Canopy Charts November Update
Hello to everyone from the rapidly-getting-colder New York City! 🏙️
It’s been two months since my last update, in which I said I would be shifting focus from feature development for the MVP to getting the word out about the product and hopefully finding my first users.
I’ve had mixed results from those efforts. I did a round of cold emailing that didn’t turn up any interest. I was attempting to target senior engineers and engineering managers from companies whose product involves charts in a significant way. Only two people responded — to say they appreciated my message but are not interested. A combination of discouragement and other things popping up in my life lead to me curtailing the cold outreach effort after that first push.
In addition to cold outreach, I created a Twitter account for my product, which you can follow @canopycharts. Under that account I’ve started following lots of people in the indie-hacker/bootstrapper space, and started engaging in order to get to know people and build connections. I don’t have any specific goals with that account — I just think it’s a great way to find people who are working on similar things as well as get the name of my product out there.
The Twitter account has already been paying off: I was able to attend a meetup in NYC hosted by Tyler Tringas because I saw him post about it, and as a result I met some really cool people who are also in the city doing bootstrapped SaaS. I plan on staying in touch with them!
The last thing I am currently trying is a small spend on Google AdWords. I set up a monthly max of $60 to see what kind of traffic I can drive to my site and if that traffic results in any signups. From what I can tell there are about five people visiting the site per day because of Google Ads, but no signups so far. I’m not optimistic about this channel so early on in the company’s life, but I wanted to give it a shot since it’s relatively cheap.
Given how averse I naturally am to marketing activities, I’m happy with what I’ve done so far, but I haven’t been putting everything into it — and there is good reason for that. I got a puppy in mid-September!
It has been unbelievable hard taking care of him. My wife and I have needed to walk him roughly ten times per day, including at least twice throughout the night, up until this week.
The only thing getting me through it is how unbelievably cute he is 🙂 Raising a puppy is a trying experience, and I've been told by multiple parents that our schedule with taking him out sounds basically like the schedule needed to care for a newborn child. The good news about raising a puppy, however, is that they quickly grow out of this phase, as my dog seems to have done just this week.
I'm finally sleeping through the night, which means I have the energy and time to write this newsletter update and, hopefully, start investing some more time in finding my first customer.
I'm going to take another serious look at targeted outreach, through my network and potentially more cold emailing. I'm going to record a high quality demo video which should help people coming to the site understand what the product is right away. I might start writing regular blog posts as content marketing, showing how to write code for different kinds of charts.
Let's finish up with a feature update.
Feature Updates
Since last time:
- Able to add text elements above the chart, like titles, subtitles, and chart statistics
- Added stacked bar chart
Wishing everyone a wonderful fall season and close to another very strange year!
