Nobody came
You launched. Nothing happened. This is where I’ve lost the most.
Which of the five reasons is behind a flat graph?
This is the stage that has cost me the most, and the reason is boring: five completely different problems look identical from here.
Nobody saw it. They saw it and did not understand it. They understood it and did not need it. They needed it but moving to you was too much work. Or they tried it and it’s not good enough yet. All five produce the same flat graph, and, worse, all five produce the same feeling.
I got this wrong on a product I cared about. Signups were flat, so we assumed reach and spent a quarter on distribution. Traffic went up a lot. Activation did not move at all. We had been in the third one the whole time: people understood it perfectly and did not need it. The quarter was not wasted because we worked badly. It was wasted because we never stopped to ask which problem we had.
The fixes point in opposite directions, which is what makes guessing expensive. More traffic only helps the first one. A better product only helps the last one. So the real mistake is not picking wrong — it’s acting quickly without picking at all, which in practice means doing marketing, because marketing feels the most like doing something.
The diagnosis is cheap. An afternoon and nine honest conversations about the last time the problem happened, without mentioning your product. I wish I’d spent that afternoon before spending the quarter.
Three ways to lose
time here.
- Reading the silence as rejection. It usually is not. Rejection would require them to have understood you first.
- Adding features to fix something that has nothing to do with features.
- Asking your existing users why other people are not using it. They are the least qualified people in the world to answer that.
You can say which of the five you’re in, and say out loud why the other four are not it.
What to check
before you commit.
Everything at this stage comes back to one question — Which of the five reasons is behind a flat graph? Each of these takes a different run at it, and gives you a verdict rather than a score.
They are free and they take under a minute. That is the point: the cheapest thing you can do at this stage is find out you were about to be wrong, and the most expensive is finding out a quarter later.
There’s a version
where I help.
A product review
Five days on the product, your numbers, and up to nine conversations with your actual users. You get a ranked answer on which of the five you’re in, with the reasoning attached so your team can argue with it.
Four questions on that page tell you whether this is worth it for you — including when it’s not.
Words this check uses.
- Switching cost
- What it costs somebody to move from what they use today to what you built, data, habit, and being slower for a week in exchange for being faster later.
- The five reasons
- The five explanations for a flat usage graph after launch: nobody saw it, they saw it and did not understand it, they understood it and did not need it, they needed it but moving was too much work, or they tried it and it’s not good enough yet.
About this stage.
Why is nobody using my product after launch?
There are five reasons and they look identical from the outside: nobody saw it, they saw it and did not understand it, they did not need it, moving to you was too much work, or it is not good enough yet. Their fixes point in opposite directions, so guessing wrong costs you a quarter.
Does more marketing fix low usage?
Only if the reason is that nobody saw it, which is one of the five. In the other four, more traffic makes the problem more expensive rather than smaller — you are paying to send more people to the same exit.
How do I tell which of the five I am in?
Look at what happens after somebody arrives, not at how many arrive. How many got past the first screen, how many finished the main thing once, and how many came back on their own. Those three numbers separate the five reasons almost completely.