It occurred to me that I was writing lots of blog posts and posting links to the posts on Bluesky and X. And there were even a couple of good souls clicking through to have a look at the proceedings. But on the blog pages (aka, pages like this) there was no call to action encouraging you to sign up to kept informed of when PeakZebra goes into early access.
In today’s interworlds, it’s probably too much to ask for someone to be curious enough to click on over to the home page, where there’s a dandy sign-up form. So I need to change the template that displays the single blog posts. Done. (Though, looking at it now, the right column needs some adjustment. We’ll get there.)
The confidence game
In general, I’ve been trying to shift my default frame of mind so that I tend to assume that things I’m doing will work as expected. For instance, if you land on a blog page on the site, you’ll give the piece a reasonable chance to hook you. And if there’s a call to action to sign up for updates, you’ll see the wisdom in doing so.
There’s a lot of talk among the startup crowd about launching the product before you’re ready. The supposition is that you don’t actually know yet what’s going to result in legitimate product/market fit. I can’t really argue with that, but I think it leads–at least for me–to a certain laziness about building things to a sufficiently finished point.
I’m learning to trust my instinct on what needs to be finished (and to what degree) before launching. Trusting that I had the right idea also makes it harder to turn away from the project when something shiny appears on the horizon. (Or, for that matter, when some big, not-very-helpful change occurs in one’s business environment. I’m mostly looking at you, Matt.)
Trust the workflow
I think I also need to trust my gut on having a rather different “agency like” workflow behind the core service. I can see a number of issues with trying to make it affordable to make alterations to one’s version of the application. But I also need to trust that I’ve got enough of it figured out that I can find solution for the problems that will inevitably crop up.
The point here is maybe not so much that I need to “become more optimistic” but to recognize that I’m mostly likely to be right in my business decisions and actions. Not infallible, but my best-laid plans actually don’t go awry very often–unless self-sabotage enters the equation.
OK, so what besides adding CTA forms to the blog pages have I missed? Well, a better sample on the front page, but that’s coming. Well, trial accounts, for one thing.
I’ve been thinking that my business model wouldn’t make it affordable to hand out free accounts, but it occurs to me that maybe the trial accounts should be spun up on a multisite instance of the application. While I don’t think it works to use multisite for paying customers (one of the advantages of the current setup is that you have your own instance and thus your entire database is completely separated from any other customer’s database. It’s vastly more secure.
Multisite is secure, I should add. And it’s plenty secure for a short trial period, after which you either get deleted or you upgrade to paid service and we move you to your own site instance.