Day 841 - The unholy trinity of indie products - https://golifelog.com/posts/the-unholy-trinity-of-indie-products-1682042648146
Someone made a [remark](https://twitter.com/Domthenic_H/status/1649065684511625217) about my products:
> Sounds like either there is no p/m fit, no distribution or no market for the products. Shouldn't be that slow.
It was kind of blunt, but sharp and on point 100%. What struck me like a tonne of bricks was how my 3 main products each suffers from one of the factors mentioned:
Sheet2Bio has no product-market fit.
Lifelog has no distribution.
Plugins serves a small, niche market.
Damn. 😅
The unholy trinity of bad product performance, and I got them all.
Sheet2Bio was dead on arrival. I launched it on Twitter, it got lots of attention, but no one paid. Bio links managed via Google Sheets just wasn't something that mattered to people. Worse: Recently Instagram introduced a new feature where you can have up to 5 bio links. The market's gone now. Sheet2Bio needs a pivot for sure.
I've struggled with distribution for Lifelog for the longest. Back in the early days I even did a #100daysofmarketing challenge to find a distribution channel for it. The conclusion from that challenge was Twitter was the channel. But I kid myself. When I was marketing it like crazy, there were some new customers, but not enough to really say Twitter was a *the* distribution channel. Most of the sign-ups didn't stick around either. And once I stopped sharing it, the sign-ups all but disappeared. Even leaving it on my Twitter bio didn't help, despite having 6k followers. So suffice to say, I've not found a distribution for Lifelog. Basically, it's hard to find my target customers – creators who want to build a daily writing habit and write long form for the long game. There's not one place where they seem to hang out. I probably need to reposition Lifelog's marketing angle so that I know where to find my customer, or continue to build it out and figure it out along the way.
Carrd plugins continue to sell, but not at a volume that can help me reach my goal of $5k/m soon. Ahrefs tell me that the search volume is just 30 (i.e. average monthly number of searches for "carrd plugins" on Google in the US alone). Google Trends can't even show me any data. So even while my SEO game is great, the search volume—and by inference, the market size—is just too small perhaps. By "small", that's of course with reference to my $5k/m revenue goal. It might be big enough if you have a lower target. Right now, I'm trying to grow it by building more plugins, be in more distribution channels. But the nagging concern is that there's a natural cap to its growth. I can and want to keep growing it, but realistically speaking, I can't bank on working my way up to $5k in small increments... it'll take too long. I need to try new bets where the market size and/or revenue steps are bigger.
Damn...these realisations hit **hard**.
But it's good pain, good lesson.
At least now I know what went wrong, and what I should look out for and do the next time.
> Sounds like either there is no p/m fit, no distribution or no market for the products. Shouldn't be that slow.
It was kind of blunt, but sharp and on point 100%. What struck me like a tonne of bricks was how my 3 main products each suffers from one of the factors mentioned:
Sheet2Bio has no product-market fit.
Lifelog has no distribution.
Plugins serves a small, niche market.
Damn. 😅
The unholy trinity of bad product performance, and I got them all.
Sheet2Bio was dead on arrival. I launched it on Twitter, it got lots of attention, but no one paid. Bio links managed via Google Sheets just wasn't something that mattered to people. Worse: Recently Instagram introduced a new feature where you can have up to 5 bio links. The market's gone now. Sheet2Bio needs a pivot for sure.
I've struggled with distribution for Lifelog for the longest. Back in the early days I even did a #100daysofmarketing challenge to find a distribution channel for it. The conclusion from that challenge was Twitter was the channel. But I kid myself. When I was marketing it like crazy, there were some new customers, but not enough to really say Twitter was a *the* distribution channel. Most of the sign-ups didn't stick around either. And once I stopped sharing it, the sign-ups all but disappeared. Even leaving it on my Twitter bio didn't help, despite having 6k followers. So suffice to say, I've not found a distribution for Lifelog. Basically, it's hard to find my target customers – creators who want to build a daily writing habit and write long form for the long game. There's not one place where they seem to hang out. I probably need to reposition Lifelog's marketing angle so that I know where to find my customer, or continue to build it out and figure it out along the way.
Carrd plugins continue to sell, but not at a volume that can help me reach my goal of $5k/m soon. Ahrefs tell me that the search volume is just 30 (i.e. average monthly number of searches for "carrd plugins" on Google in the US alone). Google Trends can't even show me any data. So even while my SEO game is great, the search volume—and by inference, the market size—is just too small perhaps. By "small", that's of course with reference to my $5k/m revenue goal. It might be big enough if you have a lower target. Right now, I'm trying to grow it by building more plugins, be in more distribution channels. But the nagging concern is that there's a natural cap to its growth. I can and want to keep growing it, but realistically speaking, I can't bank on working my way up to $5k in small increments... it'll take too long. I need to try new bets where the market size and/or revenue steps are bigger.
Damn...these realisations hit **hard**.
But it's good pain, good lesson.
At least now I know what went wrong, and what I should look out for and do the next time.