Project Page

I really love the stripe status page, and the Project Page status page was very influenced by its design, so today I published a case study looking at why it is so great, and has remained virtually unchanged from 2012 till today.

I've experimented doing this as a twitter thread (though I don't have many company account followers as yet):

As well as an article:

https://projectpage.app/case-studies/status/stripe-status

I'm also going to try a post over at dev.to as that seems to be a good place to build an audience with developers. Anyone else got any tips on places to cultivate an audience of developers?

This is perhaps a distraction from actually working on the product, but I had great fun writing it, and may write a few more over the next few weeks.

If anyone likes the story, please give it a like or retweet here:

A week after the Product Hunt launch (and of the website going live), I've had 1.1k visitors, 50 status pages created, and 4 trial signups at $5 a month, so it's going well so far, though of course trials are not actual subscribers till they confirm.

Status Page - https://projectpage.app/products/status-page

If anyone here wants a status page, I'm offering them free of charge for a few months to trial users from Indie Hackers as I'd like to get people using the product, so get in touch if you'd like to try it out.

After the launch I had to build out the user dashboard and permissions for paying users in a hurry, as I didn't have that ready and people were asking for more services, so I've now done that and am going to contact the users who asked for it this week.

I've also put in a load balancer and a couple of instances to try to get my own uptime up, as it's down to 99% at present due to all the changes. So a few little tech changes this week.

I'm now getting ready to enter the trough of sorrow :) So I need to start talking to the customers more this week and then improving the service and building out the other products to generate a little bit of buzz.

I'm thinking of building a bunch of smaller products offered on a freemium model to devs, as I think the central product (a better issues list) is going to be a hard sell to devs hooked on github and all the associated services. I've got one customer using the issues list but haven't opened that up yet to other users.

Next up is a public roadmap for projects, which ties in with the issues list and I hope to tie into github so that I can start using other people's marketplaces/networks to try to pull in users.

The home page is pretty terrible at the moment, I need to fix the video and styling to present the app better, and make it clearer not all products are available yet, but I've forced myself to launch and try to get customers, as think that.

I've decided to build in the open inspired by this (question)[https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ae7b8c9109] from @qabil and the @stephsmith response. I also signed up for the Sales For Founders course from @louisswiss as I have no idea what I'm doing on sales!

If anyone has any criticisms or encouragement please let me know in the comments below.

I did a launch on product hunt yesterday and thought other founders like might to hear what I learned from the process and what sort of traffic to expect from PH.

Results:

• 500 visitors on the day - you'd probably 2x or 3x that for a successful launch getting to no. 1
• 100 upvotes and 1 PH review - posts are visible on second day in the yesterday section
• 32 customers signed up to use the product on the first day (freemium model so these were free signups)
• 0 customers paying (this was expected with a new product and very little prior traction, and my pricing page is awful)
• 1 enquiry about paying!
• 8th place on product hunt for most of the day - not bad for no existing network and a small product in a crowded market (status page)

Things I'd recommend based on my experience

• Engage with other founders on product hunt first for a while, try
  to find some influencers on the platform with a following who may be interested in posting 'hunting' your product
• Try to line up some existing customers who are product hunt users to support you at first
• Traffic is lower on weekends, so post midweek if you can
• Post early in the day (2-6 AM PST)
• Ensure your website can handle significant traffic (though the traffic probably won't be too significant, it should be able to at least handle a few thousand visitors in an hour).
• Post on a few forums where you have a presence already (again, you need to be helpful first to others, before asking for their help) - this was super helpful for me as I used IH and Startup School, which helped get a few initial crucial votes.
• Don't ask people who are not PH users to signup - apparently new accounts are seen as a spam signal (for obvious reasons)
• Write at least one blog post you can link to on the product page - I chose to do a comparison post with the largest competitor
• Set aside some time to respond to queries/problems, and make sure you can update the site easily
• Test your signup flow, make sure it is rock solid, and leads to the outcomes you want (paid users or free, what sort of users?)
• Make sure you know what you want out of the launch - trial users, or subscribers, or paid customers? Structure your pages
• Consider what sort of users frequent PH, and if they are a good fit for your business
• Link to your PH entry back from your main landing pages
• Get some nice screenshots, and a video lined up prior to PH
• Ignore scams about getting upvotes (I was approached by a spammer in PH IM about buying votes). I was also approached afterwards about a tv news show feature which on googling is just a pay-to-play ripoff site, so beware!

Things I'd change for next time:

• Build a network first if you can, particularly if you only have one product
• Build followers on twitter you can leverage for exposure - I haven't done this as yet for the business (my largest twitter account is on a niche topic and not relevant) but have some plans to do so
• Build an email list you can tell about the product when it is on PH
• Prepare exactly what you want signups for - I allowed signups for any email/domain, and a few backlinks, and in retrospect I think I'd try to focus on people checking their own business domain, and get my pricing/paid version in a better state first.
• Paradoxically - launch earlier - in some ways it's better to launch early when you're not ready (which belies the above advice) as customers, and looking for customers is a forcing function which makes you improve. This is why I've chosen to launch status page now.

This was something of an experiment for me as I plan to have a few related products and this is one of the less important ones, so it was interesting that you can go from very little preparation and a site that has only been up a few days to being featured, with a little bit of hustle.

Here is the product hunt page for reference.

Does anyone else have any tips on launching on PH?

On the first day of status page launch, 9 customers have signed up so far for a free status page. I hope to use this product to build trust with developers, and gradually build a list of possible paid customers to talk to about the other products too.

Here it is on product hunt:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/status-page-2

Hi Indie Hackers 👋

I'm launching my first product today on Product Hunt - it's a small part of Project Page.

The product is a public status page for your startup, with the usual uptime monitoring, team alerts, and a public status page for customers, showing the last 30 days of uptime.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/status-page-2

I'm keen to get some beta testers, so if anyone would like to try the service out I'd be really grateful.

If any Indie Hackers want to try project page out I'm offering 3 months of membership free for any size of team to encourage beta testing (the product is very beta at the moment, but I have a status page, public roadmap, and issues list in beta). If you're interested in a free membership, just contact me at hello@projectpage.app and let me know you came from Indie Hackers.

If you see anything I should fix on the product page before it launches this morning, let me know in the comments below.

You can see the status page for the services here:

https://projectpage.app/status?ref=indiehackers

And the product page here:
https://projectpage.app/products/status-page?ref=indiehackers

This is a free customer from a consulting client, so not a paying customer, but will be useful to guide product development as it is a team of 10 who will be using the product extensively I hope.

I've also made some progress with the import process (required to onboard this customer), and updated the status page so that it is ready for production use.

I've started with something very simple, just a few pages. I've also worked on the first product, Status Page, which offers a status page for your services (a website for example, or an api). The status page is updated by a simple set of checkers which hit http endpoints defined by the customer for their services, usually a health check url or the home page.

You can see the public status page for projectpage.dev over at:

https://projectpage.dev/status

Customers love companies who communicate clearly and often. Project Page is a new set of services which helps you form a real connection with customers from launch through growth by offering services to talk to customers, like a status page, public roadmap, and community.

I've started with a status page, and would like to produce one product per month. You can see some of the ideas over on the public roadmap:

https://projectpage.dev/roadmap