We reached 100 weekly users on Smart Paste!

We released our first beta version of smartpaste.io about 3 weeks ago. At the time we were hovering around 20-25 weekly users on our Chrome extension.

Since then, we've fixed up some of our bugs tried to improve our usability and start some out reach and I'm so happy to share that we've hit 100 weekly users :D

Some of the things that I've learned so far is

• Talking to people becomes easier the more you do it. I'm not super extroverted but after the first couple of chats, it becomes ALOT easier. I suggest take it slow if you're not comfortable but know it'll get better if you're not comfortable right now!
• Building in public really helps get some traction! Looking at our Google analytics there were a significant number of people coming from Product Hunt and Indie Hackers coming to our website, although I'm not sure how many ended up installing
• Use your own product! I ended up creating tutorial videos for how to use the extension for certain use cases. While I was filming I ended finding a few bugs and shortly fixed it. This was really useful while we have less feedback but I should probably look for other people's feedback too (which I'd love from ya'll btw)

Things I'm still learning to do:

• We have a good amount of users and forms for feedback but we don't have that many people filling it out. I think I need to put in more effort into reaching out to users but while we're in the beta period, we don't have much ability to contact users. This is something I still have to work on
• It's hard to stay motivated sometimes especially while building this part-time so progress is naturally slower. Definitely hard to stay productive while also coding 9-5 in another job. Eventually it'd be great to build this full time but I guess that will come later :))
• Finding direction is really hard. Sometimes I'm like wait... that's an amazing idea we should build this into our product! But then we ask if it'll be that useful to our users. This is kind improved by the first point in this section but sometimes it's hard to balance ambition for where we want our product to be and the amount of time we have -- ruthless prioritization as they say

I know it's not that many users in the grand scheme of things and we still have $0 revenue but this is definitely a milestone for us since a lot of other projects that I've worked on have never hit this many users. Also, I'm super excited to see what happens to the user base as we start getting more and more feedback from users and help even more people save hours and hours of their time.

This is definitely a stepping stone for us in the sense that we're at least going in the right direction with our product but really happy to share this with the community. Hopefully in the next update I can talk about getting paid users but we're definitely not where we want to be with that haha