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11 Comments

What Am I Doing Wrong with my SideProject? #HustlerUnderPressure

My Project
I built Eurekea(https://www.eurekea.org/) - a Dataset of 250K+ SaaS, Apps & tech-products launched in the last decade.

Why Did I Build It

My intention to build it was to: Help people find validated niches for their ideas & build better products by learning from mistakes/reviews of currently existing products.

Because I believed that finding an idea for what to build is the biggest problem every maker here has to solve again & again.

How Did I Market It

Initially, I build just a landing page to get emails of how many people are interested in the idea. Got 60+ registrations, which was a fairly good response.

Then I launched the actual product on the first weekend of 2021 & posted it on multiple places- subreddits, IndieHacker & HackerNews.Even though the response was not as good as the pre-launch, but I got 2 people buying it in the first week(one just simply bought it & for the second, I had to exchange few emails to convert)

After one week, I launched on ProductHunt & it was a flop! My product remained the last product of the day from midnight(I guess maybe it's their ranking algo which induces some negative snowball effect).

Current Situation

Right now I just keep on posting on random-new platforms for side-hustles & sending a few cold-emails to users from PH & IH - which I got from my dataset :) along with those who registered early- trying to pitch them my product. But the site visitors rate remains infinitesimal & I haven't made a single sale afterward.

Please share your wisdom & tell me what am I doing wrong here? I still believe that my idea is useful to the makers community & don't want to give up on it.

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    It's been said many times before, but you can't put all your eggs in PH. I've had a flop there, and it's disappointing. If your plan relies on PH, then it's not a plan.

    I'm not trying to be harsh, but you asked where you could be going wrong.... the way you are talking about your marketing is with the expectation "if you build it, they will come".

    1. "site visitors rate remains infinitesimal" ... Not one of your marketing ideas is a long-term traffic generator.
    2. Why would anyone share your product? There is a freebie (demo), which is one thing you do right. But I don't think it's obvious enough how it works. I played around for a long time, before I realized there were a lot more columns to view (I only see ~7). I think some refining could go a LONG way: better style to make it easier on the reader, for instance instead of using developer language": Upvotes instead number_of_upvotes and Feb 10 2012 instead of "2012-02-10".
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      Thanks for the insightful feedback.

      1. Yeah, it does feel like I'm a small shop owner on the outskirts of the city- whom no one knows about. Could you point me in some direction to learn about the long-term traffic generator(I don't want to burn my pocket to buy ads yet & the only way I know right now is cold-emailing)?
      2. I don't have much experience in UI/UX - which is very evident from the site.Gotta work on it.
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        1. Long-term traffic strategies:
        • Blog/SEO is the obvious one
        • Gain subscribers (Social follows or collect emails for a newsletter/updates/discounts)
        • Offer additional value (freebies work for me, but it could be informational) The key being that other people will find it useful and want to share to friends and colleagues.
        1. Another idea came to me: Show people how to use your product. You're tool/data might be very useful, but if people don't see how to take away value, the tool is useless to them.
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          • I've tried blogging(just 1-2 though), but it's very difficult for me to adopt this habit of continuous writing on new topics. Also, is there any correlation between blog readers & actual customers? I should rethink this one.
          • From my dataset itself, I've got bulk emails of users on PH & IH. Should I use it for (i) sending promotional cold-emails (ii) Sell this data as a separate product itself-added with other useful user metrics? I'd appreciate feedback on this-is it ethically doable?
          • Agreed.Many people here have given the same advice.I've started working on more intutive demos.
    1. 1

      Thanks ! I'll look into it.

  2. 1

    Check out Nathan Latka's offerings. He runs a (Youtube) channel & podcast which interviews SaaS founders along with a "Shark Tank" like bidding for successful companies.

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    Here's some feedback from a visitor perspective...

    Great name!

    Your headline "Ikea for your next idea" - you give me a bunch of pieces of an idea and then I put that together. ???? doesn't make sense, not clear at all, imo.

    250K products is overwhelming. I'm not sure what 27 metrics means.

    The low number of upvotes on Product Hunt isn't the social proof you want.

    Your video is kinda unwatchable. The on video copy doesn't make sense, music is awful, no offense. 1 minute and 33s is way too long for this. You'd be better off showing a product demo.

    The three filters aren't useful to narrow things down. At least based on what I see in the video and the on site demo. I would make access to all filters available but limit the number of searches or number of products searched.

    Basically, the value of what you offer is not clear.

    I don't mean to be harsh but I figure it's better someone gives you honest feedback instead. Hope this helps!

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      You really gave me so much to rethink. Thanks a ton!
      I tried my hands at Video-making for the first time & I guess went into the flow of pretentiousness(the music is from 'The Little Prince' by Hans Zimmer- my fav; but yeah it isn't what it should be).

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      Thanks for the feedback @timosarkka.I'll check out The Checklist.

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