Comment by brachkow

I’m still working on turning a wishlist app that I built for my friends into a real product — it’s called https://thingstohave.app. I wrote a comment about it in summer, and these are the updates:

1. I shared the app with the small audience I have and received some feedback in very unexpected places. First, it was hard to understand how lists work because putting things into lists was an unobvious process. I fixed that by adding DnD that works well both with mouse and touch (turned out it’s two separate APIs). Second, users thought that the screenshot on the quite minimal landing page was the real app, and they clicked on it. The problem was so frequent and surprising that I decided to add something funny for people who do that, as I’m not willing to contribute a lot of time to the landing right now.

2. I underestimated how bad discoverability on the internet is. My expectation was that I would make my site fully server-side rendered, add a basic sitemap to Search Console, and have a few dozen organic users during the pre-holiday season when users are filling their wishlists. In reality, I got zero — not even users, but even visits. So I started actually working on SEO, no black magic but just adding slightly more complex sitemaps, micro-markup, and other stuff which I thought only products competing for the first page would need.

My next steps are to work on getting some minimal organic inflow of users and improving stuff related to auth and user management, which is the most time-consuming part of the work right now.