Competing with Product Hunt: a month later

Hey fellows Indie Hackers 👋🏻

It's been a month and a half since I pivoted Uneed from a simple directory into a Product Hunt alternative. There were ups and downs, good choices and mistakes. I'm writing this post to take stock of it all 😄

Firstly, and most importantly, I'm still convinced it was a good idea! As you will see, not everything is rosy. And yet, there are signs that Uneed has potential, and they encourage me to continue improving the platform.

The good

One of the reasons I decided to convert Uneed into a launch pad was SEO. Inspired by Product Hunt, I created a system of badges rewarding the best products. Some people started displaying these badges on their sites (many thanks to them), and Uneed's domain rating skyrocketed!

This gradually increases Uneed's ranking on certain keywords and improves our organic traffic.

Thanks to our launch on Product Hunt in February (get the irony?), we've been having a good amount of traffic in recent weeks.

I learned a ton, and I truly mean it: that's the best outcome of the past few weeks for me. I've got a much better overview of Uneed's visitors and users, of what makes people come and go, what makes them pay and what doesn't... I'm also much clearer about Uneed's future. I know exactly what I need to work on, and that's a first for me!

The bad

So SEO is doing great, visits are good, I'm happy... Can you see what I haven't talked about yet in this post?

That's right, money.

Tracking Uneed's revenues has always been a tricky business, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they are non-recurring. Secondly, the number of premium seats is limited: I can sell a lot at once (which is what happened in January), and therefore have less revenue the following month.

But in any case, revenues are still down. It was a real blow to my mental health and my motivation, but I managed to take a step back, pluck up my courage and dive into data analysis to understand what was going on.

It turned out that only one of my sources of income had dropped: "skip the waiting line", in other words, paying to skip the queue and publish your product straight away.

There are many reasons for this, which I won't go into here, but the main one was a new (and bad...) UX during the addition of its product. It turned out that many users were submitting their product, but not completing the form. It took me a while to realize that this was because the form wasn't clear: some information was mandatory, and it was difficult to see which was missing once the form was completed.

So I added a checklist on the left-hand side of the form... And within a week, the conversion rate had increased by 30% 🤦🏻.

What's next?

Uneed's success is down to one thing: traffic. For the next few months, all my efforts will be focused on this. Here's what I plan to do:

• Write new blog posts, especially posts comparing similar products.
• Add activity "streaks" and rank the most active users.
• Make it automatic to create posts on social networks: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
• Launch contests on social networks to win premium tickets.

I'm also working on another mini-project which, if it works out, will give me a new source of traffic.