Stranded at the product crossroads

I’m having one of those existential crises with Pagecord.

On the one hand the product is neat and tidy, simple and easy to use, with a decent chunk of reasonably happy paying customers. I could leave it alone for a while and I’d probably see continued growth. On the other hand, there’s an arguably bigger chunk of people for whom it’s too simple, so it gets overlooked all too often. 

I can understand this. Pagecord is more niche than something like Pika and Bear Blog (the two nearest competitors, as I see it), so it’s natural that they will win out most of the time. They’re either slicker and more refined (Pika) or more customisable and developer friendly (Bear Blog). Pagecord is left competing on price (urgh) or the niche blogging by email feature which, frankly, the others could and probably will copy in a heartbeat. 

I built Pagecord for me, for fun, and I really like working on it, but it’s purely a labour of love. I never set out for it to be a business. Small blogging apps are a terrible business idea! Pagecord turns a minimal profit, but there’s no actual personal income (yay B2C!) so I have no choice but to treat it as a side project. It would take a minimum of 1000+ customers for me to take it more seriously and invest more time and energy, but I’m years away from that at the current rate of acquisition + churn. It seems highly unlikely at this point. 

This position of having a side project for which people are becoming reliant yet which doesn’t bring home any bacon, is a tricky and uncomfortable one. Do I learn to live with this, or try and make it a more realistic (financially worthwhile) business? To do that, I’ll need to make it more commercial and hike the price. This is how business works! 

The top feature requests for Pagecord are:

• Custom home page
• Multiple blogs 
• Improved theme customisation 

I can implement these no problem, probably in a couple of weeks, but at this point I worry I’ve morphed my original “vision” of a beautifully simple, social blogging app into a scrappy, low-rent version of Pika or Bear Blog. This is not what I wanted to accomplish when I first created the app! 

So I’ve found myself back at the product crossroads and I’m not sure which direction to take. Should I make Pagecord more “commercial” for growth, or take the road less travelled and continue my labour of love while ignoring the feature requests? 

This is really a rhetorical question for me to chew on in the coming weeks, but if you like you can send me your opinions by using the cryptic, uncommercial and hopelessly non-intuitive reply button below.