Yada Yada Yada™

I read a thought provoking article on Medium about building a product for your customer and not yourself (link below) which also made a salient point about being "goal focused" instead of feature focused. So at our company meeting we took a hard look at our roadmap and identified our goals instead of cool things to add. It was a great exercise and revealed that some of the things we were building were out of order. So we revised the roadmap with a greater focus on achieving the following in order: adoption, usage, paid plans, business support, and expansion. I'd highly recommend the article:

For the first time we have expanded beyond the initial co-founders! Our newest team member hit the ground running and immediately churned out an invite page which has been in our backlog for months. It's really exciting to be able to have another set of eyes and hands helping to build it out.

The new editing experience was debugged and we can firmly say we have entered beta! We are beginning promotion amongst our friends and family this week and are excited to get people using all of the improvements we made. I think this could be a useful tool for a lot of indiehackers to get their tips and advice out there as well as get some link-backs to your own products and sites to boost your SEO. Let us know what you think!

SIGN UP here: www.listturtle.com/sign-up

We worked incredibly hard on the new list editor which streamlines the entire experience for the whole application. The editor is the heart of the product so we thought long and hard about how we could reduce the friction and time it took to make content. We released it to zero fan-fare because we are just getting started but for us it was a huge milestone.

We got approved to run ads from Google and Amazon and have begun implementing them. This is a big milestone for us, our goal is to be self-sustainable in 6 months or less off of external ads. Then we plan to spring board to creating our own internal ad network to support the network and content creators. The Amazon ad network is quite impressive so far, after a few minutes the products it recommends accurately pull from the list's content. Keeping it relevant is obviously a huge win, and we've already starting making a little money! Check out an example here:

We have a lot more in store, but are trying to follow the principle of deploying early & often, therefore we are now live! We have redesigned the list creation process and list editor to be more intuitive but didn't want that to delay the initial release. This will also allow us to get started with indexing on Google and applying to advertisers who require live applications. We're having trouble getting Adsense to approve our application and hope to overcome that soon. We will start a heavier marketing effort after our next major release which will include single-sign on as well.
Check it out at https://www.listturtle.com

After a couple of refactors, several rounds of user feedback, and lots of front end refinements we are only a few days away from removing our alpha access code and getting some beta users in. Then out of the blue, someone started pummeling our donation widget, trying to make $10 donations with prepaid debit cards. Stripe blocked them all, thankfully, and we took the widget offline as well. The timing was actually great because its serves as a warning shot to be vigilant as we open it up.

Another small milestone was we developed a roadmap that is equal parts marketing and development which build on one another. I've read lots of stories about founders that neglected marketing efforts and hope to learn from those lessons.

Alpha testing group 2 was awesome! We got tons of useful insights and will be making revisions in preparation for group 3.

It was also a really great feeling when the revisions we made to address confusion from round 1 really clicked in group 2. People were able to figure out the mechanics much easier simply because we moved a few buttons around and added some tooltips.

We tried out the alpha release with the first couple of users and got some incredibly useful feedback. We have built everything to be functional first, so now we are changing out focus to usability and experience. Given our limited resources, I think it was a good choice to forgo a lot of design questions in the early days. We just proved the concept and now we are designing based on the usability feedback we have been getting.