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!