Listifi launch

· erock's devlog

A retrospective on the launch of listifi.app

listifi.app is an app I built recently to solve the problem of sharing lists with friends and colleagues. I often found myself sharing the same lists over and over again. List apps are everywhere, but most of them focus on productivity. Listifi is a social list sharing site with the intention of making lists extremely simple to share with people.

In this article I'd like to talk about the overall reception of my launch, what I learned along the way, and what I plan to do next.

listifi

Reception #

Overall, this has been one of the most successful app launches I built on my own. I posted to the following websites:

These posts drove most of my site traffic over the past few weeks.

Stats #

Website traffic

A Sobering Experience #

Overall, I feel proud to build a product that people are using. It feels amazing to build something and release it for the world to use. However, I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed. I was really hoping for more engagement. I only managed to convert a handful of users from guests to registered users. The number of "useful" lists are very low and most of them were created by me or my direct friends.

I think my biggest learning experience from this was that I need to understand the problem and the customer better. While I had a lot of fun building this product and I did what I do best: write code, I made some key mistakes:

After spending some time on IndieHackers, I have realized how costly these mistakes can be.

Find a problem, not an idea

Early on I became enamored by the idea of a list sharing app, that I lost sight of the problem I was trying to solve.

I didn't want to do the research, I just wanted to write code. There is a ton of hacker waste because of this trap software engineers fall into.

Hacker waste is when servers are spun up, resources spent on marketing, and labor is wasted building a product no one wants

It's cliché but I believe we learn more from our mistakes than our victories, and I think I have grown from this experience.

Where do we go from here? #

At this point, I've built the features I wanted to build. It's a fully functional app that has some interesting features like staring lists, voting on list items, and allowing users to make suggestions to a list.

My plan is to continue to use listifi.app, to build lists and share them with others. I still find it very useful. I'm going to continue to market the product and try to get users engaged. However, I do not plan on adding anymore features until I can drive some real user engagement into the app.


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