Valist

I knew from the start that to sell my product, I need to write compelling content to try to explain more deeply why the product is needed; a landing page would be difficult to provide enough context to sell something most probably never considered even looking for.

The first and so far only content I've published is on my website.

https://www.valist.dev/blog/why-you-need-a-staging-environment-for-every-change/

It has not gone viral or generated any huge amount of traffic and not even a single sign up. However, I've seen 100+ new users daily the last 2 days on my website which is a significant increase from before.

I will continue writing and publishing more content in hopes that it will continue to drive traffic to my website and hopefully one day entice somebody to sign up and try my product.

So about a month ago I submitted my app Valist to BetaList to try to attract potential customers.

Although it has been on the front page for almost an entire day now, it has not generated a single sign up and the number of visitors is less than 100 according to Google Analytics.

https://betalist.com/startups/valist

Until now, it has been possible to use Valist for free. Now, you will instead be met with a paywall after the trial ends, and deployments will no longer be possible to start until a payment method is added.

Although stripe just added their hosted portal to manage subscriptions, I chose to integrate their API directly in my application to provide a more cohesive user experience. It took me about one day to implement this so maybe I could have saved some time using their portal. However, getting the experience of using their API forced me to learn more about how their platform works and getting experience I am sure will benefit me in the future.

This was the last major piece in developing my service. Now I can worry less about having an unfinished product and continue to iterate.

Having no previous experience in sales, I knew that this is the greatest obstacle I have to be able to get this working. I am confident that I can create a product that fits a market having worked both as a software developer and product manager. However, selling a product requires skills I need to acquire.

So the last week I've been reading up on a lot of articles about cold emailing to understand how to succeed with this.

I am starting small with a few companies. The way I am doing it now if fairly inefficient and I definitely need to create better automation for this.

For the last few months, it has been hard to switch focus from adding new features to my product to focus on marketing. So far I have not had a single person sign up to my product or even newsletter so the need for better marketing is clear. The product is now at a state where it is working and can definitely add value to teams developing web applications even though I can think of many features I would like to add.

I wanted to reduce the effort required to understand how to use the product. My audience is broad, ranging from programmers to product managers. I know that for a product manager, it would be difficult to see how my product works without integrating it into the development process. So I did a few things.

First, I started by trying to more clearly describe my value proposition on the homepage. I want to convey that it requires little effort to set up and that it can add value by solving a problem I think a lot of product teams have.

Second, I added a way to book a demo with a simple tool that's free called Appointlet. I can't say yet how effective this is but it should help me get in contact with users. The demo is not just to show how the product works but also a way for me to better learn from potential customers about their circumstances and how I can add value.

The website is available at https://www.valist.dev

After about 3 months of working on the first release of Valist, I finally have something functional to show for it.

What's interesting with this project finally at this state is that as I build the product, I can use it myself to aid my development. The product enables product teams to see and test every incremental update to a product with automated deployment of staging environments. So every time I make a change, I will automatically try the product myself. So as I now can easily force myself to use the product while developing it, I can learn a lot about everything that may annoy a user so that I can make a better product without long feedback cycles.