Thank you, this is supremely helpful! 🙏 go for that new book ;)

Great insights, thanks! Another question, since you've gone through it:

Self-published ebook vs. real publisher doing physical books? E.g. when to go for what, what's ultimately better in your opinion, how much people still want physical books?

It does explain itself. However, it's not self-evident, and the explanations had to be sought by me. I go on the site, and the only thing I can guess from the name and percentage-ordered list of some products is, that it's an ordered project list.

But I had questions and only found them after doing "relatively" much research (speaking in terms of average internet user with short attention span):

• How does it order the projects? (after reading the about page I understood it's growth based)
• What's the "community" of a project?
• How do I participate?

Other questions that I also have:

• Why should I care as a product maker?
• Why should I care as a no-product-maker? Also, if I can't care as a non-product-maker, I won't probably care as a product maker, cause I'm not interested to get eyes on my projects of people who are unlikely to use it cause they're way too busy doing their own stuff.
• Why is daily relative growth rate a good metric to sort those projects?

PS.: Segments pie chart makes simple numbers look complicated IMHO
PPS.: The page layout somehow makes me think I'm on a gambling/scam/advertising site or smth, not sure. Probably cause it's dark + has projects arranged kinda banner like

I have nothing to say about this that would roast it. But since I'm already here I didn't want to leave this uncommented, so I'll just say I really like everything about this product!

I wasn't thinking of connecting to people who actually want to be pitched for other than practice reasons. However, it's probably better to just start participating regularly in some online meetups, e.g. those to be found on Indie Hackers www.indiehackers.com/meetups - I'm sure there is plenty of chance to practice pitching there, if you just want to practice your pitching skills. Also pretty much the reason I didn't pursue thie idea more.

The service itself is fine I think. Even if it's similar to already existent ones I can see enough need for another one.

What I'm missing mainly is more details info about it on the landing page. How does it work very specifically? Maybe some screenshots? Features? Ways to integrate and use it? Currently "Backend as a service" is all I know about it, and it's way to vague for me. Differences to Prism? To Contentful? To Firebase? (even if you don't compare it directly to those tools, give a description clear enough so I can plot the differences out in my own mind).

So first of all: Wow.

That project looks amazing at first sight. And as a software engineer, I am humbled by the amount of work that must have gone into it. That's truly a masterpiece. And just as the desktop software, the landing page also looks like it came straight from a billion-dollar company.

That being said, here is the experience I made with it (pretty quickly):

I seemed a bit unintuitive to me. The graphs and activity categories like "Work", "Communication" look great, but in practice, I only can scratch my head. I am literally clueless what I am looking at, it just gives me the feeling that I know (or at least should know) what's going on with my time, when I still don't.

There are some UI glitches that make me uncomfortable, e.g that profile picture with the checkmark. I was searching for a task that I just had created and couldn't show it up in the desktop app until I found out I can click the checkmark. I still don't know what it does, but I am assuming it filters done tasks vs pending tasks.

I also don't know why there is the web UI. Creating invoices feels a bit clumsy, and taxes seem to be missing from the generated pdfs. After I hide a project that I imported from Trello I couldn't figure out how to bring it back. I also didn't figure out how to NOT import a project from Trello (I'd like to have a whitelist approach, where I explicitly choose which projects I want to import, instead I have all my Trello boards in now, including my life planning and even cooking recipes).

I should add that I was eyeballing with RescueTime recently, so I took a look into DueFocus because I was sincerely interested. But I don't even know what DueFocus is supposed to be or do for me. I hoped for a cool time tracker that gives me stats to improve my productivity (that's the hope that built up in me when I scrolled through the landing page and hence my interest in RescueTime) but got a tool, that looks more like something I would want to use as a rigid employer to minute-track my employees (and the making screenshots feature or the notification that I have been inactive for 5 minutes also contributed to that feeling).

I then went out to find other, similar apps. What stroke my nerve most, is probably www.and.co/. I can't tell the difference in what problem DueFocus and And.co are supposed to so solve, but they seem very similar to me. I would choose And.co simply because it looks less complicated (this impression comes entirely from the screenshots, I didn't try And.co). I am missing a bold statement and a mission from DueFocus, and eventually, it is just too complicated and unintuitive for me.

All that "critics" given (you asked for a roast, though!) I must say I see some potential and I also see that there is probably some good reason for specific features. For example, I had to figure out the "Cold time" feature at first, but then it made sense. I guess a lot of the issues I have right now would fade if I just got used to the system and idea.

It's just not for me. I don't want to waste time by actively tracking time for all I do (which I believe is impossible anyway). As a freelancer, I'd rather turn on my iPhone timer when I start working and turn it off when I stop working. As a human striving for more productivity, I'd rather know how to improve: "What gets measured gets managed".

I just figured, you could also append that refunds are not a problem, if they don't like it. That also takes away some of the financial weight to the message.

Actually, I changed my mind! :D (Although I still stay by my original statement fundamentally).

I think you should go and try it. Invite 5 people you'd like to join and offer a free membership. However, also invite 5 people from Hacker News just asking to join paid. Then have a comparison / evaluate the results as far as possible.

Where I still strongly disagree is, that offering a paid membership sounds like spam or makes you sound / feel "disingenuous". It's not about what you offer, it's about how you offer it. Try something like the following:

"Hey John, I admire your most recent project, "XYZ". Because you're rocking as a maker so much, I'd like you to know about WIP, a project of my own. A community of makers with a very active and supporting Telegram group.

Great indie hackers like Arnold and Tim already use the community daily. Access is paid though, and as much as I'd love to offer you a free membership (mainly because I believe it would make this message sound less spammy), I can't do it because I feel it would be unfair in regards to the paid members.

I would love to see you around, thanks!"

For me personally, that's more than enough sincere touch to view it as a genuine message.

I have adopted a realistic point of view and understand that, while I pay for some services, someone else might pay less or nothing or even get paid to use them or whatever. It's all vitamin C and the world works like this.

However, from an entrepreneurial point of view, I just think that's not the way to go. You'll get too many people (percentage-wise) in, who don't really care about WIP.

Remember, that those people are still people. Just with a few more followers for what it's worth. They will bring the same positive and negative characteristics into your community like everybody else, but you're not filtering the bad ones out by offering free access (by the way, "bad" doesn't mean bad people or professionals or whatever. Just a bad fit for WIP). It's just not a good business decision. They won't do the things for the community you hope them to do if they got a free-ride, because they are not invested with their skin. They won't act authentically.

Ask yourself:
- What made you decide to set this up as a paid community, in the first place?
- Would you repair windows for any one of your family's friends for free? (Really???)
- Could it be that you're actually doing them a favor if you tell them about WIP?

As a simple solution: Just tell them what you've done in your life. "Built this and that. Oh, and also created WIP. It's a community of makers. Last week I also took some cool photos of people's fridges, you should check them out!"

That should be easy enough to do in a conversation. If anything, they will catch up on the WIP part and have a look at it. Maybe they join. Maybe they don't. Maybe they contact you asking for a free membership. How is it they don't feel disingenuous doing that (if they ask)?

The price doesn't change anything for someone who wants to bring and receive value and genuinely is hooked. It only changes something for someone not willing to pay it anyway and probably not even interested in the product.