Keytunity
Grow your website and your traffic.
One thing I've realized with some of the recent feedback is that in certain edge cases Keytunity was erroring terribly. A very unhelpful 500 error page was being presented to the user.
None of these errors were something I can fix directly but if I explain better to the user what is happening (which is being caused by how their Google Search Console is set up,) then possibly they can fix it.
Or at least understand it and not blame Keytunity.
I posted already about Hacker News but that didn't really get anywhere. Oh well!
I also tried Facebook Ads over the weekend, spending about $50. That was a bit of a disaster as best I did get about 10 people to sign up to Keytunity, but not only were none paying, worse none were even connecting their Google Search Console (an essential step to using Keytunity). Somehow Facebook was sending me the wrong people.
Of course I can fix this, perhaps through better audience targeting, changing the objective on the campaign or making the copy clearer. Audience targeting is probably the key here and I'll look at that, likely later in the week.
Meanwhile organic signups seem to be continuing so I think the efforts I made to showcase Keytunity to the world have worked well!
I've finally posted to Hacker News. I've been trying not to post to all the biggest sites at first but start small and build up. (Product Hunt was the biggest so far.)
Well I've posted the link to Hacker News, I hope it goes well!
Please feel free to visit and upvote!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32033205
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Congrats on the release!
Small feedback for your landing page, the "Explode Your Traffic By Listening To Google" has a negative connotation (explode can also be reduced to zero) and "listening to Google" sounds confusing and a bit creepy.
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Hi thank you for the feedback. It's always difficult to get these things right, ideally I should be A/B testing different alternatives. Anyway I've changed it around a little bit, let's hope this helps!
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I just got my first paying customer for Keytunity. Man that feels good. I have over 100 free users but it's a great validation that someone is willing to pay something for Keytunity!
I guess the only "downside" is it looks like they signed up on the offer screen before they started using it.
It will be nice to see someone sign up after they've used the free version.
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Congrats Jason! Must be an amazing feeling :) And it seems like Keytunity has only been live for a few months and already a paying customer!? Wow
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Thank you. Only really life for a month! Before that it was some scripts on my computer
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One month!? That’s incredible. What is your marketing strategy? What worked well for Keytunity? Now I’m super curious :D
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There's something by an Indie Hacker called Spread the World. It's a list of places to post your startup. You can get it cheap on AppSumo.
I got it and I think it was well worth it, especially some of the Reddit communities where I had some decent feedback.
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Thank you so much for the tip! Definitely considering getting Spread the World now.
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Step by step Jason! Here's to many more 🥂🥂🥂
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Thank you!
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I launched on Product Hunt on Monday. I messed up the schedule so I did very little in terms of promotion as I only realized it had launched halfway throughout the day.
I still did well, coming in at number 8 for the day, but even more importantly, driving another 60 new users to Keytunity.
I think the lesson here is that a good product will do well on Product Hunt naturally.
CMS' like Wordpress make it easy to get a website up and running quickly. Pagebuilders like Elementor make it easy to get a beautiful design.
But when you hit a snag it can be incredibly frustrating as you have to spend time trying to figure out what is causing it and how you can undo something so that you can do it your own way.
The pleasure of doing a project yourself is that you just figure out what you want and code it. Yes I'm using an opinionated framework like Ruby on Rails but somehow it's not the same problems.
Plus it really helps to use Tailwind as the CSS framework!
I wanted to make a change with Keytunity just now and it was so easy to just change what I wanted without having to figure out the "way" of doing it.
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amen! and agreed with having the competency to update your product as you work on it seamlessly without engaging someone else. Autonomy for the win!
So a new piece of feedback was the limits on the free plan are two restrictive. Where to set them I ask myself?
Too high and there's no incentive to move to the paid plan.
Too low and people don't get enough use / value out of the product to want to keep using it / recommend it.
Well since I'm at an early stage and I've had that feedback, I'm happy to increase the limit.
So I had some really good design/marketing feedback a couple of days ago. Things like rewriting my about page to be in the first person.
This is different from the feedback I'd received so far which had been about functionality and using the app. But it's just as valuable (or even more so?)
Well I've updated the home page and about pages with these suggestions and it's really looking slick!
I've started posting Keytunity in some of the smaller directories and reddit communities in the hope of gaining some traction.
I'll save some of the bigger ones for when I've gotten more feedback!
So far the only feedback I've gotten has been from people I know and one person on a discord group.
If you have feedback about Keytunity please don't hesitate to get in touch or feedback publicly.
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I spotted it in a Reddit Sub, so your marketing is starting to work. I signed up for the free account and like what you are trying to do. I have a broadly similar product I'm currently building (uses the GSC API but presents different data to yours), so I feel your pain around Google authorisation. I think you're spot on with lots of really valuable data buried in GSC that people ignore. Good luck with it.
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Hi Jon,
Thank you for your kind words. Nice to know I wasn't the only one struggling to make Google auth work!
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I've received some feedback, in particular around some specific UX points (finding page reviews).
I've managed to rework and turn around the feedback in less than 24 hours. I'm so proud of myself. Best of all I even learnt somethings about Rails I didn't know.
I love this early stage of being able to make changes quickly and easily based on user feedback.
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What did you learn about rails?
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This is going to make me sound like an amateur, but I learnt I can use update_columns to bypass callbacks (including the broadcast ones) and I can use update_all to not only bypass call backs but also make the update on several records in one faster database transaction.
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6 Comments
500 is a generic "Internal Server Error" which means something is broken on the server rather than on the client side... it's not user error. I can see why your users would blame your app and not themselves :)
Yes, absolutely agree. I didn't mean to imply my users were at fault.
Effectively their Google Search Console wasn't set up in a way Keytunity could use, hence the unhelpful 500 error (eg. no sites registered on search console, or sites registered belong to someone else with no permission to access data.)
What I've done now is explain this so that they can set up their Search Console account if they want to.
How do you get the data from google search console? Is Keytunity a browser extension?
It's a server-based app. It pulls the data via the Google Search Console API (https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/about)
Ah I see! Then it shouldn't be too hard to handle incorrect google search console setups... right?
If google won’t / can’t send the data then the only thing I can do is explain this to the user which I’m now doing.
If they don’t have sites on their Google Search Console for example then there is no data to send so they need to set up their site on search console.
I’ve even linked to a video of me showing how to set up a site.
Hopefully this makes the user experience better.