SixBySix: Three Month Review

Mike Gatward
We Are Contrast
Published in
9 min readApr 1, 2015

--

I don’t know about you, but the last 3 months have been pretty crazy for us. We’ve spent nearly 650 hours, launched 3 projects, gained nearly 400 Product Hunt upvotes, appeared on two podcasts and written 15 blog posts. After launching our third project, Outstanding Bar, 2 weeks late, we decided to take “mid-season” break and start month 4 in April. This has given us some time to reflect on everything that’s happened, and we wanted to share what we’ve learnt so far.

Aside: SixBySix

Now, you may well be wondering what all this is about? You can read the long story here, but in short, CONTRAST is made up of Mike and Fred and after failing to launch anything in 2 whole years, we set ourselves the challenge to launch 6 projects in 6 months. SixBySix is our way of forcing ourselves to learn how to launch. Anyway, back to it, here’s our story so far.

The story so far

Month 1: HowsItGoin

HowsItGoin was the first project of SixBySix and the first real product we had ever launched. It’s a simple web app where you create a list of questions, and then give daily answers. You can then see reports and graphs on how you’ve answered over time.

When we first started planning HowsItGoin, it seemed fairly small, and we thought we would be able to get beta testers using it fairly quickly. We totally underestimated how long everything takes. Nearly 8 weeks later, with 250 hours invested, we finally launched.

Since launching, HowsItGoin has received a total of 125 upvotes on Product Hunt, 325 registered users, 5,640 visitors, 11,733 pageviews, 1409 questions created and 3247 answers given. We are really happy with how much attention HowsItGoin received, but the stats above don’t tell the whole story. As you can see from the graph below, after being featured on Product Hunt, there was an influx of users to the site. However, the following weeks saw a severe drop off in weekly users, culminating with just 24 people using the site last week.

HowsItGoin

So what went wrong?

Ultimately, the issue we faced was getting users to come back to the site. Looking back, HowsItGoin was missing a piece of key functionality which would have helped this — reminder emails. Despite trying to make something as simple as possible, we had made something that people (ourselves included) would never get round to using. This taught us a key lesson: keep the scope small and as simple as possible.

For a full breakdown of our launch checkout ‘Month 1 — Introducing HowsItGoin’ & ’48 hours later — Stats from Product Hunt’.

Month 2: FlashTabs

After spending the first couple of weeks unable to decide which idea we were going to pursue, we finally settled on FlashTabs, a simple chrome extension that adds flash cards to your new tab screen. Once again, this seemed like an idea with a fairly small scope, and, even though we had less than 2 weeks to launch, we were confident it would be ok.

Month 1 had overran by quite a bit, in fact, we’d missed our deadline so badly that we approached February 26th, just 2 days before our planned launch date, with no functional code in sight. Ultimately, despite the smaller scope, we still ended up missing our monthly deadline for Month 2.

In the end, we launched FlashTabs 10 days late, having spent just under 77 hours working on it. Since the launch there has been a total of 3966 visitors to FlashTabs.co, 1697 weekly users on the extension itself and 100 Product Hunt upvotes. FlashTabs was also featured on the Chrome Web Store as part of a special Product Hunt collection, and was even included in a “10 Must-Have Chrome Extensions For 2015” list.

All of this has meant that while FlashTabs saw a decline after its initial launch on Product Hunt, it has since almost doubled its weekly users.

FlashTabs 7 Day Active Users

The continued popularity of FlashTabs goes to show how vitally important it is to remove barriers that hinder access to your product. FlashTabs had one marked difference to HowsItGoin, once installed, every time you opened a new tab, FlashTabs was there. It’s inescapable, so much so that some find it offputting, but for those that really desire to learn it can be really useful.

You can find out more about FlashTabs at FlashTabs.co, on the Chrome Store or in our introductory post.

Month 3: Outstanding Bar

Month 3 saw the release of Outstanding Bar, an easy to use WordPress plugin that adds a customisable MailChimp newsletter signup bar to the bottom of your site. We spent just 60 hours building Outstanding Bar, and had hoped that by choosing an idea that had an even smaller scope than Month 2, we would be able to launch on time. Once again though, life got in the way and we ended up launching just over 2 weeks late.

We initially soft launched on March 16th to a (very) small number of people as we wanted to make sure that the plugin didn’t have any major flaws when used in the wild. On March 22nd, once we were happy everything was working as expected, Fred popped a message on Maker Hunt and shortly after Violeta Nedkova submitted us to Product Hunt.

Analytics outstandingbar

We’re really happy with how the launch went. To date, Outstanding Bar has received 171 upvotes (beating HowsItGoin by nearly 50), 3899 visitors to OutstandingBar.com and 142 plugin installs. We were also included in two articles, though it does seem that they were both by the same person.

Things weren’t all rosy though, we almost immediately received our first 1* review, soon to be followed by another, as well the first few of support & feature requests. We’re not letting those reviews get us too down though, as there are plenty of others who are happily using the plugin. As with any review system the users with a negative experience are always more likely to post about it, so it’s hard to get a good grip of the overall picture.

For the full story checkout our intro post, for more info head to OutstandingBar.com, and you can download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

What we’ve learnt so far

Start Small

“Start Small”—Justin Jackson

We couldn’t agree with Justin more. We honestly thought HowsItGoin was a small, simple idea. How hard could it be to create a simple web app where you can set questions, answer them daily and view your past answers? Quite hard, as it turns out. One small feature, the ability to delete questions, added huge complexity. It affected everything.

The key thing we learnt from HowsItGoin is to be meticulous when it comes to scope & to understand, as best as we can, the impact ‘small’ features can have on our timeframe.

We managed to pick smaller projects for both months 2 & 3, however we still have a way to go as we still weren’t able to launch on time. We actually found that our last 2 projects, despite spending substantially less time on them, have been far more successful than HowsItGoin. This further reinforced our need to heavily limit our scope. It’s really tempting to add a lot of nice shiny features to a product, but truth be told the core essentials are all that’s needed for the initial launch. If the core of your product doesn’t work, then the extra features probably won’t save it. However if your product’s core works great, you’ll have enough to keep people satisfied until you have time to figure out what features should be added. A big benefit of this is having real feedback from real users about the features they actually care about.

Repeatedly making smaller projects rather than one big one has really helped us start to understand our capacity. We work hard at what we do and put in all the hours we can (nearly 650 hours and counting), but we’re not superhuman. We all have a limited amount of time available, and we’ve started to get a handle on how much we’re able to get done. We’ve still not nailed it yet, but we’re definitely making progress.

The Community is awesome

Another big thing for us has been the community. When we were starting out we emailed Justin Jackson asking where people were hanging out. He pointed us in the right direction, and since then we’ve joined the communities over at #startup & larachat amongst others.

One of the unexpected bonuses of getting involved in the community has been the job opportunities. Within a couple of weeks of being on #startup Fred had connected with a guy on there who worked for a cool remote startup, who then introduced him to the company & arranged an interview. It didn’t work out in the end, but it was great to have the opportunity to get to the interview stage simply due to a recommendation. A few weeks after that, someone else recommended the TechLondon community, so Fred joined and, spotting a job post, applied, went through the interview process & ended up getting the job. So getting involved in the community landed Fred with a great new job. Pretty sweet.

Outside of career advancement, the community has been great for general support & encouragement. It really makes a difference when you connect with like minded people, for us it’s been inspiring getting to know people early on the journey and those further along and hearing their story. We’ve had a lot of feedback on our projects, and even had some free bug testing from the guys at BugNet.io, who you should definitely go & check out.

We can actually do this

We’ve tried launching projects before and failed pretty miserably. In fact our only ‘success’ was a small joke site, aretheNSAwatchingme.com, which was a success inasmuch that it actually launched, but less so in terms of any traction gained.

So for us, going into SixBySix we had one big question, can we actually do this? Will tight deadlines, smaller scope & building in public have any effect? Will we ever gain our first user?

It turns out we would, and this surprised us. We really didn’t expect anyone to use HowsItGoin, and, before launching on Product Hunt, we were quite pleased with the handful of people who had given us positive feedback and started using the site. It’s fair to say, our progress so far has exceeded our expectations.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “well can I do it?” we encourage you to give it a shot. While we are enjoying launching 6 projects in 6 months, its not for everyone. We’re hoping that by taking what we are learning from SixBySix, you’ll be able to pick a project, set your timeframe and launch. We’d love to hear from you if you do or if you have any questions feel free to drop us a reply in the comments, email us on our site or tweet us a twitter.

We’re not alone

Shortly after starting SixBySix, we found out that we weren’t alone in attempting to build X products in X months. So far we’ve come across Pieter Levels launching 12 in 12, Dylan Feltus with 9 in 9 and Justin Jackson launching a new product each week. We’ve enjoyed following the progress of others who are attempting similar things to us. It’s helpful to hear about the challenges they’ve faced and how they got round them. If you know of anyone else doing something similar to SixBySix drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

We’re halfway there

The past few months have been great & we’ve learnt a lot, but this is only the halfway point. We’ve taken a midway breather but from April 1st we’re all go again. If you want to keep up with how it’s going then follow us on twitter and sign up to our minimal monthly mailout, where we round up how the month’s gone and let you know what we’ve launched.

Between the initial draft, edits & publishing, this blog post took a combined total of 19 hours, 22 minutes.

--

--