Dynomantle

I recently wrote a Twitter thread about some mystery traffic I had go to my personal blog. This traffic had no referrals listed so I suspect it was a link shared on some site with noreferrer set. That ruled out someone sharing the post on link aggregators like Reddit.

Also, when I do share posts on Reddit, 70% of the traffic is on mobile. 80% of this traffic was on desktop. That implied the post was shared at either a company's Slack (which sets norferrer) or several companies' Slack channels since the traffic was also global.

This all matters because I promote Dynomantle from my personal blog. This traffic ended up only getting me 2 signups when the bulk of it occurred, but I also noticed an increase in Dynomantle signups after the traffic bump. I'm going to continue investigation to see if I can capitalize on it or grow it using similar channels.

I saw another founder market his startup with a YouTube channel. His strategy is to provide genuine advice about the space in general including on how to effectively use his competitor's products. It seems like a really good strategy so I decided to start a channel on personal knowledge management.

I don't plan to talk about my competitors products as much (though that seems to be the "growth hack"), but I do plan on talking about general practices that have helped me with PKM.

My views are a bit contrarian. My first video is on how inbox zero is useless which is not what most productivity gurus say. Time will tell if this helps bring traffic to Dynomantle or not.

I took a step back from marketing to work on onboarding for a week. The reason was that I was actually getting a good amount of signups, but most were not sticking around for more than a couple of days.

The classic problem of PKM tools is that they are either a blank slate or filled with content too generic to be useful. That makes onboarding hard.

I attempted to mitigate this with prebuilt notebooks around specific topics. People seem to use them, but they are not having the intended effect of being helpful.

Spent a bit of time revising the software development notebook as that was the most commonly used one.

It used to be just a collection of random notes I had, which now seems obvious are not useful to many people.

Now I have sections explaining the random notes and how people can use that as inspiration for their own note taking.

I also have new sections for notes from when I was learning new technology so people can use that as inspiration as well.

I suspect some people may be adding this notebook wanting to learn to code which is not what it provides. I am looking into adding that in the future.

Here is a screenshot of the new notes.

I'm starting to prepare for an ad campaign and decided I wanted a couple more landing pages in place. I'd like to run three campaigns: one focused on information overload, one on personal knowledge management, and one on the email integrations since that's part of the paid tier.

Here's what the PKM landing page looks like.

I found that my personal story for why I built Dynomantle was a lot more engaging for people than my marketing message.

While I think this only has an appeal to the indiehacker demographic, I still felt it was worth writing and sharing with people.

Check it out here

I've been trying to figure out a good way to describe what kind of app Dynomantle is. A Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tool is probably the most accurate.

I've been hesitant to use that term because Dynomantle is so different from other PKM tools. It does things they don't, but it is also missing a lot of features they offer.

A lot of folks looking for PKM tools look for those features that I never intend to build. That's probably ok because I'm not targeting those folk. My demographic is people who need a PKM tool, but are overwhelmed my complex PKM systems. They need something simpler. Something stress free. Something that let's them be busy with their real work.

This is something I'm probably going to hone in on with my messaging going forward.

I spent a while thinking about what Dynomantle's onboarding experience should look like.

In the end, I decided to go with something simple: a single bookmark to the Dynomantle help page.

The help page is publicly accessible and could gain some SEO. The single bookmark in the app uses the app features in the onboarding.

Check it out here!

I launched the subscription plan for Dynomantle today.

Subscribers have the following accessible to them:

• upload up to 100 GB of files
• full text search for web pages, emails, PDFs, and Word Docs
• forward email directly to Dynomantle
• unlimited randomly generated email addresses

I also started making videos walking through the uses of Dynomantle. The first video about managing information overload can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksj4Z9UxbRU&t=16s

I realized a month ago that half the features in Dynomantle are hidden. The reason is that I dark launched them because I know they're going to be expensive to provide and will have to be behind a pay wall.

The issue is that while they are half the features, the synergy they have with the rest of the app is 90% of the value the app provides.

That realization made me realize that I actually need to build and release a paid tier for Dynomantle. It is mostly ready for release. At the moment I'm working on a bit of marketing material for it such as the in-app purchase page, the pricing page, the home page, and acquisition channels.

I'm making tutorial and marketing videos. Will probably post drafts on Twitter and Facebook for feedback. The final cuts will get posted on Youtube.

Also collecting a number of photos for the app. These will get posted on Instagram and maybe Pinterest.

A lot of the feedback I received for Dynomantle revolved around the onboarding. Users come to the app to the blank page and wonder where to start.

I've had similar issues when onboarding to other note taking apps and other productivity apps. Some apps go with creating content around how to use the app.

That approach has never worked with me so I suspect that's true of many other people as well. The approach I'm taking with Dynomantle is to create interesting around various topics and then using that as a base for notes in the app. Instead of a plethora of generic content, users can pick the pregenerated content that interests them the most.

The fourth topic I covered was a guide to automated testing: https://www.dynomantle.com/automated-testing/

It starts with a post providing a high level overview followed by a sign up link that promises more in depth examples after signing up for Dynomantle. Existing users have access to all content from the app.