Forky
Mindmapping Quickly and Beautifully
Over time people just keep signing up. 0-5 usually daily. Sometimes a teacher signs up a bunch of teachers which gets me excited.
Unfortunately when that happenned it usually crashed my real-time systems. Now I have fixed it!
I also started to track the REFERER header to see where signups come from. (because I shun google analytics)
Seems like from a few places:
- 2 blog posts by random strangers
- product hunt launch page
- google / yandex
From various sources, I have a decent amount of signups for 3 months!
I think the main sources were:
Product Hunt Launch
A guy blogged about it on an education blog.
A school signed up many classrooms :O
However, I have not converted anybody into a paying customer yet. Aww.
Still work to do! Perhaps they need to fall in love first.
After a lot of work and wrestling with slack APIs and other frustrating things.
It's accepted into the Slack App Directory.
When you paste a Forky link into a conversation, it will show a preview of the mindmap in the chat!
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I built this because I thought that if I had it in the Slack App Directory I would have a lot of visibility.
However, it seems like nobody notices it :/ Seems like wasted time.
After much sweat and a teardrop or two.. I finished the stripe integration for Forky!
For now, it's going to cost $3 / month to unlock all of Forkies features.
Additional features include:
- Borderless Text
- Arrows and Dotted Lines
- 3 Extra Themes
- Public Viewing Links
- Infinite Diagram Size
I went on product hunt, and made a post. I hoped anybody would notice and give me some feedback.
To my surprise, It got 189 up votes and was #5 product of the day!
From the launch I think I got 400-600 or so signups! People were signing up every 5-10 minutes.
What a rush! From then on, I realized my product had a future, and have been working hard, with basically no money to spare!
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Some things were not working. For instance logging in with Google required two attempts to login correctly because I had a bug in the code, and there was a lot of work to do to make things better.
I have learned a lot since then.
But my goal has been to react to feedback and come up with a reasonable business model.
3 Comments
Congrats 👏
Would love to hear about your process and possibly featuring the story on MarktStash.com
Cheers
Wow, that's great! Good luck with all of those signups.
If you ever get to the point where you think you'd benefit by having a partner help you with this, I've recently launched MicroPartners - a platform that helps product creators find and form business partnerships with professionals that have skills contrary to their own - leading to faster growth and increased profits.
The idea is that you can't be a superhero at everything. If you're a developer, maybe consider partnering with a marketer, or a content creator, for example, leveraging their skills to grow your business more quickly and with confidence.
Anyway, good luck at everything either way!
Congrats. I am looking to launch my mini service at the start of 2023 with a primary focus of obtaining 1-3 months of emails who are requesting an invite to beta access.
What are you currently use the 3k+ emails for?