Wraith Scribe
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So I've MVP'd my product and it seems like it is making nonzero sales (stuck about about the $200/mo level).
Churn is higher than I'd like and I can spend an inordinate amount of time improving the product. Yet, I'm stuck at ~10 subscribers a month so I don't know how much I should care about the retention data due to very low sample size.
Here's my dilemma:
Do I focus on acquisition / sales? Or do I focus on making the product better?
I believe the former is correct. A great product means nothing if you don't have customers using it. Conversely, a crappy product also means nothing if you don't even have enough customers to complain about it to you.
Here's my next dilemma. I'm spending a few weeks improving the landing page and it may take a few more days to complete. My intention is that if I'm going to do a 6-12 month marketing push and devote a ton of time to it, then even a 1% increase in conversion would be worth it. But I also wonder:
Is improving the landing page a waste of time when I already have about a 4% conversion rate (organic)?
Not sure. On the one hand, landing page improvements are impossible to know. I might think it's a great improvement but the conversion tanks. Or the conversion numbers are false to begin with due to limited sample size.
On the other hand, if the landing page is markedly better like I think it is, then it increases the leverage I have on my future marketing activities.
So it may or may not have been a mistake that I've invested weeks into improving the lander. But I can always revert if conversions suck and split test that way.
When Should I Go Back To Improving The Product?
I think I should improve the product if a few customers complain about the same thing. Or maybe even 1, depending on bandwidth. If 1 person complains, it probably means 10+ customers are experiencing the same pain (assuming 10% is vocal enough to complain).
Efforts
My goal right now is to spend 80% of my time marketing/sales. 20% of my time improving the product. If there's no virality after 6-12 months then I can safely say 'this is dead' and move onto something else.
Speed is important because spending tons of time creating a project with 0 customers is probably the worst use of our limited time on Earth here.
I'm not an SWE by nature and coding is self-taught. So coding for me is pragmatic as opposed to an intellectual circle-jerk. That said, my main goals in building this (and other) projects are:
- Learn things in SW that'll be useful for other projects.
- Build something useful that I can use.
- Iterate on my learnings to be able to go faster in the future.
I built this project with a boilerplate called SaaSPegasus. Great support and not too expensive for what it is. Django + Python might not be the fastest thing in the world in terms of performance, but it's relatively quick to develop with and shoot out an MVP. I'd rather have technical debt with paying customers than financial debt without customers.
For frontend, I just use bootstrap 5. I also installed a theme called 'bulkit' but TBH I would avoid this in the future. My landing page is bulkit whereas the rest of the site is another theme. This made things very difficult.
For a side hustle, I write blogs. But I use a long-tail keyword strategy, which is hard to get traffic with. My traffic's doubled every month but it's getting harder and harder for me to come up with ideas.
So, I've decided to create have AI write blogs for me.
3 Comments
It costs way more to acquire new users than to retain existing ones.
Do you know WHY people are leaving your product? If not, that's the first question to ask. Maybe a simple fix allows you to reduce churn, making 1 day of work more valuable than 12 months of marketing.
Ultimately, if you have high churn, then you can focus on marketing and at some point you'll have worked our way through your customer pool, and revenue will decreases again. As people leave your product they will provide word-of-mouth suggestions of a competitor instead of yours, making your marketing job harder and harder as time goes on.
Finally, definitely don't plan for virality unless you have a proven track record of being able to create it.
Yeah I’ve gotten like 1 response. The fix for that would take months. Also 1 response isn’t really enough data imo to invest time building around it.
Obviously high churn isn’t good. But so is not having subscribers to begin with.
Engineers always would opt for the “scalable” solution but I think at this point it’s too speculative to know what is scalable and what isn’t. If sample size is closer to 100 and not 10 then I feel it makes sense to build around feedback.
I think perfecting the product (already spent a few months improving it) before heavy marketing and customer acquisition is doing backwards. You need sufficient data to inform how you get better. Not just nonzero data.
Also I’m not sure how to take your feedback on virality. Just sounds like “you shouldn’t plan to have lots of traffic or try at all” which is completely unhelpful and begs the question: why did you even reply?
Do you have 10 subscribers total or roughly 10 a month with constant new users and churn?
I assumed the second as you mentioned high churn.
If you have a constant 10 users, then yes, too few users to measure and you need to market.
But if you are regularly acquiring, but the churn rate matches your acquisition rate then I'd follow what I mentioned.
“you shouldn’t plan to have lots of traffic or try at all”
This is not what I said.
You initially stated "If there's no virality after 6-12 months then I can safely say 'this is dead'".
I don't think you should plan for virality as it's very much out of your hands, and just because something doesn't go viral doesn't means it's dead either. You can increase your chances of virality. But if you're banking on it, then you'll likely be disappointed.