Is It Keto?
Quick, straightforward answers about the keto diet
In October, Is It Keto began selling its first product: downloadable meal plans.
I made my first sale within two hours of going live. I spent the rest of the month trying to make more sales and only managed to sell to one additional customer.
Here are the experiments I attempted, in short:
- Replace AdSense ads on other parts of my site with self-ads for my meal plan product
- Result: It might have increased visits to my sales page, but the change is too small to be meaningful.
- Reduce prices from $14.99 to $4.99
- Result: No sales after two days (cut short the experiment)
- Offer discount in exchange for feedback about the meal plans
- Result: Only one user provided feedback but did not follow through with a purchase
- Pitch to reddit users one-by-one
- Result: Tried this for a few days, but was too labor intensive and was not yielding any results.
- Revert to sales copy from the smoke test
- Result: Similar percentage of users clicked the "Buy button" but only one completed checkout.
- Put more detail into sales pages
- Result: No new sales, still working on this one.
For the full writeup, check out my October retrospective:
In March, my site's revenues grew by almost 4x, traffic increased by 30%, and search rank got significantly stronger. However, revenues are still too small for a viable business, so I'm shelving the project.
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Hi Michael, I know someone that is looking to get started as a consultant on keto diets and your project could potentially be a good starting point for them if you'd be open to passing on the torch.
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Oh, cool! I'm not interested in selling yet, but revenue has grown enough that I'm considering hiring a writer again. If they're interested in writing, I'd love to talk to them over email.
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With flat growth and struggling revenues, it may be time to shutter Is It Keto.
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https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/03/#my-hail-mary-data-visualizations
I loved this section, you are definitely hard-working keep it up!!
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Thanks for reading!
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Rooting for you!
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Thanks!
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I just read your google story! Good luck with the keto project. Hope you make your goals.
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Thanks for reading!
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Good luck, I get it. Starting to wonder if I'm there with Libate...
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Thanks for reading!
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I'm actually surprised you got that much revenue with that site. It's missing two things: design and engagement.
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Design - Looking at this site, I think most of your visitors can tell right away that it's not a serious site. It just doesn't look professional.
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Engagement - This barebones site is missing soooo many of the engagement hooks that content sites use.
You're making this decision at the wrong point in the product's life. You haven't given it a fair chance yet. Building an awesome content-driven website is super tough work. There's a morsel of it here. Decide if you're willing to put a ton more work into this before pointing at your stats for decision-making, or if it's simply not worth the effort, for you, at this point in time.
Get in touch and let's have a chat. A few years ago, I built a recipe website, so I can give you a few pointers.
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Thanks for reading!
Do you have specific recommendations?
I agree that the design is amateurish, but I'm not convinced that's the limiting factor, so I'm reluctant to invest heavily in polishing it.
I'm not sure which type of engagement hooks you mean, but I don't see it so much like a standard content site like Buzzfeed or The Onion. I don't expect users to return every day to read the latest articles about which foods are keto. I think of it more like a reference site like IMDB where you go when you want to look up a particular thing.
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Is It Keto earned its first dollar of revenue through an Amazon Affiliate link.
Is It Keto earned its first dollar of revenue through an Amazon Affiliate link.
After shelving the project for several months, I returned to focus on it and found it had been quietly growing without me. I added affiliate links and better page structure for SEO. https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/isitketo-returning-to-a-site-that-grew-without-me-0a0fe3ef52
I paused development to focus on my other project, Zestful. I was sad to stop Is It Keto before it reached critical mass, but I thought Zestful had greater potential.
After building an MVP and playing with it for a couple weeks, I publicly announced Is It Keto on Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/show-ih-isitketo-a-pivot-from-ketohub-515b7cd600
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