My latest launch finally drove home an embarrassingly obvious lesson: attention matters.

It’s important to make something people want, yes. But step one is getting people to even look at what you’ve made.

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Over the past couple years, I’ve built products which went nowhere and a handful which made money.

This was expected — the super-optimistic base-rate for success is 5%. Roughly 5% of YC companies become unicorns, and among solo founders even the famous @levelsio claims a hit-rate of only 5%.

I commend myself for gritting my teeth and pushing out products, no matter how painful some launches have been. But I’ve been doing things backwards.

The name of the game is:

1. get people to look at you
2. convert them to your product
3. retain or upsell paying users
4. repeat at increasing scale

I’ve been doing things in reverse: building product while neglecting attention (step two before step one).

That’s shooting myself in the foot. Here’s an illustrative example.

A product launch got ~6,000 views on Reddit:

Over the next 24 hours, that led to 154 people visiting the landing page:

And 78 people going to the app page:

And then 19 people signing up for the app, and 0 paid conversions. Here’s what the entire funnel looked like:

This is an abysmally leaky funnel.

Nineteen people poked their head in the door then politely left. A weak negative signal, but too weak to call the product a failure.

Ideally, the next step involves making the funnel less leaky. There are several tweaks which might help: allowing a no-login demo, offering a free trial, etc.

But I can’t test these changes if I can’t — repeatedly — pour more people into the funnel. There are only so many times you can post on Reddit/Product Hunt/etc before you get flagged as spam.

So I need to somehow grow an audience: people interested in what I’m doing, who sign up to repeatedly hear about my new projects.

Of course it still matters whether I’m building something people want. However, I need to start prioritizing attention/growing an engaged audience — if only to iterate towards better product.

Twitter, for better or worse, seems to be a Schelling point for founders + creators to capture audiences. I’ll probably start there.