpful clues. This could save me a lot of time.

          I don't expect you to have solved this particular problem, but I mention it as a way to illustrate that there are many ways that you might save time during an edit. I think it will help your positioning to get specific about where your tool can save an editor time.

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            P.s. if you like that particular idea, go for it, but as a favor to me, please make sure someone would buy it before you spend time building it. I don’t use Windows, so I don’t count. I’d feel bad if you spent time on this and no one else wanted it!

            1. 1

              Thanks a lot! The idea is quite awesome, but at best would require half a year to implement (and I'm being optimistic!). It's definitely something to think about in the future, but I can't afford to spend time on it right now.

              If I were to use an API to turn audio into a text script - that would certainly cut my time A LOT.

              I think it will help your positioning to get specific about where your tool can save an editor time.

              Agreed. I'm looking into creating small tips & tricks to show where my app shines. Hopefully I'll have something done by end of next week.

              Having said that, pretty much everything I've done - I've optimized it a lot, just to make sure no matter what you do, the effects are instant.

              The next step (I plan to start working on it on Feb) - is to integrate my Effect Creation app into Cinematic Studio. This will allow you to change/tweak pretty much everything related to video and/or text and animate them very very easily (what I shine on is masking). As far as I know, no one has this type of editing in place.

  3. 1

    Great initiative Jay!

    My challenge today is that I am creating a new format for my blog posts but cannot figure out how to implement Schema markup. Does anyone have a non tech-savy guide to this?

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      Can you provide details? What blog system are you using? What challenges are you facing?

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