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Quit or Not to Quit - That's the question
So...
You've built your cool MVP after reading PG interviews, inspirational tweets and inspiring IH interviews.
Your mental model looks like this:-
-Build audience before launching
-Don't build features that no-one wants
-Write articles and get SEO traffic
-Spend more time on promotion and not building your product.
- You've got your homepage soaring to capture at least 100 sign-ups - which will give you an indication that you've 'built what people want'.
..and then
-You get only 27 sign-ups.
-All the DMs to 3 commenters on your tweet were ignored.
-Only 4 of the 27 people who signed up actually opened your email; but did not respond to your 'early offer'.
What do you do?
1. Decide that it's not worth it?
2. Decide on spending more time promoting the product?
What'd you do? Let me know.
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bazoko
I'm assuming this is about a software business/product.
What would I do? I think that I would just keep adjusting until I find a product or market fit because it's relatively easy to pivot to other ideas.
Before that, I would make sure that my promoting is effective: maybe I'm targeting the wrong keywords? Maybe Twitter is not the best place to find my target audience and I should look elsewhere?
After I solve that problem and find my target audience, I would spend more time and resources promoting. Otherwise, I would keep pivoting until I find a market fit.
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@gaurav_verma10 I get that. My question is - how do you really know if the product/idea is worth working on in the initial days?
27 is actually a good start! Many founders believe B2C is about masses, stats, flows etc. Yes, eventually.
But at the beginning it's one by one. It's analysing each user's journey:
- why did they stop at the email ?
- why did they stop at the click in the email?
- why did they stop at the onboarding?
etc.
And remember also that following the example of those that succeeded is not a guarantee of success. There's strong survivor bias here: there was likely some element of luck, of timing, of network here.
We will all need luck, but as John Doe had it: "90% of everything in life is about luck. But the more you work, the more luck you get."
@emmanuel_lefort1 Thank you. I like the optimism you bring. Yeah 27 is a good start; and I need to find out a way to talk to them. I hope they'll respond to email! :-)
There can be many scenarios moving forward:
1. Make the cost of operating this product either zero or very less that it does not bother you. Spend only a few hours in the weekend on it. And move forward to doing other stuff. The product might take off someday when the right people start discovering it. This is what we did with Letterflix.com. And after 1.5 years, this product is doing $100 MRR.
2. If this is your big bet to sustain yourself financially, talking to your users and finding the value proposition that people would stick to it becomes the only task as a founder/maker.
3. You shut it down, write a blog about your learnings. And move on to the next thing.
Before acquiring 100 users you have to acquire one. You already had 27 people interested. Set a more realistic goal now, go for 10, talk to them, talk to the 27 that showed interest, show them the product one on one. Start with non-scalable things so later on after you learn some things from the pain you are solving to your users, you can try scalable things. If you notice that people is not interested at all, try a new thing. It is definitely more about your execution than anything else.
@daniel_leal - thank you for your reply. The most discouraging part is that none of those 27 responded to email. I think I should target people who I can talk to.
I'd keep on trying to find what works by analyzing what didn't, and trying new platforms for the promotion