Hypersonal

It's been a few months my app has been on the app store, but I haven't done much anything for it. I think the main thing blocking me from investing more in it is that I'm not sure I understand the pain point I'm solving. It feels convoluted. This feels like a tool looking for a problem, and personally I get demotivated when I don't feel like I'm helping people, and the flip side intuition is that I don't think this would sell easily if it was just a tool looking for a problem.

I'm at a crossroads because I only want to work on one project and it will be Hypersonal or Jopro. I'm going to become much more time constrained soon. I'm more intrinsically motivated with Jopro, I find the space more interesting personally and have found it easier to develop Jopro than Hypersonal. However Hypersonal has better economic potential in my opinion, and a clearer distribution strategy. I just don't think Hypersonal is valuable, if I can excited about Hypersonal actually making an impact then I think Hypersonal would make sense to choose.

I think the best thing I can do is talk to potential customers to figure out if Hypersonal could solve any of their potential top of mind issues.

After a few months of developing and testing, I think Hypersonal is ready to see the light of day! It's nowhere near where I want it to be, but I think that's okay. I have no idea what features merchants will actually like, if any. I am worried that putting it out now will result in negative feedback, but I have to see what people want. If they end up wanting something else entirely I can always pivot it under a new app itself.

I finished coding product chat today. It's a great feature that lets you ask questions about the product listing and also has context (as in a hypersonal context, e.g. your search term, or leading ad, or referring page, etc.) aware suggested questions. Once I finish with the product recommendation front end I can make a demo video! This will round out my landing page, which isn't getting much response as is today.

The problem with my product and landing page today is that the problem is not clear, not singular, and not understood as a "problem". Finding PMF is proving tricky. Something I do need to do is try out ~5 different landing pages and figure out what things resonate.

I spent about a month foregoing this problem, and instead tried to demonstrate Hypersonal's value through a series of contrived experiments and surveys which ended with mixed results. The blind comparison surveys always showed favor to what I was building. The real case ended up being so contrived that the value of the product was reduced to color matching the product from an ad I ran for a product that didn't sell because it was dropshipped and poorly differentiated. And in that case somehow had a negative impact for my small sample size. 🤷‍♂️ I ended up getting embroiled in trying to build out this secondary brand and product. Oh well, back to reality, time to stop procrastinating and let people tell me it's crap instead of doing everything I can to avoid hearing it from someone else.

Once I have a demo video I will look for other distribution channels for getting initial customers (in the worst case just putting it out on the store as a listed app). Managing the initial customer reviews is critical for things that thrive or die on a marketplace. I promise it's not an excuse for not putting it out there, I'm very consciously trying to launch with feedback first so that reviews that hit the public store profile are good. I might try talking to people who make a lot of apps and see if that's just a way I'm tricking myself. Anyway, my goal is to get it into the hands of a real customer as soon as possible to start getting feedback. I will try to ask for the help of others where I can.

I will also move on to testing 3 more unrelated ideas before the end of the year, in very simple landing page form.