Hello everyone.
Recently I developed a new product called [Product Graveyard], a place to store your precious, abandoned, and failed projects.
Its function is very simple. After registering an account, you can post your product information, including name, introduction, current product’s death status (almost dead, dead?), and then fill in your experience and summary of the product. You will then have your own homepage where you can showcase your failed projects to the outside world.
Two days ago, I posted this product on a relevant forum, which aroused sighs of relief and was disliked by various people. for example:
-
My products are about to be abandoned, why should I still publish them on your platform?
-
Even if I want to post to your platform, why do you still charge?
-
Your platform is a fake demand, so let’s take advantage of it.
To be honest, these shocked me. Later, I reorganized and carefully sorted out the product logic.
Develop products -> more and more products -> there will always be products that fail -> don’t want to be forgotten or want to store them somewhere -> product graveyard
I personally think that there should be no problem logically. The key point is to show value to users. So I made the following optimizations:
- Modify the hero title of the homepage
It used to be: Kiss your product for the last time, say goodbye to it, and then start over.
Now it is: Brave indies face the death and failure of their products head on, say goodbye to them, and start over.
In comparison, you will find that I emphasized Brave, which I think is an essential quality for an independent developer.
- Added renderings
Essentially, this is a social product, so I took a screenshot of the user’s personal homepage and put it on the homepage to display it intuitively.
The latest effect is here https://productgraveyard.app/
Again, I will never be discouraged.
If this is basically a product directory but for dead products, I don’t really see the point in that.
I personally wouldn’t use that, not as a user nor as a developer who has had many failed projects.
As a user, I sometimes like to watch long format Youtube videos where the rise and fall of some company or product is explained as a story, or similar long format text content in a form of a well written article.
But would I browse some product directory of dead products? Nah.
And as a developer, I don’t see the incentives for me to write up about my died products and submit them to your platform. I don’t mean that I’m shamed of them or anything like that, I just don’t see the point. Why would I submit my dead projects to some platform, rather than spend that time to invest into my current projects? Especially I don’t see the value proposition for me if you are asking me to pay you money for me to write content to your platform about dead products.
There might be some good ideas here worth thinking and even developing, but you need to start by incentives. Why should people add their dead products to your platform?
Thank you very much for your comment.
You are right, I am thinking about how to add value and make users more willing to share content on my platform.