Trough of sorrow is coming π₯
Today marked the 14th day of lonely.dev. Past two weeks were incredible to me. I kept delivering cool features that our members really need. I launched our community on IH, HN and PH. I kept contributing new videos almost every day and engaging with our members.
But what if I don't have anything new to show? Will the traffic remain? NO!
It's been three days since the PH launch. I saw traffic dips every day. Every day the traffic is lower than it is the day before. I know, the "Trough of Sorrow" is coming. I hope we will be hitting the bottom soon.
These days, I am always thinking how to make the community more engaging. People may have no idea what to talk in front of the camera if it's their first time visiting the website. How to make they be willing to contribute and know how?
So today I delivered the "Weekly Topics" section. From this week on, we will have 1 topic every week so people can have the same thing to talk about. The 1st week topic is "How is your work and life in quarantine?" Check out here: lonely.dev/weekly.
I hope this can help make the community grow.
Damon,
Just to encourage you on the PH traffic. It's been 3 years since we were hunted. The landing page we set up for that still gets traffic and still converts a few times a week. Β―\(γ)/Β― Consider adding your product to lists of products using the collections features of PH.
Also, have you considered doing some marketing around this? Four ideas:
Anyway, hope that helps
Marc
Thanks Marc for your ideas! They are invaluable! We do support sharing videos to social network. For creating collections, I think it's such a good idea. Right now, the content is loosely scattered. Some of our member suggested tags or hashtag before. As time goes, it's necessary we do some housekeeping to make the content more categorized, I will work on this. Oh, btw, is this Tuple.app you mentioned?
Weekly topic is a nice idea, though with a small community it may be hard to get people to generate the content needed. If you keep creating new topics, think of ones you feel the existing members would enjoy and benefit from.
Forget about the trough of sorrow, it's an artificial graph that doesn't really help you grow longer term. Focus on showing up every day and lead by example with the type of content that you think should exist there.
A big part of the challenge with these things is that people won't want to invest time into something new, people will come in time if they feel it will be around longer term and there are some good foundational people and content.
I forgot to mention. You got an endorsement from Andrei in our community π€ Check out this video: https://lonely.dev/video/yHToy0002gu01JbS4EBOEVxx28gDzi8737o00MacC4bRDYQ
Thanks for that, I responded.
Thank you Rosie! I am not really worried about the size of the community so far as we are still quite early. And I am very proud to have a few champion members who would like to share their videos and continuously contribute to the community.
I remember @heylorenzut once made some comments somewhere. The point is we shouldn't care about the scale in the beginning. If we only have 100 members, just serve them with 100% of your effort. I think I should stick to the same mindset.
I tried to make myself show up everyday. I learnt a lot from keyvalues founder @lynnetye. She has been extremely disciplined in sending her newsletter every Thursday for the past 140 weeks. If she only did it for 10 weeks, I don't think we still have keyvalues today.
Your words are so encouraging. I will keep on and hopefully bring you guys more good news in the near future! π₯°
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It may not be exactly the same, but you have it here https://www.indiehackers.com/post/is-this-what-doing-things-that-don-t-scale-means-a48a7b276a
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Haha, no worries, I hope you are getting better Patrick. People are really going through a lot during the quarantine, especially the mental health. I totally get it!
You have to understand that PH users are just people who are just walking around for new products. They are just looking for novelty and they will not stay for a long time.
To keep users coming back, you have to deliver something valuable, a solution to problem.
Thank you Benny! I didn't really expect PH users come and stay. This is totally predictable. You are right. It's not launch make users stay. Instead, it should be the solution, in my case it's the content, to make them come back.