Initial sales spike after launch, now almost nothing.
Hey Hackers,
I launched my first product (https://peripheryapp.com) almost 2 months ago. It got featured in a few high traffic developer newsletters, followed by a flurry of sales - much more than my modest expectations.
However, now that traffic has died down (a lot), my sales have also dropped to near nothing. Since this is my first product, I guess I somewhat naively expected more organic growth once it was featured in the newsletters. I've noticed a couple of tweets, and mentions in small-time podcasts, but in general very little organic content.
My traffic right now can be broken down to residual traffic from the newsletters, a small amount of AdWords traffic, and a small amount from my efforts creating a blog and posting on LinkedIn/HN.
Clearly my expectations about organic growth were way off, so my question is to those that have experienced a similar pattern with their own product launches. How long did it take for organic content to grow in a meaningful way?
I'm also a little concerned I may have underestimated the percentage of developers that might care about my product. I understand that it's my job to convince potential customers why my product is worth the cost, however that seems like an extremely difficult task if my pitch is falling on deaf ears, especially from such a small soapbox.
Any choice words of wisdom?
Can't you relaunch it? What did you do in the launch?
I can certainly do paid advertising in the high traffic newsletter, though there's limited advertising opportunity (currently sold out through July), and also the audience is the same for each issue.
I think I need new eyes on the product, or some drastic means of educating potential customers that weren't previously interested.
Sales is hard. You will need to do sales, as it is unlikely that pure marketing will service this specific niche well. At your price points (maybe a good customer is ~$12/mo?) it can be difficult to make the economics work. You may wish to consider raising your prices and focus more on delivering value to enterprise (highlight CI/CD integration?) and pursue closing deals on a one-by-one basis.
Highly specific technical tools are difficult to make a bunch of money on without focusing on those customers to whom you deliver the most value.
Your point somewhat validates what I'd already been considering - my price point is too high for the average indie developer, but should be within budget for larger companies.
I guess I have a choice to make, focus on sales with large companies, or lower the price to appeal to broader audience as @Guillaume suggested. 🤔
I second what @vwoo said, for big companies even what I consider as an indie dev as "small" can be mission critical.
Hi,
I am not coding in Swift so probably not in the target but as a developer I can still relate to such product and give my humble feedback :)
From my point of view the price is definitely too high compared to other tools I may pay for.
Let's take some examples (not related, but I pay for):
On the other side your tool is very useful but only provides one feature which is dead code removal. From my point of view even if dead code is a burden it's definitely not worse than security problems or technical debt. So it's not the first "problem" I would pay for solving.
Also, it immediately makes me think about similar tools that are free like TSlint which does linting (including unused code) for TypeScript and wich is definitely free.
So maybe the organic growth is missing because even if your product solves a problem (and apparently the feedback is mostly positive considering the sales you got at the beginning) some people may not recommend it to friends and coworkers. At least it would be my case as I don't see enough value for the price.
Good luck :)
Do you think $34.95 for the indie license would be more reasonable?
Honestly I have no idea what a good price would be.
I personally wouldn't pay for such tool, however I could recommend it to my company as a must have in the CI toolings / workflow. Which make me think that it could also be free for indie and paid for companies. Like GitKraken free for non commercial use. It allowed me to test and use it personally and push it at work as a paid version.
I am definitely not a specialist of freemium plans, but it could serve as a sales leverage. If many can use it for free then the word of mouth could take on. And you will be probably better with one big sale at a company than 10 average sales with indie devs.
Why wouldn't you pay for such a tool? This is exactly the kind of thing I need to understand :)
You're right, I need some leverage beyond the free trial right now. I'm actually planning on providing a free service for open-source tools in the near future.
Because currently I code in Typescript, and TSLint is a free open source tool doing the type checking, linting and some dead code detection.
So I wouldn't pay for a tool doing only dead code detection, at least not for JS / TS. Maybe it makes perfect sense for Swift but now I have a bias as I am seeing free similar tools for other languages.
That's why I said that I am definitely not your target, but if I was coding in Swift who knows, maybe I would pay for it.