PB 30/9: The Sheer Joy of Shipping

Highs, lows and lessons from a fun first week for TheBestProductStuff.com.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

Well, that was a lot of fun 😀

So after noodling away for three weeks, and telling all of a, I had a proper shout about TheBestProductStuff.com on LinkedIn, and it all went a bit better than expected. So if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to do my weekly status report !

1. Smashing those vanity metrics

My post on LinkedIn had 57,000+ impressions; 300+ reactions; 50 comments; and 25+ shares. That’s 6 x anything I’ve ever put up on there before. I added about 250 followers: and actually connected with some great people doing good work I was unaware of.

The site itself has had about 2000 visitors over the last few days. And a big shout for Clicky metrics - which I’ve been using and loving (it’s so much simpler than Google Analytics).

2. North Star metric: not so good

So even though the vanity metrics were much better than I’d hoped for, the few things I was really looking for went miserably.

• I put in place a feedback form. To date it’s had four responses; and two of them were my test ones (the other two came before I’d actually announced it on LinkedIn).

• After day one, I removed the link to the feedback page and replaced it with a ‘Buy Me A $5 Coffee’ link. My thinking is - I know people will like the look of this, but I wonder if they’ll feel so positively inclined they’d actually make a token donation. I don’t need the money. But it’s my real test of whether I have created something people see as valuable as opposed to just interesting.
  So - Numbers Of Coffees Bought is now my North Star metric. Anyway - current coffee count is 0. Guess I’m going to have to work a bit harder to earn that!

  Then again - I might do what the Guardian does and put a link at the bottom of every page to see if that helps.

• I can see the traffic tailing off. The sugar rush of early usage is fading - I’m keen to see where it levels off. I suspect by this time next week it’ll be at about 10% of peak.

• I am nothing on Twitter. My mention of my amazing new service got one repost. No likes. Nada.

• And of course - I found out someone has had the same idea before and also built it in Notion: Product Hustle Stack - although I humbly suggest I’ve done it slightly better.

3. The sheer joy of shipping

The thing this did bring back to me though is the sheer joy of shipping. And in all the stuff I’ve written and read about product management in the last few weeks, how little that actually gets talked about.

I’m used to working on products with millions of users, and have to admit, I’ve got quite blasé about that. But this little bit of home-made hackery, has reminded me of what got me into product in the first place. It’s that process of conceiving something, bringing it to life and then seeing other people use it and enjoy it. All the more fun when. you can get from the start to finish of that process in three weeks.

And, oh my days it’s fun when you’re looking at the live analytics clicking around the site. Compared to actual work - the numbers are teeny, but just as addictive, talking of which..

What people have been looking at

So - as of Friday morning - the top 5 pages have been

1. The Best People

2. The Best Stuff

3. Creating a Product Strategy

4. Roadmapping and Prioritisation

5. The Best Product Blogs and Newsletters

Meanwhile the top 5 bits of ‘stuff’ that people have looked at have been..

1. Roman Pichler’s My Product Strategy Model

2. Ken Norton’s Building Products at Air B’n’B

3. Manan Modhi’s The Top Product Managers You Can Follow Right Now

4. Ravi Mehta’s Product Strategy Stack

5. Gayle McDowell’s How to Crack the PM Interview.

And the top 5 people pages that have been looked at are..( I think the alphabetical order might have an influence!)

1. Aakash Gupta

2. Lenny Rachitsky

3. Aatir Abdul Rauf

4. Gibson Biddle

5. Ravi Mehta

Meanwhile I’ve surfaced a few hidden gems - good stuff that I can see people aren’t getting to..

1. Product Sense workshop: Product thinking vs Project Thinking

   From Shreyas Doshi - I think this is a great video (there’s a number of different versions of this on YouTube)

2. The Product Manifesto

   Everyone should take a look at this..

3. The most underrated product skill: influence without authority

   From Sachin Rekhi - you need to know this.

4. Making good decisions as a product manager

   From Brandon Chu - because we’re only as good as the decisions we make.

5. Executive presentations - a guide to achieving the outcomes you want

   From Deb Liu - because the reality is that this is where great ideas can either live or die.

I’m going to add a load of stuff on Monday..

On my ‘to listen’ list..

With all the fun I haven’t got round to listening / reading everything I want at the moment - two podcasts I will be finding time for over the next few days..first is Reid Hoffman on the Farnam Street The Knowledge Project podcast…

And next is Jason Fried on the 37 Signals Rework podcast: Good Enough is Fine

I’ve also been reading..

• The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving: which is 20+ years old, but just a great guide to structured analysis.

• Thinking in Systems (after listening to the excellent One Knight In Product conversation between Jason Knight and John Cutler)

And that’s it for this week.

Apologies for the self-indulgence! Hope you have a great weekend.