Supermind

We decided to give new users a 14 day free trial before they pay for monthly or yearly subscription. We prefer this approach to a freemium business model because it allows us to focus on a single experience that users love, rather than both an incomplete free mode and a complete paid mode. We want to continue refining the experience of our product, and increasing the free trial conversion.

Check it out at: https://superm.in/d

After 24 hours on the front-page of Lifehacker, we reached 500 users. At this point, we were also scrambling to get better tracking and analytics all over Supermind, in paranoia that there were more bugs and errors we weren't aware of. We were also thinking of ways (emails, design changes, etc) to best engage our new users to keep them active on Supermind.

The press coverage in Asia started when a publication called AsiaTechDaily reached out to interview us. They found us through our post on Show Hacker News a few weeks back. At this point, we had under 100 users and had just finished the MVP, so we gladly took the interview!

Shortly after the AsiaTechDaily interview was published there was a huge spike in traffic from Japan. We found the source of this spike being an article on Supermind in Lifehacker Japan. Lifehacker Japan has orders of magnitude more readership than AsiaTechDaily. The lesson here: press coverage compounds so you should take any press you can get at the start!

Through many late nights and weekends in lockdown in San Francisco, we finished the basic feature set we imagined for Supermind.

The last big product feature was sharing, which we knew was a really important feature, but had unclear UX decisions that took weeks to decide on and finish.

Finally, the last step in completing the MVP was redesigning the website landing page. Prior to this, the landing page was very basic and just for friends and family to try out the product. After this redesign, the landing page was much more appealing for new users.

We posted in Share Hacker News because it's most low-effort way to get early feedback on a prototype. We had good traction on the post (it remained on top of Show HN for ~2 days), and lots of both positive and negative comments, feedback and bug reports. After this feedback, we had a better idea of our goal for the finished MVP.