DiscoverPlanGo

This is going to be a bit of a weird tale because I was actually trying to get the opposite result by running a social media experiment.

It all started at the beginning of the month when I was really burnt out at work and didn't have time for social media or working on DiscoverPlanGo. I logged on to my analytics to see how it was performing and I noticed that my site literally had no one visit in the previous 7 days. I don't really talk much about DiscoverPlanGo yet and usually only get 15-20 visits a day anyway so I wasn't too bothered because I wasn't putting in the effort. But what was interesting is that the lack of visitors started the day after my last tweet.

I then set out on a deliberate mission not to use social media for a month and see if that trend continued. Now this is where it gets weird, I don't know if it was a bug with Netlifys analytics; or they just felt sorry for me, but when I logged on a few days later and it shown I'd actually had the usual trend of hits despite saying 0 a few days before. I decided to carry on the experiment anyway since a social media cleanse is always good.

2 weeks in I get an email from at 2am in the morning, I usually sleep through a lot of stuff, but for some reason the notification woke me up and I was surprised when I saw it was from Zapier and someone had actually signed up to my site! I go back to sleep and when I woke up as normal I checked my phone to make sure I wasn't dreaming and I had another email from Zapier just dated just 2 hours later from someone else who had signed up and then another came through at 2pm. 3 Sign ups in 1 day and somehow the content out there already was enough for them to find me!

1 week later the same thing happened, 2 more people signed up for my beta around similar times to each other.

The analytics on Netlify don't allow you to dig down into specific days, but the most popular sources this month have came from indiehackers, bing(!?) and direct to discoverplango.com with direct being most popular source. This combined with how close the timings were suggest that people might have actually shared the site which seems like a good trend! So even though i only have 11 subscribers total I'm really pumped and I can't wait to share my app with everyone!

What's an unexpected win that you have had?

I finally did it! I followed through on the idea that I formed last year and have booted it out into the world for everyone to see. It took a lot of courage to do this and I'm really excited for the next steps and getting an MVP out and released!

I built the site on my own using Gatsby and Netlify so I can try and keep the costs down to a minimum since I am funding this myself. To be fair even if I had money to spend I would probably still choose those services because it is just so easy to get things up and running.

I'm a developer at trade and not a designer so the design of the site probably took the most amount of time. Also the copy was really hard to write. I still don't think I'm happy with it but I tried to tell the story of why it exists without boring people and told them what they can expect to do with the site when its launched. This seemed to be a common thread of advice that I saw and would love feedback on how I can improve my copy writing skills.

I think I have caught the maker bug now even though this is a pretty small achievement in the grand scheme of things. But just getting something out there just feels so good, even if no one see's it, I am still proud to say that I did it!