You've launched. Now what?
Believe it or not, this is a really common scenario.
It goes something like this:
- build something
- do some kind of launch
- get an increase in traffic
- experience a post-launch trough of sorrow
- feel lost about what to do next
How do you think indie hackers can avoid this?
What have you done to ensure that you have an ongoing growth plan that fills you with confidence instead of doubt?
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I built pagecheck as my main app: https://pagecheck.app and launched on ProductHunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pagecheck-2
So I'm at about step 2-3.
For building sustainable traffic, I'm writing/building content people want. For example, for launch day, I wrote a marketing article about how to optimize front-end performance on dev.to:
https://dev.to/meyer9/5-optimizations-to-make-your-page-run-faster-4o3m
I also built a small tool yesterday for calculating SaaS growth and linked to pagecheck as the "sponsored" page: https://growthcalculator.app/
Would love to hear some metrics on these two strategies when you have clear numbers! Especially the free tool -> Sponsored paid app
I'm curious..My wapalyzer browser extension shows that your pagecheck.app landing page was built with node.js and..lua. Is this indeed the case?
Love this growth hack :D
No, I'm using NodeJS and PostgreSQL with an Nginx ingress server.
TL;DR Try affiliate marketing / have multiple launches
I launched my Adobe Illustrator extension to an email list of 36 people. I had two sales and then entered the trough of sorrow. My project would never have been profitable if not by serendipity.
I had a holiday sale and was put in touch with someone who wanted to be an affiliate. I had never considered affiliates, but this person was a huge influencer of my audience.
After I got him on board as an affiliate, he put me in touch with more people, I built a solid version of the product and had my second launch.
There's no law saying you can't have multiple launches if your first one isn't a success.
After launch 2 my business grew to 5-figures in 9 months.
Re the "trough of sorrow", it may sound a bit purist but I'd say put faith in the process and push on. And by 'process', I mean:
(For early stage, it's really useful to work from/iterate the Lean Canvas to do this).
The ongoing uncertainty can be a bit of a killer, but as a little trick, me and my co-IH-er do the following:
It gives a forum for that big question, whilst allowing you to focus in between.
"experience a post launch trough of sorrow".
Ahah that's where I am.
I'm currently contacting writers to get their habits, workflow, feedback etc. and it's tough because when I'm not ignored, I get "I use Word and it's fine".
I like to build stuff so the "you are lost about what to do next" usually comes right after the first launch.
I work hard to get https://colofon.io noticed but some day, it's just completely silent and it's hard to bounce back.
So it's usually the people close to me who keep me going and give me ideas.
Build a plugin for Word that strips out all the unnecessary crap so users can focus on writing haha.
Think of your launch as casting a wide net to find out who your target users are. Hopefully from your launch you identify a couple people that really like your product and actually start using it. Rather than worry about your inevitable traffic crash, focus on talking to these people, improving your product based on their feedback, and finding more people like them.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.