Original Summary

About a month ago I posted here asking whether 98 visits and 30 signups in 5 days meant anything. Lots of you answered, thank you. Here's the follow-up, with real numbers. Quick context: it's an email hosting service. You bring your own domain and get real inboxes for your team, at a price an early-stage company can afford. Where it's at 400+ registered users ~60 visits/day, ~20 signups/day 2 paying customers One day I got 1,000+ visits and a wave of signups at once. Nothing broke. What I think the business model is I spent a while thinking I had to convert people fast. What I see now is different: early-stage founders and small teams sign up for the free plan, put their real work email on it, and stay. They convert later, when they've had months of mail that just arrives instantly, and when they need what the paid plans give them. The other part they get is sender reputation. Every new sending domain is reviewed by hand before it can email strangers. That's slow for me, but it means a new customer isn't sharing a reputation with someone running a cold email farm, and their mail lands in the inbox. So free users aren't a cost I put up with. They're the pipeline, and the conversion window is long. Lesson 1: for some products, the "MVP" has to be the real thing I'm not saying MVPs are wrong in general. But I'm glad I didn't ship a fragile one. The 1K-visit day came with no warning. If a few hundred people had signed up and found their email bouncing or delayed, I wouldn't have gotten feedback. I'd have gotten bad reviews. For something people put their business on (email, payments, auth), "minimum" has to include "doesn't lose your data and doesn't go down". Lesson 2: asking users for feedback barely works for me. Watching what they do does. Everyone says "talk to your users". I tried. My users are busy founders using the product to do their job, and almost nobody answers "how can I make this better?". Maybe it's worse because it's freemium: nobody feels they owe you 20 minutes. What did work was looking at usage. Example: I saw that most of the extra mailboxes people create are never logged into, and a lot of them are named things like info@, hello@, sales@ . People didn't want more inboxes. They wanted more addresses delivering into the same inbox. Nobody asked me for that, but the data was clear. (The one user who did answer my outreach asked for exactly that, too.) So my version is: don't ask users what they want, look at what they do, and use the rare reply to confirm it. Questions for you Marketing takes most of my time. I'm looking at tools that notify me when someone on Reddit or X talks about my market (looking for an email provider, complaining about their current one, etc.). Does that actually work for you? Which do you use, and is it worth paying for? I always seem to arrive late to the relevant threads, and

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/14 02:57:38