Page Flows
User flow patterns for product people
Quite a meta milestone, but this week an interview about my experience with Page Flows was published on this very site (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-gained-traction-and-became-profitable-after-almost-quitting-18dc0bc62d)
I’ve been a fan of Indie Hackers since it launched a few years ago, so it feels great to be featured 😊
Doing the interview was also a great way to reflect on the journey so far, which is something I haven’t really done until this point.
Over a week ago I added team plans for Page Flows (https://pageflows.com/team-pricing/) so companies can get access for more than one person at a time. Last night, someone subscribed for a team of three people.
I've been meaning to add a team plan for a while because I suspected larger teams would find it useful, but didn't prioritise it until recently. It's exciting to see the first team sign up :-)
Since the big update a couple of weeks ago, I noticed in the analytics a lot of people go to sign up and drop out at the stage where we ask for money (which makes complete sense).
I'm trialing a very limited freemium flow where people can sign up and get access to all newly added & updated videos, plus a total of three views for all other videos.
Three user flow video views is a tiny amount, but it's enough to tempt people to sign up, see some value, and then consider becoming a premium member.
I'm not sure how this will play out, but I figured it was worth a quick experiment. I spent 2-3 hours changing the sign up flow for this, shipped it last night and will let it run for a week or so to see if the numbers make sense.
So far ~30 people have signed up and 1 has converted to premium.
The flow is hardly optimised, no drip campaign etc, so if the numbers look decent in the current state, it would make sense to stick with freemium.
I'll report back in a week or so with a decision to either stick with freemium or switch back to paid upfront.
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Hi @Ramy looks like a cool experiment!
I think you should publish this story at Hackernoon - i'm sure you aware about this website. it's cool and very inspiring to hear stories like this one!
Following Page Flows now-
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Thanks for the support! I thought Hackernoon was more for technical articles?
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Nice! I am also considering to offer a free plan. Sounds like I should give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Nice. Was this for Remotists?
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After some conversations with customers and digging into the analytics, I realised the way the content on Page Flows was organised didn't really make sense.
It was all sorted based on recency and with a focus on the product rather than the user flow.
What people actually want is to find user flow examples that will help them figure out how to make progress with whatever they're working on.
This new version (https://pageflows.com/) is the start of trying to make that happen. I have a few more things on the to-do list before getting there, but I wanted to ship and iterate rather than try to perfect this new version before releasing it.
For anyone who cares about tech: In the process of this redesign, I decided to rip out Vue and use regular old HTML served by Django with a little bit of Vanilla JS. I realised having a SPA for a fairly basic content website was overkill and was slowing me down.
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Love that you've taken the step to strip out Vue and go with good old HTML. Sometimes we get caught up in the new tech and frameworks, especially when it's very basic content etc! So +1 on that 😄 Awesome stuff.
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I love that you decided to move from an SPA to plain HTML, sometimes you need to follow the pragmatic route
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Yeah it was a tough decision, it kinda makes me feel like I'm being left behind when I'm not using the new tech.
I came to the conclusion that I should separate learning tech from trying to grow the business. I can play with new tech in my spare time instead now :-)
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Yeah, thats true. For content-based websites, it actually does not make a lot of sense to use react from an SEO perspective and also it slows down the dev part. Great that you took the plunge.
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I’m a big believer in doing whatever enables you to move quickly (especially as an Indie Hacker). Congrats on having the confidence to follow your strengths.
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Looks nice. This will definitely boost revenue and reduce churn!
I see you are capitalizing on yearly subscription, what is the ratio of year subscription to 3 months subscription?
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I hope so!
Currently about 30% opt for yearly
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Amazing! What's your current MRR?
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It's roughly at what I was earning as a junior web developer a a few years ago.
I know transparency is the hotness these days, but I've stopped sharing exact numbers - not sure why.
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The hotness is doing what makes you feel comfortable at any point in time. Who knows, things might change next year and you would probably start sharing again.
How do you feel earning currently what you were earning years ago? Do you feel like going back to 9-5?
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So true!
I feel great about it. Obviously sometimes I think about the earnings I'm missing out on, but I much prefer this lifestyle and freedom so far.
Not tempted at all to get a job
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago
I've been meaning to follow the "talk to your customers" advice for so long and have finally been pushed to do it by joining the Sales For Founders course (https://salesforfounders.com/)
I sent out ~100 emails to existing customers and ended up having a couple of email chats, one real life conversation (in London) and 6 calls.
In all honesty, I learned less than I was hoping. I struggled to get into the details of what the customer's goals were, what they cared about, their pain points etc.
I did, however learn some things. I learned that Page Flows was more valuable than I initially assumed. Churn is high at the moment, so I assumed that meant no one found Page Flows valuable, but that's just not the case. I do need to figure out the churn problem though, and continuing to talk with customers (and ex-customers) will be part of that.
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Ramy, you're to be congratulated for taking the risk and reaching out to your customers to learn what their goals are.
It's scary to do the first time so give yourself a pat on the back. 👏
Getting customer feedback is as much an art as it is a science. It takes practice to learn how to ask questions, when to ask them and when to ask further, more probing questions.
You've taken the first big step in asking.
Now it's a matter of practicing to improve.
Knowing how to write your questions, when to ask them, how to ask them and what to do with the responses takes practice. (Check out the section on asking questions etc. It's in Part 3: At-Risk Customers. https://anitatoth.ca/crush-your-churn-guide )
As much as possible, you want to leverage the time and energy spent on those interviews and surveys.
Give it time and practice and in no time, you'll be getting the quality responses you're looking for. 🙂
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This is really cool because many founders (like me) just don't do it :(((
May I ask you what exactly you charge users for?-
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Thanks! I charge for access to the video library.
I think the recurring charge might be part of the churn problem, some people sign up specifically to see a few videos then cancel.
Also some people sign up wanting more videos of specific products, and because every customer is different, I can’t cover all product types with the current low pricing. These are just assumptions though!
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Thanks for your response,
but it's still not clear for me, where these videos are from? Have you made them? Or they are from companies? If the last one, why users would pay for access to what can be found for free?
Thanks!
(Sorry if my questions look stupid :-\)-
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Not a stupid question at all. I spend hours every week recording the videos. It’s actually an annoying and time consuming process.
People can do it themselves, but by paying a relatively tiny yearly cost, they save themselves hours of signing up to multiple products, recording their many flows, waiting for their emails to come in to see what they send for onboarding, etc. With this they get to learn best practices and see if their flow designs are missing anything without the hassle of doing the tedious work themselves.
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I shipped a new section just for mobile patterns (https://pageflows.com/mobile-patterns) while also updating the post view and the video player. This section makes it easier for people working on mobile products to find inspiration (videos or screenshots). More to come for other verticals!
Based of the interest in monitoring which emails companies send, I've created an MVP for what's essentially a related, but different product.
Inbox Flows is like Page Flows, but just for email. It's a library of emails that popular products send to various types of users (eg, registered user, trial user, customer, cart abandoner etc).
I've built the landing page and the MVP. Next, I'm going to try and sell to people who work in email marketing.
2 Comments
Loved your interview - and Page Flows is such an awesome idea! Happy for you dude 🌟
Thank you :-)
This comment was deleted 6 years ago