Canopy Charts is Public
Hi friends 🙂
Since my last update I’ve made significant product improvements, enough so that I feel ready to start talking about the project in public and looking for people who might be interested in using it. My initial outreach strategy is a mixture of talking about Canopy Charts on Twitter, using LinkedIn InMail to message people who fit what I think is the customer profile, and cold emailing people after I run out of InMail credits.
Cold Outreach
Funny enough, I don’t feel as much trepidation about doing cold outreach as I would have even a year or two ago. I look back on myself then and see a shy engineer: most happy coding away in a little cave and reluctant to do anything that involved going out in the sun and possibly bothering other people. What I’ve learned since then is you have to talk about what you’re working on for it to have any impact. People won’t use what they don’t know about, and if you think you are building something that will genuinely solve a problem for someone, it’s not a bad thing to reach out and see if that’s true.
Another thing I have internalized over the past couple years lurking around the indie startup space is that many people have figured it out before me. Once you have a product (or even an idea) that truly solves a problem for people, it’s just a numbers game. It’s just a matter of grinding until product market fit.
So, please wish me luck as I embark on my first marketing campaign!
Feature Updates
Since last time:
- Added pie charts
- Added the ability to test your chart with builtin sample data
- Axes automatically scale to x or y dimension, depending on orientation
New Website
I also upgraded the marketing website, which is public at https://canopycharts.com.
There is a live demo of the chart editor available without signing up or anything. I think this is a great marketing tool for products where doing this is possible. You want to show off your cool product to people, and there’s a higher chance people will take a look if it’s easy and there is no commitment on their end.
Right now the demo just drops you into the chart editor without any ceremony, and I’m thinking that’s not the best presentation. In the near future I will add either an interactive walkthrough using https://reactour.js.org, or a video demo. Or maybe both.
Until next time!
