Log #3: Zooming out

It’s been a bit of a difficult week (especially early on) – I won’t go into details, though it was nothing major. I made some progress on projects, thankfully.

Last time, I had these next steps on Delivery Ravens:

  • Put together a landing page
  • Think about the pricing model
  • Tell people about the service

Put together a landing page

I decided to put this on hold. After spending a little time thinking about it, it feels premature. I was getting excited about finally having put something new online and wanting to give it more of an identity and playing around with copy, as if building and publishing a fleshed-out landing page counts as marketing when no one visits the site in the first place.

Beyond that, parts of the app are incomplete and ugly, so prioritizing a landing page is daft. It’s now the final task before tagging as V1.0.

Think about the pricing model

Services that allow you to distribute digital products have a range of pricing models, from skimming the cream off the top of your sale to typical monthly subscriptions and free.

The current price to activate products and get them delivered with Delivery Ravens is $5/month. It’s probably a fine starting point. And it’s also a hard sell.

I thought about credits (like download credits), and that seems reasonable at first glance, but then what happens when someone’s customer buys their product and never gets to download it because the creator lacks credits? That split between the sale and fulfilling the order makes it difficult to do anything like that.

Right now, I’m leaning towards a cheap annual subscription. That feels closer to what I would want if I were a paying customer for the product.

Tell people about the service

I shared Delivery Ravens with a small group of people - a SaaS discord server I’m a member of - this week. They’re supportive of new products, so it was the ideal place to just share the link and few lines of what I’ve been doing. Even so, I had to battle with my anxiety. Hitting enter on the message took me far too long; I was worrying about what they’d think, whether I’d get negative feedback, or that I’d get ignored. It was fine, obviously. I hate how difficult it was.

Around the same time, I realized I’m not really part of any communities these days? I don’t recognize the Indie Hackers site any more (I stopped visiting when everything was self promotion and spam).

I stopped engaging on Twitter years ago and a lot of the people I was following have moved elsewhere.

So the people building products and projects online seem to be all over the place. I want to see people working on cool projects and sharing what they’re doing and learning. And I want to be a part of that. Where are they?

Zooming out

Now that I’ve done some more thinking about Delivery Ravens, I’ve been coming back to what I said last time, “this is one of those projects that’s definitely a ‘side project’”. And by that, what I really mean is I don’t think Delivery Ravens has the potential to grow into anything substantial.

  • It’s nearly ‘done’ in that there aren’t many more features to build.

  • I don’t actually know many people that need this product (I just built it for myself).

  • Even if there are a few people that would pay, there doesn’t seem to be much money in it – I’d need hundreds of customers to just hit ‘ramen profitability’.

Is this cope for not wanting to do marketing? Maybe. But it’s also true.

Dedicating tons of time finding people to use it isn’t the best use of my limited resources – not when I have other things I could work on instead.

So maybe that’s really what Delivery Ravens is: a side project that suits my specific requirements. And that’s OK.

Next steps:

  • Focus on the digital product I want to send via Delivery Ravens.
  • Locate people building cool projects and products.
  • Work through my task list to get Delivery Ravens close to version 1.