Working on a Product with no Traction

Not writing about my project sucks. Sitting in my closet, working on the product without talking about it doesn’t give me any feedback.

If you followed along my “Zero to MVP in 30 Days”-Series, I’m sorry for not keeping you up to date. To be honest: I’m a little embarrassed that I made so little progress in the last two months.

The last months weren’t too easy. I have a full time job and the overall motivation for this project wasn’t as high as it should have been.

Photo by Damian Zaleski

What’s the plan now?

I want to launch this thing in May. If you don’t know what this thing is, you can read a little about it here.

The following parts are still missing:

• Alerts
• Plans & Payment
• Better Inputs
• Exports

There are further things planned, but this is what I want to launch with.

Photo by Anna KolosyukAlerts

An important aspect about marketing on Quora is being the first to answer a question, as it gives you a higher chance of being a top answer. So what you’d naturally do is watching questions in your field. Since this isn’t easy to do manually, it’s a strong feature of Find Better Questions.

Plans & Payment

All alpha users have the same set of features. There will however be two different paid tiers. That’s some work on the website, I need some code to enable certain features, and implementing a payment system will be quite some work. To keep it as simple as possible, I’ll probably use Chargebee for that.

Better Inputs

As seen on the current landing page, lists can be created with questions, people, or topics as inputs to find other relevant questions. Thus far Find Better Questions only supports questions, so there is still a lot to do.

Exports

This could be useful to further process the scraped data in a custom spreadsheet. I hope that this will be easy to do.

Bugs

I also want to make sure the product works. I’d rather skip a feature than ship a buggy product. Not offering a certain feature might keep some people from buying, but a bug could make them angry, which is even worse. I don’t want to disappoint anyone.

Photo by Peter Feghali

Marketing

This is a fight.

I collected more than 100 emails in December and only about 10 after that.

I did achieve what I wanted: Get some people to test the product. I just still feel very uncertain. No one told me they’d buy it. I should have probably gone with the purest form of validation: pre-ordering.

One more thing:I need a logo / icon and a color palette. The app currently doesn’t share a single design element with the website. Ouch!

I’ll try to post a few more updates in the coming weeks. Let me know if you’re interested in anything specific.

Originally published at blog.findbetterquestions.com.

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