Friday September 17th 2021
Did a few things on Paper Website yesterday, the most significant being I reverted back to a "pay-to-use" model. Something just didn't sit right giving away so much value for free.
I realized these "free" users just weren't engaged - barely any of them using Paper Website for its intended use. I sent out an email to these users, and although the open rate was good, app usage leading from that was bad.
I think a user who pays from the outset is more likely to use Paper website seriously for its intended purpose, and I'm much more excited about these people.
Still, I want people to get a feel for Paper Website before they use it to build trust. I've come up with a solution that I think solves this: a demo page.
It's right on my homepage, anyone can test out converting paper to a webpage. There's even some demo test images you can select if you don't have one handy. This means you don't need to create an account, or have any writing to see the immediate of value of Paper Website, which I think is great!
Another thing I did was upgrade the engine that does the paper to website conversion, this was a difficult but important task - and I'm now confident it's pretty good, and I don't want to make any changes for a while.
I built a system to help me visualize how my OCR package is understanding the page, this helped loads, as before I was just staring at matrices of numbers representing bounding boxes which made 0 sense.
Still not got that first customer. I know that a product hunt launch/Hacker News launch/Twitter announcement would probably work - but I want to find a sustainable channel for growth instead of a one-off launch first.
Users visiting the site yesterday was 170. This has been one full week of doing this daily Paper Website blog. I've really enjoyed it! I'm not sure if anyone is reading it, but if you are I'd love to hear from you. What do you think of it?
