Let’s jump right in.
How did the launch go?
In terms of Product Hunt, I finished 11th for the day. Not great, but considering I was fighting things up until the last minute and didn’t coordinate a lot of help that I probably could have, I don’t mind it. But 11th was good enough to generate a lot of traffic. That brought in over 200 visitors from Product Hunt and about 130 from other sources, which I assume either scrape Product Hunt, watch it, or saw tweets about it. So just shy of 350 visitors, which resulted in 124 new accounts created.
That’s a 35% conversion rate from visitor to signup, which I’m ok with. That’s a lot better than I had with Feather. And of those 124 new accounts, 13 converted to paid accounts of some sort, so about 10%. That’s really not bad.
I was hoping that the paid signups would shed light on what people prefer more, the ability to unfollow individuals for a cheap monthly subscription or a higher, one-time payment. So let’s look at the breakdown:
Of those 13:
6 paid the 1 time $5 fee
5 chose to subscribe for $1/month
1 chose to subscribe to $5/month
That was delightfully inconclusive, but at least it supported my decision to add the one time payment at the end.
So the final results of launch day:
$40 total revenue
$10 MRR
Not bad. That’s a decently good day, I’d say.
Now, let’s talk about the feedback I received.
There was one issue where someone paid and the Stripe update didn’t hit right. So he wound up in a weird infinite loop, but I was able to resolve that quickly and it didn’t seem to be a systemic issue.
Someone also pointed out that the level of permissions I was requiring was too extensive. Unfortunately, being on Twitter OAuth1.1, I wasn’t able to choose fine-grained permissions that I needed, but I did accidentally set it to allow Direct Message access, which wasn’t needed at all. Twitter’s OAuth1.1 allows 3 levels of access:
Read
Read/Write
Read/Write/Direct Message
So I was able to drop it down from level 3 to level 2.
But the thing I got the most negative feedback about: people complaining that they couldn’t see any of the analysis for free. And this was 100% my problem, because I did offer that. But several people had issues finding it and pointed it out. Which means there were probably quite a few others that didn’t see it and just bounced.
That’s an area I can improve and figured it needed to do better. I’m still not happy with time from analysis to showing, but in a mastermind I joined as part of the 100 users in 100 days challenge put on by Indie Worldwide, someone pointed out that I could just tweet their results at them when it was done. And if I couple that with a link that would take them to their analysis page, several things would be accomplished.
I wouldn’t have to have them wait for the analysis and find it, they would be notified.
It would also act as defacto marketing, because others would see it and be curious.
So that’s going to be the next feature added. I’ve been a bit busy and haven’t had a chance to work on it since launch, but it’s still growing, which is pretty cool. This next feature should make things even better.
Twitter Developer Challenge
In case you missed it or don’t remember, I also had to work on my entry for the Twitter Developer Challenge.
Here’s my entry:
Here’s the full submission page.
It was a fun project. The challenge was figuring out how to track conversations. It’s tough, because Twitter allows you to easily differentiate between the first tweet and replies, but no tracking of replies easily. Figuring out whether it was a reply or not was easy, determining where in the conversation it is is hard. So I had to build the conversation as I went, and structure it carefully. So a tweet at the bot starts a conversation and then I keep track of the replies that I make with prompts. Then I can get the next set of mentions, find those that are part of the conversation, and reply as needed, depending on the response I get.
Early feedback I got: I need to` increase the range of content I support. But the idea seems cool to people and it’s a novel way of interacting. Next goal is to try to get people using it and submitting content. There’s a bit of an issue in that if nobody adds content, there’s nothing to discover. So I need to find areas that I can put it to have people submit content and improve the usefulness of the database.
From there, I plan on doing some experimentation with ways I can enhance that data, such as grabbing RSS feeds and notifying of new episodes/blogs/whatever, some scraping of information to do some more fine-grained categorization, who knows? But there will be a lot of ways I can go from here.
Build In Public University Updates
I haven’t made as much progress publicly as I would would like with Build In Public University, but I’m getting things figured out and set up. I’ll be ramping up things in the next few weeks and plan on running a cohort at some point. First cohort will be completely free and will have one goal: see if it helps.
A lot of conventional wisdom tells me to be more robust with it and charge something, at least at a discounted rate, but I decided I don’t care about conventional wisdom. Instead, I’m going to see how it works without the motivation of payment attached. In some ways, it makes it harder. When people pay for something, they are more likely to do the work to make it worth it for them.
But something I’m keying in on: I believe that it should be “easy” to reach success. I think we tend to make things a lot harder than they need to be, so this is an experiment to see what levels of success can be reached by focusing on things that are interesting, fun, and experimental. So I don’t want the added pressure of paying for it to interfere for this round. And it means I can put less pressure on myself to provide a “premium experience” and instead focus on the fun aspects of things as well.
As a start, I’m starting to experiment with content formats. Here’s a video I added to the BIPU YouTube channel where I explored ideas related to AI:
I also streamed it live, but nobody showed up. I did another live stream last night with a guest and we talked about the future of education. Was a fantastic stream, we had a few viewers, and it was fun. Look for more of that. I’m lining up guests and experimenting with some consulting in public as well. I’ve been helping people out with things related to creator businesses, entrepreneurship in general, monetization strategies, distribution strategies, automation, etc.
I’d like that to be a bit more public though. Because it’s where I’m at my best. And that’s why I’m focusing on it as a build up to BIPU, because it will be a part of the curriculum, streaming help sessions live as I can. Practice, practice, practice. That’s the key and it will pay off. There’s no doubt in my mind at this point. It doesn’t matter how good or bad I am right now, because eventually I will be good enough.
Stay tuned for more updates as I get things figured out. Cool things are on the way.
Factory Production Stats
Let’s take a look at where things stand now. I’ve got Who Should I Unfollow? live and generating revenue. I’m also calling Friend Content bot a product that’s live as well. It’s not revenue-generating yet, but I do have some monetization plans in the works if it starts to take off and the data that will be generated by its usage will be valuable in other areas.
Current Products Live: 2
Total Revenue: $89
Recurring Revenue: $24 MRR
Paid Users: 24
Subscribers at $5/month: 3
Subscribers at $1/month: 9
1-time payments of $5: 13