100DoTS Week 2 - Landing, Feedback & Invites
Hi everyone!
This is a summary of week 2 of my #100DaysOfTechStartup challenge with Chiffre.io. Not much has happened on the product side, but I've been busy on the marketing and social front. It's not as fun as coding, but I learned a lot.
TL;DR: The invites are at the end 😉
Newsletter
I moved this newsletter to Buttondown, a nice indie service to send emails for free for up to 1000 subscribers. The archives of previous issues of the newsletter are available here.
One of the nice features of Buttondown that I use with Chiffre is subscriber context: when a visitor subscribes to the newsletter, I can set some key/value metadata based on where they subscribed from: the landing page or the signup page, and know which pricing plan they were looking at.
Landing Page & Feedback
The only code I wrote last week was for the landing page, which now lists features and dummy pricing elements :
https://chiffre.io
The IndieHackers community has a group dedicated to landing pages, so I submitted Chiffre's, and got some interesting feedback: some people did not understand what the project was about. It makes sense: the first draft is vague, it does not show the product or what added value it gives compared to other privacy-friendly analytics solutions.
That's one of the hard challenges ahead: how to promote a core feature that is essentially invisible to the end-user, and that favours something that most don't care about (data ownership and ethics) ?
It seems my target audience was too broad, and not well-defined. Just slapping end-to-end encryption on an analytics solution is not a product, it's a technical solution in search of a problem.
Large businesses have money, but don't care about data ownership: see the rise of surveillance tech built around the free flow of personal data. If they cared about privacy, everything would be a cryptographic paradise and we'd all have Yubikeys on our keychains. But encryption is friction, and businesses avoid friction at all costs. Paying to get less options than Google Analytics (which is free) makes zero sense, especially if privacy is not in your stakeholders priorities.
The tagline on the landing page "Insight, for your eyes only" implies you have something to hide. From me and from anybody. End-to-end encryption is like an armour, it only makes sense to wear it if the data you want to protect is valuable. Is it the case for analytics ? I'm not entirely sure, but I might be wrong. It's more the possible deviations of mass data collection that can be a problem. So, is it a cannon to kill a mosquito ? Maybe.
The other issue is with the privacy-first approach. Not that it's a bad one, it's one of the fundamental values that lead me to build Chiffre. But there already are well-positioned solutions on that front: Fathom leads the way, Plausible and SimpleAnalytics not far behind. Small indie companies that placed their ethics as a founding principle of their product. Maybe the market does not need another privacy-first analytics solution, so pivoting on whatever Chiffre collects and how it shows it to you might be in the pipe for the near future.
Enough existential rambling, let's look at some data !
Platform Stats
The images did not send properly in the first issue, so here are the stats of the MVP running for a select few alpha testers:
It's so close to 10k ! Let's make it happen together: the owner of the project that generates the 10 000th event will receive a free-forever unlimited account 🎉 (if it's one of mine I'll get the next in the list).
Try Chiffre
If you want to give Chiffre a try and don't mind hitting some snags, you can sign up for a free account for the preview here:
https://chiffre.io/signup?code=100DoTSWeek2
This link will be up until Friday.
Tips to get started
- You will need a strong password, and store it somewhere safe (ideally a password manager). This is an end-to-end encrypted application, which means your password never hits the server, so I'll have no way to reset it for you if you lose it. However I have plans for a similar feature in the future.
- Once you're in, create a "Project", which corresponds to a website that you want to analyze (I need to work on the wording, naming things correctly is a developers bane).
- The deployment URL is where you will deploy the tracker script. Read on for details on domains and origins.
- Take a look at the Known Issues
If at any time you encounter a problem or need a hand, hit me up at francois.best@chiffre.io, I'll be happy to set you up.
About domains & origins
At the moment I'm filtering incoming events by origin domain, which means that a project configured for https://example.com will refuse events coming from https://preview.example.com or any other domain. If you want to allow more domains, let me know and I'll set you up.
I added that feature early to avoid spam from preview deployments, but it may be premature optimization.
Closing Thoughts
Before I leave you, I want to ask you a simple question:
How many daily visitors do you have on the most popular website you own or manage ?
Let me know on this poll on Twitter, or you can reply to this email. Thanks !
François Best
Founder | Chiffre.io