🌈June Update

A mini viral moment!

WaveGen got its first mini traffic surge in June and here is the story:

After not generating many waves with my marketing activities the first two weeks in June, I woke up on a Friday surprised to find a lot of new users in Firebase, and increasing on every refresh. Google Analytics showed two digits of users on the website together for the first time. Then I checked stripe dashboard - holy shit, I even got new paid users! 😮

After the initial thrill, I started deeply regretting not finishing a bug fix the night before. I panicked like a party host with a lot of guests showing up before the prep was done, but figured there wasn’t much I could/should do, except beef up the server. With all these intense and mixed feelings, at the end of the day, despite not doing much, I was exhausted.

It turns out WaveGen is featured in three different newsletters, which picked it up from all different sources:

• One is from my hacker news post. The post got a total of 3 upvotes at the posting time, all by my indie builder friends.

• One is from my post in a marketing community. I entered an AI workflow challenges there and didn’t win, but decided to share my submission to the community anyway.

• One is from my submission to an online AI tool directory. They featured me in their newsletter after I asked them to take me down from the directory because the traffic got too spammy.

These are all secondary effect of my actions and the expected results from my action never materialized.

At the end of the June, I’m getting:

• 👀1k visitors

• 📝~300 signed up users

• 💰3 new paid customers

Nothing massive, but I got a lot of great product feedback, some market insights and stronger signal.

Marketing lessons learnt

• You need to take the risk and put yourself out there

  It can feel very awkward, and needs a lot of self-persuasion to cross the mental hurdles, even for an extrovert like me. But it is what it takes to get distribution, and without distribution, your projects are just hobbies, not businesses.

• Patience with results since marketing’s feedback loop is long

  Software engineer is wired for fast feedback loop: you write the code, you compile, and you instantly know right or wrong. Marketing, however, has latent indicators. You never know when the seeds you planted today would bloom. Keep showing up even if you feel nobody is watching, and let compounding do the work.

Two questions on top of my mind

• How to setup micro feedback loop for long term goals?

  This question is prompted by the marketing lesson above: though recognizing it's impossible to have the feedback loop like coding in businesses, are there ways to engineer proper micro feedback loops to ensure I'm on the right path with the right speed?

• Should I diversify by starting another project or focus more on this project?

  Despite controversial, many indie builders begin with a "12 projects in 12 months" approach. I want to do it too, since it’s a good to exercise your build → launch muscle and develop your own benchmarks and intuition on evaluating an idea/product.

  However, after receiving all this feedback and insight, it feels like a disservice not to act on it for this current project. I need to think more carefully about whether and how to start another project.

Would love your thoughts on the questions! Otherwise, see you next month!