Whisperly

Last week I launched Whisperly, my macOS dictation app, on Fazier. The listing was paid, $39, and it did great:

#1 Product of the Day. #4 Product of the Week. #4 Product of the Month. A "Featured on Fazier" badge showing 108 upvotes.

And here's the same launch in PostHog, filtered to everyone who arrived with ref=fazier:

19 visitors. 26 pageviews. Average session: 27.8 seconds. Launch day peaked at 10 visitors, then it slid to almost nothing within a week.

For scale: the site gets around 145 organic visitors a week when I do nothing.
The #1 launch added 19. Total.

What those visitors did:
- App downloads: 0
- Accounts created: 0
- One person clicked the share button (thank you, whoever you are)
- One person left an email on the waitlist

The waitlist one is my favorite. It arrived 8 days after the launch, from an Android phone, requesting the Android version. The app is macOS-only. So the single conversion from a #1 Product of the Day badge is an email address for a product that does not exist. That email cost me $39.

Some math on the upvotes: 108 upvotes produced 19 visits. Most people who upvoted never clicked through. An upvote on a launch platform is founders supporting founders: it costs one click, and that's about how much interest it carries.

To be fair, Fazier did exactly what it promises: it put my product in front of its community, and the badges are real. As far as I can tell, the community I reached was mostly other founders mid-launch, collecting upvotes for their own thing. 27.8 seconds of average attention is what that audience has to give.

What changed for me after this:
Product Hunt was next on my launch list. I've parked it. My current read: PH without an existing audience is Fazier with extra steps.

And every channel now gets one question before I spend time on it: are my users actually there? Fazier's answer is in the screenshots.

If a directory launch ever got you actual paying customers, I want to hear what you did differently. And if you're about to launch on one anyway: go for the badge. That part works.

I have this feeling that I'll be in the minority, but I'm discovering the history of paid and free directories. As I mentioned in my previous post, one of those directories was TAAFT, which generally shows fairly good numbers at a high level.

The real challenge doesn’t start there… When leads start flooding your site in droves, the toughest part begins when you realize those leads are unqualified and low‑quality.

They’re people looking only for freebies and aren’t your target audience at all. On the other hand, you can look at this situation as a way to boost your ego. There's a great book—I can't recall the exact title—but it's basically about how to manipulate numbers. Those are exactly the vanity metrics. You might start focusing only on how the number of visits to your site is growing and think that's success, but that's far from the truth, right?

I've always been curious how effective marketplaces and newsletter products are for promoting your business, aside from SEO and just having an online presence. What exactly can they bring to your product?

Tonight we had a launch for "There is an AI for that," and I'd like to share the initial results, which are modest but overall better than nothing at the moment.

Overall, the stats look decent considering the project has only been running for about 12 hours so far. But what surprises me is something else. Right after I launched, users started DM-ing me with enthusiastic reviews like, “Hey, I tried your product and it’s awesome.” That's not even the main issue. The real point is that since the launch, I haven’t gotten any new users for the product. So, the question is, why...? 😅

Whisperly turns speech into clean text in any Mac app: press a hotkey, talk, and polished text lands at your cursor, in your wording. Free at 2,000 words a week, Pro at $14/month with a 14-day trial.

It's been quietly live for a while: a small closed beta since spring, paid billing since June, the app is at version 0.7.2. Now I'm on the part I kept putting off: distribution. Submitting to catalogs, setting up this page, and actually talking about the product in public. If you write a lot on a Mac, try it: whisperly.io