Much ado about Pagecord
I’ve seen customers subscribe to Pagecord recently which is encouraging, but they’re few and far between.
In part this will be because I’ve done very little marketing other than some LinkedIn or Bluesky posts, so not many people know about it. For the most part though, I think it’s because I’ve built a product that few people want. It either doesn’t fulfil a need, or it kinda fulfils a need but there are alternatives that are perceived as better in some way.
There are also headwinds. Blogging is less popular these days, and microblogging even less so because people do it on social networks (X, Bluesky, Threads). There are also freemium blog products like Write.as, Bear blog or Pika which are really good, so why I choose a non-free (albeit cheap!) version that doesn’t have as many features?
On the flip side, I have some paying customers and I really like using the product myself so there must be something in it. I find I’m far more inclined to write if I can just do this in my email app and click send, so perhaps others would be too? I just need to find them, right?
So where do I go from here?
Should I make the free version available again? I originally made it free but was inundated with spammers. I could probably cope by just deleting these as they crop up, not a biggie at this small scale.
My free plan had no image attachment support so it was text only, but that feels a little constrained. However if I don’t limit this, the only other premium feature is custom domains and not all paying customers use that feature so they might feel hard done by?
Another feature I had in mind was email subscriptions. People don’t really use RSS so it’s hard for non-techies to follow a blog without subscribing via email, and this functionality is now commonplace (just look at Substack’s success). I could definitely implement this, but I’d have to think carefully about how to handle the inevitable spammers.
I could even drop the blogging by email restriction and allow people to create posts in the app itself. The truth is that you can already do this, but I prevent it because the whole point of Pagecord was to blog by email. Would lifting this restriction dilute the product, or make it more accessible? Wouldn’t it be better to keep it minimal and use it as a USP?
It’s difficult to get motivated myself because I like the product as it is and I’m not hearing feature requests from anyone at all, but I’d really like to get some feedback from people who have thought about this or know more than I do about these things. If you have a few minutes to spare, please let me know what you think!
In part this will be because I’ve done very little marketing other than some LinkedIn or Bluesky posts, so not many people know about it. For the most part though, I think it’s because I’ve built a product that few people want. It either doesn’t fulfil a need, or it kinda fulfils a need but there are alternatives that are perceived as better in some way.
There are also headwinds. Blogging is less popular these days, and microblogging even less so because people do it on social networks (X, Bluesky, Threads). There are also freemium blog products like Write.as, Bear blog or Pika which are really good, so why I choose a non-free (albeit cheap!) version that doesn’t have as many features?
On the flip side, I have some paying customers and I really like using the product myself so there must be something in it. I find I’m far more inclined to write if I can just do this in my email app and click send, so perhaps others would be too? I just need to find them, right?
So where do I go from here?
Should I make the free version available again? I originally made it free but was inundated with spammers. I could probably cope by just deleting these as they crop up, not a biggie at this small scale.
My free plan had no image attachment support so it was text only, but that feels a little constrained. However if I don’t limit this, the only other premium feature is custom domains and not all paying customers use that feature so they might feel hard done by?
Another feature I had in mind was email subscriptions. People don’t really use RSS so it’s hard for non-techies to follow a blog without subscribing via email, and this functionality is now commonplace (just look at Substack’s success). I could definitely implement this, but I’d have to think carefully about how to handle the inevitable spammers.
I could even drop the blogging by email restriction and allow people to create posts in the app itself. The truth is that you can already do this, but I prevent it because the whole point of Pagecord was to blog by email. Would lifting this restriction dilute the product, or make it more accessible? Wouldn’t it be better to keep it minimal and use it as a USP?
It’s difficult to get motivated myself because I like the product as it is and I’m not hearing feature requests from anyone at all, but I’d really like to get some feedback from people who have thought about this or know more than I do about these things. If you have a few minutes to spare, please let me know what you think!