devmarks.io

I've moved devmarks.io to Digital Ocean and hosting it with all my other sites now. Users keep signing up for devmarks.io and I keep adding new features, but I haven't spent much time actively marketing it or trying to determine how to get closer to product-market fit since I've been distracted by my open-source projects and https://fediview.com for the past few months.

Ooof, it's been a while since the last update! I still use devmarks regularly and people continue to sign up for it, but there is definitely no product market fit. Or at least nothing that people will pay for. Maybe it needs a different pricing structure, different features, or maybe bookmarks is something that people just won't pay for? It is more of a "vitamin" than a "medicine".

However, I did hear from one user who paid for the service! Unfortunately, he only paid in hopes of getting around a bug! I fixed the bug... and then offered to refund him -- that's not how I want to make my first sale. :) He did provide some hope that others might find devmarks useful, so I'm re-focusing on it after spending the past few months on my open-source repositories.

New features:

• CTAs to upgrade
• support markdown for bookmark notes and collection description
• soft delete bookmarks to prevent syncing from "re-creating" a bookmark that was previously deleted
• Try to prevent the memory consumption from spiking in the worker that retrieves bookmark URLs
• Add canonical metatag to collections for SEO
• Lots of bug fixes

New features

• new landing page that has a screenshot, more concise marketing copy, and is overall "less quirky"
• edit url for bookmarks
• move server hosting from Heroku to Render
• fix lots of little bugs

Marketing

• betalist.com sends ~10 sessions per week
• manually sent an email to all new users (and heard back from a few!)

New features

• search (it's super basic, but it's something!)
• much reduced database load
• bug fixes, bug fixes, and some more bug fixes

Marketing

• improved AppSumo cover image and copy (still no buyers!)
• some "build in public" tweets
• https://dev.to/adamghill/why-i-built-another-static-site-generator-a-love-story-15mm
• https://www.indiehackers.com/post/looking-for-feedback-for-devmarks-bookmarking-for-developers-0ae27de4fb?commentId=-Mygj6ISFZ8MguI3ej-5
• SEO article: https://devmarks.io/articles/definitive-guide-to-finding-new-projects-on-github

In good news: the AppSumo deal went live on their site. In bad news: no one bought. I have some theories why including: a not great cover image, not compelling marketing copy, etc. I gave myself a week to see how it went, but still nothing. So, maybe not the trough of sorrow, but more like a "blip of sadness"?

I was hoping to get one sale. Looks like I need to keep pushing that boulder up the hill! So, I wrote an article for SEO marketing and worked on some bug fixes which are still on-going.

Next up

• Improve the AppSumo marketing page (maybe see if changing to lifetime would convert better?)
• Gate features with CTAs
• Start building out search

Marketing

After a bunch of back and forth AppSumo approved the devmarks.io deal. I'm not sure when it will "go live", but that should (hopefully) provide me with another marketing channel to get more feedback.

Most of this week was preparing for AppSumo. I added:

• Read More functionality which is an archived version of articles that is more readable and without any ads
• Create/update/delete collections of bookmarks
• Lots of design tweaks to the UI to attempt to polish it up as much as possible

Next up

• Maybe AppSumo goes live? Best case: pays for server costs; worst case: everything breaks and I get inundated with customer support emails
• Actually gate features based on current plan and add CTAs for upgrading from the free plan to the paid plan
• Marketing landing pages
• Start building out search

New features:

• updated tags selector
• added syncing for Hacker News favorites and Twitter likes
• add "open in new window" setting
• add dropdown to username in top nav to get to favorites, profile, and logout links easier
• save the view type (expanded or list) on the bookmark list view
• add sort order to bookmark list view

Still need to do:

• https://devmarks.io/pricing tweaks
• public collections creation/editing flows to help with SEO and some virality
• set up paid plans on GitHub Marketplace and/or Stripe
• weekly email

Added 15 more users over the past month by:

• Tweeting about new features (i.e. working in public)
• Including it in a few forum posts when appropriate
• Getting it into the GitHub Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace/devmarks-io (which took longer than expected)
• it got referenced in https://twitter.com/carltongibson/status/1480600778939191313?s=20 (which was a particularly good test which added 7k+ urls into the system)
• Referenced it in https://dev.to/adamghill/building-a-micro-business-what-services-i-pay-for-1p0m which got shared pretty broadly on Twitter

Potential next ups:

• https://devmarks.io/pricing just went live, but it needs more tweaks
• public collections creation/editing flows to help with SEO and some virality
• set up paid plans on GitHub Marketplace and/or Stripe
• RSS and Twitter integration

3 users doesn't sound like a lot -- and it's not -- but everything has to start somewhere! Looks like most users come from Twitter where I have a few followers. I also created a screencast to show a little "build in public" although I'm not sure how helpful that will be.

The hope is to provide a tiny bit of virality with public collections that users can share with a CTA at the bottom for non-logged in visitors. I also have a few other ideas for SEO, but I want to provide a little more in the MVP before focusing on that (says every developer ever).