Site Pixel
Real user feedback.
Help bridge the gap between users and application owners.
The past few months, I have been thinking about shutting down Site Pixel... I've come to the conclusion that it is not worth the effort nor the expense to continue this project. During my time working on it, I was gifted many opportunities to talk to great people about how they would use it. However, at the end of the day no one was willing to vote with their dollars.
I hope that this decision will help lead me on to greener pastures. By not spending as much time on a failing project, hopefully I will catch wind of one that can go beyond a simple MVP.
Onwards and Upwards
After a year of development and a few hundred dollars in hosting fees, I just haven't gotten the right amount of traction for this idea. People seem to be underwhelmed by the emoji feedback widget.
In fact, another developer I talked too said his company would just build it themselves... which wasn't super encouraging. Thus, I think it's time to start evaluating the survival of the emoji feedback widget and possibly start investing my mental energy into a pivot. I would feel better having the project center around a widget that people are actually interested in.
- Will it last?
- Should I Pivot?
- What will I pivot too?
- Find out, next time that I post.
After much internal thought and a lack of traction, I have decided to offer a free plan. Of course, currently there is no billing features... so every account is free and unlimited. But I will have to implement these limits at some point. Might as well have an idea of where I want to go.
In fact, I'm not even sure if registration works...
You can see these new limits/offers on my marketing page, linked below.
My personal AWS bill was around 80 dollars for last month. That is way too HIGH! So I changed things up. I am now running Postgres as a docker container on the same box as the site pixel API. This gives me some flexibility and reduces costs by quite a bit.. My next bill is predicted to be around 61 dollars, which is a bit more manageable, but still kind of high. Maybe I'll put in some more work into cost optimization later.. After I get a customer or two?
Found a template and have started replacing the content. This is pretty taxing. I'd almost rather be writing code, but I will push through. Feeling a bit better. Yesterday I kind of felt like I was going crazy. This pandemic loneliness is getting to me.
I'm lacking motivation this week. Plus my marketing site expired so there is that. Feels like things are starting to crash down. I don't even know who would use this site... I mean I can barely tell people in coherent sentences what it does.. And they usually end up asking me Why?
Another day another struggle.
Today, I wanted to show off my shiney new widget to my family. Ends up it didn't work. I had let a bad deploy through and it affected the site. Probably has been like this since my last post. #Whoops Luckily I was able to fix the mistake by commenting out some crapy code I had written. Onto the next ticket.
Not even a full product yet and the widget already fails to send data back as it is blocked by both of my ad blockers. uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger... Not sure what to do about that, but it certainly requires more investigation. I didn't even realize this would even be an issue:/
I am finally displaying real results from the emoji feedback widget. This is such an exciting moment! I was positive I would quit and pursue something else before getting to this point, but NOPE! I have stuck with it and am happy with the progress. See the screenshot below!
- May the 4th be with you
Tonight I was able to fix up a working version of the widget. You can see it live at the following link: https://sitepixel.io/ it collects a users selection and then disappears. Simple, sweet and to the point. Hopefully, later on, I'll be able to take the feedback and show it to the user who embedded the widget in their site.