Comment by mittermayr

Things that come to mind when clicking through:

- Loads super fast (nice), I actually was puzzled by how fast it showed up

- I thought the 'totally not a fake person' was funny in a way, but then I realized that it slightly soured the overall impression a bit; which brings me to:

- I clicked away before trying the tool, because I've tried hundreds of similar services before, and probably half if not two thirds of them have completely disappeared overnight. They were also created by an indie maker who failed/struggled to monetize or lost interest, and my data and habits were caught up in a broken tool. So...

Some suggestions I could think of:

While it can be honest and transparent to play up the "hey I made this myself over a couple of weekends" indie maker vibe (I do the same thing), it really depends on the tool you're pushing, I'd argue. If I should switch to this tool as a time tracking tool, I want reliability, I want uptime, I want to be able (and try) to export my data to move on to another tool if necessary, I want to know that this tool will be as reliable as a hammer or screwdriver I'm buying at the hardware store. If this looks or feels like "a fun" experiment, then I'm out, because my work is not allowing me to play around too much with those.

I think you can win long-term users by making sure they can really trust to get their data out again (like you do with the Excel export at the bottom, but I only saw that on second glance when I started writing this here), but also if you decide to shut it down one lonely evening. If there's even a small chance I log on one random Monday, and I am confronted with an unpaid V-Server or DigitalOcean droplet warning thing, then I am not even going to give it a try. This tool doesn't have anyone on the payroll, your motivation to keep it alive is potentially very, very slim. That's what I'm worried about, even if I am totally wrong.

It's not easy to solve "trust" for a "weekend project by one person", but it's also not impossible to do so. Others go open-source (which I don't necessarily recommend) to be clear on "if I fold, you at least have the sources to continue using it", some may prefer an automated data backup (upload a copy to an FTP, or S3, or by e-mail, daily) — whatever, I am not a pro on solutions here, I am however good at worrying :)

Think of the risk assessment potential new users have to go through. Make sure you take care of the most prominent issues on that route and then think about the rest, like pricing, website, how 'transparent' or not you'd like to be.

If you'd just thrown up a great API that let us train GPT-like models or Dall-E type renderings for next-to-nothing, then you could have a literal middle finger as the only image on that page and people would sign up like crazy.

If you're planning to launch a tool that has thousands of similar competitors, and they're mostly competing by reliability, pricing and time-in-the-market — it may be smart to focus on the user journey (and persona you're expecting to convert) a bit more.

Hope that helps!