Conversion Funnels & the Banality of Success
Source: Dev.to
After the Build
What happens after you build the thing? Some might expect a profound feeling of satisfaction, a parade—figurative or literal—a media blitz of stupefied journalists, an outpouring of interest from venture‑capital firms, or an invite to billionaire parties. If only it were that easy. After you build the thing, you’ve only just begun.
Few people actually get to this point, so kudos if you have. You’ve accomplished something incredibly difficult, but no one knows it or you exist, which is a problem if you intend to make any money whatsoever.
The Founder‑to‑Influencer Transition
I’m shifting from “insane creative full‑stack mad‑scientist developer” mode into a lowly content creator who’s new to these processes and workflows. Writing this feels like an essay to myself—maybe it will inspire me to record something later, but perhaps Emstrata needs a thousand more features first.
The jump from founder to influencer is jarring. I don’t see myself as someone who needs all this attention, so being the face of a project is tough to compute. Other concerns that people don’t talk about often include:
- “What will person X I knew from high school think about me if I’m actually trying to follow my dreams?”
- “What if I’m creating a living record of a future failure and this project doesn’t pan out to the level of my most grandiose fantasies?”
The answer is essentially: Do you actually care? It may be an evolutionarily rooted mechanism to keep us in the in‑group. You need to decide how much you want this, but by now you should have already had that conversation with yourself. So, just live with it and trudge on anyway—videos don’t record themselves.
Content Creation vs. Development
While development rewards creativity and brilliant architectural decisions, content creation rewards disciplined, incremental improvement and persistence. Keeping yourself organized, building sustainable workflows, templatizing what works, and building on small successes are far more important in this new paradigm. You’ll likely need to spend some money on promotion without clear expectations for a great return.
Paid Promotion and Analytics
My advice for paid promotion is to collect useful analytics early so you can track improvement and develop clear pipelines for sign‑ups and subscriptions. I’ve set up a dashboard that tracks my sign‑up conversion funnel to see what might be preventing people who try an Emstrata demo from signing up for the real thing.
Without these analytics, the problem could be any of the following:
- The demo is boring.
- The fundamentals aren’t as interesting as I think.
- It’s too difficult or unobvious to sign up.
For instance, I recently added Google sign‑ups to my authentication system to make it even simpler to get started with Emstrata, and now I can track the impact of that change.
We’re no longer in fantasy‑creation land; we’re building according to the numbers. Visionary ambitions are being turned into a methodical, numbers‑based approach. Analytics collection and conversion funnels are the sacrifices visionary founders need to make so their message doesn’t fall on deaf ears—maybe one day that parade will come.