Thanks @ben, this echoes what I think is a large part of the problem for people who do end up on the website.

I started out building this tool as a way to build real time visualisations for event streams (I have support for multiple visualisation types and the Space Invaders theme is just one of them), basically a "web based logstalgia" with built-in TV-mode.

I then figured that this is "fun" but not really a painkiller, so then pivoted slightly and started building more tranditional log management features (see video) but that's not shown on the landing page at all so I understand how that gives people the wrong idea.

Apart from that I also built a CLI client that allows people to "tail" their logs via the API.

I think what I'm currently doubting most is whether I should continue down this path or abandon it because the log ingestion space is become more crowded recently with players like BetterStack and Sentry integrating log management into their product offering.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Some more context:

• I've only been building since half of August this year.
• "Talk to your users" would be lovely, if only I had them. I literally have no signups, except for a single person that I know IRL, who I suspect signed up to make me feel better 🤣
• "Make the product demo not a video"; I do have some free tools listed in the footer to "get a taste" and I actually had a live demo of the visualisation plugged in before I had the video. It showed real-time traffic to the website on the website. I thought it was cool, but I don't think people really understood it.
• I've started working on some landing page tweaks to highlight the log viewer/filtering aspects more and demonstrate the individual features better, but I'm struggling with motivation to finish that home page revamp if no one is going to visit anyway. Bit of a chicken and egg situation, I guess.
• "Add some AI". I actually have an MCP server built-in, but have not published any docs or demos. Could be interesting, but if people are not going to use the basics, I doubt AI will draw them over the line.
• Traffic: very little. 26 unique visitors in the last 7 days. I have written/generated some basic articles to get some SEO juice hopefully. I actually have a copy of Danny's course, too! The articles already implement many of these keywords, but it might simply be that they are not really picked up yet.
• Advertising: I tried 2 weeks of advertising on Google and Facebook, which brought me about 1200 unique visitors. Not a single one of them signed up 💀

Nah not my thing.

Thanks! I use Cursor on my dayjob (burning a looooooot of tokens) but for this project I forced myself to use Codex + Claude to make sure that I don't use any company funds for my own project.

I'm still using Codex as my IDE, but do most of the AI generation using Claude and Codex.

Ah, that's awesome Cat :) I did not realise that.

I'll add some more context for you (and others, in the spirit of transparency) here:

Gistreader still feels a bit like a "happy accident" to be honest. I just wanted to build a tool for myself and shipped it because some friends told me to 😅 I did not give much thought to brand, audience and strategy so I'm figuring out things as I go along.

Ideally, my goal for Gistreader is to save users time by making it easy to read online content. I do this by:

• Providing a reading view that shows you only the article, not the rest of the website
• Providing both RSS and "read later" (single pages) support
• Generating AI summaries that extract the essence of the article
• Generating personalised podcasts based on (manually) selected articles. Although this sounds cool to most people, this feature is barely used and to be fair, I don't even use it myself. Main reason for that is that it's a manual process, which removes the fun and "magic" from the experience. Just sharing that here, because I don't want to put too much focus on this feature right now.

I have done some minor marketing efforts, mainly by sharing my work in progress on Twitter. This definitely connected me to a lot of cool people (👋) and a reasonably steady flow of users. I get 1-3 signups per day on average right now. I also created some posts on Reddit, but they never gained any traction.

• 445 users right now
• ... of which 5 are paying 😬
• Users are onboarded on a 14 day free trial that allows them to use every feature
• 3 days before their trial ends, I send out an automated mail that reminds them of this fact
• If trial ends, they are put on a free plan with low usage limits and no AI features whatsoever
• 2 days after trial ends, I send out an automated email that asks them for feedback on what I could have done better.

The main issue right now is that the active user base is just super small and it's hard to get a good grasp of what I can do to retain them. I don't think adding an email funnel will drastically turn things around, but I'm definitely interested to see if it has a measurable impact.

I have been asking users for feedback but 9 out of 10 times I am getting no response, which makes it a bit hard to determine what I should change. I've got dozens of features that I want and that I will probably eventually build, but it's hard to get a grasp on what my potential audience wants.

Thanks Cat! I'm not at a point right now where I'm able to hire people to do this for me, so at this time I'm mostly interested in hearing what tools people use, what has worked for them and what hasn't.

I never played with ConvertKit before so will definitely give it a try 👍

Yessss that fixed it for me. Thanks! 🙏

Same here!