This is a short recount of the failure of my side project, https://www.ux-app.com . Some of what’s to come will come across as sour grapes, and for good reason. I am a little disappointed that UX-App didn't get more users. The reasons for this are
- I would have liked to earn more money for my efforts
- It’s a cool tool which I think would be useful to lots of designers/developers
This article will detail how I went about promoting UX-App and the results I achieved.
It’s also a cautionary tale for other developers who, like me, may underestimate how difficult it is to get any traction for a new product.
Current Stats
Time in Development: 3.5 years — I have a day job… cut me some slack here ;)
Days live: 496 (launch date 19th Jan 2015)
Revenue: $1780.26
Customers: 42
Homepage bounce rate: ~60%
Active monthly users: ~100
Benchmark for success
I'm a modest guy. Success for me would be
- $10k revenue in the first 12 months
- a growth rate of 5%/month.
UX-App has failed to reach these targets.
Some Background
About Me
My name is Eli, I'm a high school teacher. I like coding. I would have liked to have a (at least moderately) successful side project.
About UX-App
UX-App is a rapid prototyping tool for the web and mobile apps.
The features that set it apart from other, similar tools:
1. It’s the only app that features a full suite of functional components.
2. It has, arguably, the best editing tools for said components
3. It allows designers to create interactions using visual programming
Here’s an example of a simple UI drop down.
And here’s an example of how to wire up a button to do cool stuff.
And here’s a version you can click on to your heart’s content.
Pretty slick eh?
Promoting UX-App
As a long time reader of Hacker News, it was with great excitement that I launched my product there.
The results were… underwhelming to say the least. My post quickly slid from the ‘New’ page with only a small handful of up-votes and one or two encouraging comments. I tried a few more times over the coming months. It reached the front page once after getting promoted by a mod, which resulted in a couple dozen up-votes, a few encouraging comments and zero paying customers.
Undaunted, I put this down to a mismatch between product and audience.
More targeted promotion
I moved on to spreading the word in places where potential users might be. This involved posting to
- Desiger News
https://www.designernews.co/stories/42335-show-dn-uxapp-a-prototyping-app-i-launched-today
Plenty of encouraging comments, but no discernible up-tick in signups and paying customers.
2. Reddit
Here’s my Reddit profile https://www.reddit.com/user/ux-app/submitted/
As you can see I submitted to a number of sub reddits, made a number of comments to relevant subs and in the process
- Got loads of encouragement and positive comments https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2tmlzu/launched_a_prototyping_application_this_week/
- Banned from /r/userexperience for spamming … oops
Hard to estimate how many paying subscriptions I got from Reddit, but it would probably be fewer than 10
3. Product Hunt
I tweeted to Sacha Greif(https://twitter.com/sachagreif) who kindly posted UX-App to Product Hunt. UX-App quickly became a featured product for that day and this drove insane amounts of traffic to the site.
As you can see https://www.producthunt.com/tech/ux-app, the pattern was starting to repeat. Lots of up-votes, positive comments, but again I’d estimate fewer than 10 paying sign ups.
Traffic Spikes
Are the stats below any good? I don’t know. Are the numbers low, above average? Beats me. I’ve never launched a product before so I don’t have anything to compare against.
Much of the work I was doing across sites was resulting in temporary spikes in traffic (PH resulted in 50–100 active users at any one time for about 2 days straight!), followed by a crash to pre-promotion levels. I knew that this was unsustainable.
It was simply too much effort for too little reward. Something new was needed and this is what led me to the dark side.
Content Marketing and Astroturfing
There’s a reason that people engage in content marketing. It really works. Here was my strategy:
- Create a fictitious profile
- Write engaging content
- Demonstrate UX concepts using UX-App
- The UX examples would have a small link to UX-App in the corner
Here’s an article that I wrote in a couple of hours which went gang-busters. 135k views, 66k reads, tens of thousands of page views and 20–30 paying signups. Not a bad ROI.
My experiences here are as follows
- I discovered that I'm pretty good at writing articles that got people’s attention
- The articles were very popular with a number receiving article of the day and totalling 100s of thousands of views
- A single article that might take 3–4 hours to write would result in sustained traffic for many months to come.
What Went Wrong
I don’t think there is a product problem with UX-App. Its functionality is great and I've seen users make great prototypes in record time. So there are 2 possibilities
- Plugging away at what is working (content marketing) will eventually lead to a critical mass event that will then allow the product to start growing organically.
- There is a magic element missing that I'm not aware of
My gut tells me that it’s number 2. I don’t know what this mystery, magic element is, but my intuition tells me that it might be something along the lines of an endorsement by an industry celebrity within the target market. Or it might be another unrelated ingredient which is missing. At this point though, I'm out of ideas.
“What if it is a problem with the product? Have you spoken to users directly?”
Why, those are some excellent questions, thanks for asking! I have done some customer outreach which leads me to…
“Maybe if I talked to more people, tweaked some things about the product it would suddenly reach critical mass. I should probably devote more time to the product...”
Except this is starting to sound like some sunk cost fallacy thinking and I don’t want to find myself in essentially the same position 2 years down the track, having spent another few hundred hours on the product.
So that’s where I find myself now. Should I carry on or cut my losses? I don’t know.
So, now we’re all caught up…
How has this affected me personally
I'm not sentimental about UX-App. My product is not me. I had a go, learned a lot along the way and I earned some scars to go along with my side project war story. The universe does not owe me success.
Where to now?
UX-App is paying for its own server costs, so for existing customers it’s not going away. I’ll only continue working on the product if I can find a suitable business partner who is willing to push the marketing of the product for a 50% stake in it’s success.
A call for a potential co-founder
If you’d like a 50% stake in UX-App and you have the marketing skills to make it worth our while then reach out to me at eli@ux-app.com
I really feel like we could make thousands of dollars together!!
In all seriousness though, UX-App is a better product than a number of existing solutions that are valued in the millions, so … who knows?
Cheers,
Eliasz Sieradzki
