It's been awhile.
We recently received a huge influx of users because of a recent advertising push that resulted in us hitting the front page of hackernews.
We put $25 into reddit ads which resulted in:
- 60k unique visitors
- 940 new users
- 170 sites
- 227 blog posts
- 84 pico+ signups
If only we could continue to put that much into ads and get the same result.
Some of you have noticed that service availability has been a little flaky and it is primarily because of the uptick in traffic. We have a set of infra changes we are making but will create a separate post to talk about that.
We received a bunch of feedback, mostly positive, and had a blast monitoring our services, responding to questions, and shepherding user engagement on pico. It was totally unexpected and highly motivating for me and Antonio.
We wanted to take this opportunity to continue the dialog about our platform and where we see it going into the future.
We are at a fork-in-the-road with pico.sh
Right before this influx of users, we were feeling the overall engagement with our platform "settle" into an idle state. People were still using the platform, but usage was pretty low. We anticipate this will happen again and we will settle into an idle state before end-of-year. To us, this is an indication that we haven't hit product market fit for what we are trying to build; we haven't quite figured out exactly what our users need from our platform. They signup, use our services for a couple of months, then churn. This is where we need to be radical. Antonio and I also feel like "ssh services" is quite niche and even within the dev community not everyone is interested or comfortable living inside the terminal. Maybe that's good enough?
So the fork: do we stop building pico and instead build something using it? Maybe something not so niche, maybe a more broad product or service that could attract orders of magnitude more users? OR do we double-down and continue working on this platform that has given us great satisfaction?
As other users have pointed out: charging $2/mo is not going to be sustainable. It works just fine at a smaller scale, but once we hit a critical mass of support requests we will eventually burn out. So if we want to attract more users, for our own self-preservation, we will probably need to make changes to our platform -- including pricing. If we do continue working on pico, I could see our next go-to-market strategy being a b2b motion where we try to attract small-to-medium sized companies. This would mean a greater focus on team features and services that help businesses focus on their product and not their infrastructure.
Which path would you take? Is there another path we haven't thought about?