Is It Keto?
Quick, straightforward answers about the keto diet
I was always frustrated with the difficulty of figuring out which foods are compatible with the keto diet. I want to offer a site where users can get quick, straightforward answers.
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.
With flat growth and struggling revenues, it may be time to shutter Is It Keto.
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
