The path to our first 15,000 users

It's been a while, IndieHackers. I feel like the past 6 months have flown by in what feels like a matter of weeks. In that time we've onboarded 15,000 people into our synced, large-file, CDN platform - a few big customers, too! It's been exciting to start seeing our platform get some serious global use.

As exciting as that's all been, it's still taken much longer than we thought to grow an organic userbase and we don't feel like we've reached true "product-market fit" yet. And so, we pivot.

Some of our biggest wins have been unsolicited press stories about the product which have resulted in permanent steps up in our daily signups. We've gained an almost cult following among junior front-end developers who have found our product to be a great place to host their portfolio websites and we've also gained a number of e-learning, software distribution, and media production companies among our more serious users who are pushing out some pretty impressive traffic numbers.

More importantly, almost daily we get a least one message from a user telling us they think our product is amazing, or that they love it. We know we're on to something - we're just not entirely sure exactly what it is yet. And yet, it's getting clearer.

Since launch, we spent a total of about $1k to test paid ads testing the Amazon S3 file hosting market - probably too small an amount to really vet such a large market, but still, the results were not good and we've moved on from such strategies.

Instead, we're doubling down on creating a better publishing experience within our product in the expectation that it will help increase our growth through word-of-mouth.

A few months ago, we also saw a new opportunity in the market that our technology could address with only minor changes. Since then we've begun laying the groundwork for a re-launch of our product, adapted to focus on a new target customer.

A few weeks ago, we launched the first minor feature to support this new vision; a customization tool that lets you change the theme of your shared folder and file list.

Next, we'll be launching much more capable customization tools and a set of features focused on helping our users capture value from the people who come to download your content. You can read more about that here: https://fast.io/landing-pages/

Wish us luck!