Keeping Customers Engaged During Periods of Development
Doing the indie-hacker thing solo means that my time is divided between developing features and marketing. I'm slowly getting better at marketing but, as with improving any skill, part of getting better is realizing how bad you were before.
One place I feel like I fail my customers is keeping them engaged and excited about the product when I'm in a period of deep development, for instance working on a feature that may take a week or more of deep focus to build.
💡 Last week a light bulb went off for me: it seems crazy not to have a Changelog or Roadmap on my site to tell users what features have recently landed & what features are on the way.
So my question for indiehackers is:
What techniques or features do you use to keep users interested when you're not able to do marketing actively?
I have a friend who does copywriting for product announcements and he’s following the good ol’ principles: Connecting the feature to their goal. For eg, if you have a SaaS to create better-performing FB ads and you add a certain feature, tell them how that feature is going to help them make their ads perform even better.
Hey, Rob!
Have you given product tours a try? You can use them to improve the onboarding experience for new users but you may want to target existing users to nudge them towards other existing features they can try while you build new ones.
This can help you convert free users into paid ones, or simply keep existing users engaged with already-built features and continuing in their product adoption journeys :)
Driftly can do all this if you want it give it a spin!
That's a great suggestion! I'll definitely check out Driftly. Cheers!