One month in, zero paying users

overnight success does not happen overnight! you are right to not get discouraged.

this post convinced me to launch on PH right away: https://melissakwan.notion.site/Product-Hunt-Launch-Checklist-Tips-68ace29f38c64026a381fd169945656c

My experience- I spent 30 mins on Lint's PH launch. Got featured, didn't get any signups, but the PH backlink helped SEO and indexing speed immediately. you are likely losing more by waiting than you will gain with overplanning. you can always launch again !

I got my first paying user 341 days after launching! Hang in there, you will make it!

• Marketing: Tried Google Ads, FB ads and direct mail (yeah...the postcards you see in your mailbox). Direct mail was a complete dud! (No surprise!). Digital ads got some traffic and a handful of conversions. But CPC was unsustainable. Didn't take long to pull the plug on that one.

• SEO: I got some traction after 30+ blog posts and 8+ months. If you are getting traffic with 3 posts already, you have a great start! Keep at it. Investing time for SEO is 100% worth it. Google Search Console has been my best friend.

• Reddit: Is an underrated marketing and customer-insight tool. Naked promotion of a product is prohibited in most subs. But, that shouldn't be the agenda either! A good way to use reddit is to understand the pain-points of customers and then covering those topics in the blogs.

Great post Yossi!

Hell no. It's going to be a long, long game.
Love this part.

And a few thoughts here:

I started working on backlinks by submitting UserTrail to several product directories. I know the holy grail here is a Product Hunt launch, but I feel it's too early to take that leap.

Would love to hear what directories?
Keep in mind you can do a Producthunt launch every 6 months w/any new features. Might be worth doing a launch now, then another, larger and planned launch early next year :)

Thanks for the read and update!

Congratulations mate and stay strong 💪🏽

@fastsociety & I launched contentable.ai in August and we have only managed to get $30 in payments from users so far. I reckon users will pay after they run out of their free credits.

We pulled our hair and had lots of discussion on our product hunt launch. PH launch was exciting but only converted in ~25 signups. Good thing was we got a lot of feedback which is as good as paying users.

Are you planning on a PH launch. We shared some learnings on this post

PH launch is good but not great TBH. We are also joining lot of reddit communities and trying to create value. Most communities do not like cold email or cold posts. So be mindful. We almost got kicked out of one AI community

All the best mate and hang in there. Its always a long tail game.

Several things:

1. You must focus on the problem that your product solves - you don't actually explain why someone would like to use it? which profit would they have? does it help to save money or time? or may be it helps to earn money or time?

2. You said "Clear & Elegant Dashboard" but honestly, to me, it doesn't look elegant at all

3. Your product requires someone to code. But as a developer, I don't see much profit in sending my data somewhere that I don't control, can't query, can't play with. As a dev, I can easily create such things on my own and use a tool like pgAdmin to see my data, query them, etc. So, maybe your target audience is wrong.

People are lazy. Nobody wants to create an additional code if it doesn't help to solve a big problem. Let's take a chatbox for example: it creates a great communication channel between a company and user (given it's coded well :) The profit is obvious: users always want to be able to communicate with founders.

In your case, the profit is not obvious. You need to find (or create) some unique, desirable, and hard-to-do-on-my-own thing. Maybe it could be an AI analytics of the data or a super-easy querying tool.

Good luck, my friend. It's not that easy, but I believe in you.

Congrats on getting started on your journey!

May I suggest you change the sample JS code on your home page with the code from your SDK? My initial reaction was, "what, you want me to make calls directly to your API? Where's the SDK?". And then, later, I saw in your docs that you have an SDK.

Since I was in the market for such a product recently, here are a few more criteria I had when looking around for a product that you may consider:

1. Companies/Organizations. Except for very basic B2C apps, most apps have a concept of companies or organizations. In my case I wanted to link a user to their organization so I can also track the events on that level.
2. Email sequences. A product like this is typically closely tied to sending email sequences such as onboarding. You may want to put this on your roadmap as well.

Best of luck going forward!

I think you should offer more integration options, this will bring you more users. For example, you can make a WordPress Analytics plugin that is based on your SDK ...etc

One month is not too much, just focus on brining value and targeting the right audience.

Trust the process

It's clear that you're committed to the long-term success of UserTrail, and your detailed post-launch analysis and plans for the future are commendable. Here are some thoughts and suggestions based on your experiences so far:

Missing Features: While the "paying users first, more features later" approach can work for some startups, it's not set in stone. In your case, where you have a clear vision and understanding of the market, adding essential features to create a more robust MVP is a valid strategy. Ensuring that your MVP is competitive and meets user needs is important.

Marketing: Your experiences with Google Ads and Twitter DMs are valuable lessons. Targeting users in the pre-launch phase is a smart move, as they might be more open to considering new tools for their projects. Be prepared to iterate and refine your marketing strategies as you learn more about what works for your target audience.

SEO: SEO is a long-term game, and it's great to see that you're investing in content creation and backlinks. Consistency in publishing quality content is key. Additionally, consider conducting keyword research to optimize your blog posts for relevant, high-search-volume keywords.

Remember, the startup journey is often challenging, and you've already made significant progress by launching and iterating. It's great to see your dedication and willingness to learn from your experiences. Keep up the hard work, and you'll be well on your way to success with UserTrail. Best of luck!

I would make it so the free version isn't as long accessible and is more restricted so the paid version are more required.
Also think about more services you can include in the paid version to make it more appealing.

Reddit is super useful, although I do not have any converted paying users, Ive been able to identify lots of pain points and customer dissatisfaction within their respective industries.

I think you are in the right track. Maybe you need to adjust here and there to match the product and the customer, add some feature and talk to you registered user on why they don't want to pay for this. You can also ask them what feature can make them pay.

Apart from that you are doing fine on getting traffic as you mentioned a lot of people registering for your product. Perhaps the price to high or the feature is to silly to be paid.

Just keep talking to the customer and iterating until you get there.

PS: I saw that you are trying to do 2 times a week blogging. I have made this tool that enable you to automate seo research and get the best title and topic to get more organic traffic. The tool will scrap google data and do analysis before coming out the best keyword for your specific needs. If you interested checkout creativeblogtopic.com