A trough of sorrow is the period after started, many startups get mentions by the media, caused the number of new (curious) users to spike for a short period of time. Then they have little or no new users, and the spiked users don't come back.<p>If you have experienced and overcome the situation, can you share your story? And how?<p>I have been struggling to continue to grow my product, and hope to find some inspiration<p>Many thanks
The vague answer for my own question.<p>#1 Andrew Chen blog: Stay alive, dealing with the problem by identifying the root of the problem. Is it about the product, the customer target, or the founder?<p>#2 A quote from Paul Graham tweet: "If you don't know what you need to do, figure it out."<p>#3 Every startup goes through this period, treat the spike as an illusion (not real, and ignore it). Setup analytics early to learn from the users and the product and iterate to find small improvements
To me this seems like visitors have been labeled users. Media mentions can drive visitors, but visitors only become users by conversion and retention. Sure it's a big ego boost when people visit my site and if I'm blogging that's what matters. And if I'm running paid ads, visitors make me money and Google has tools to help me do that and bloggers have spilled a lot of pixels writing about it.<p>But a product is different and driving people to the website is not the direct mechanism for making money. Sales are how products make money and that's where metrics need to be taken. Sales is harder than SEO and PR.<p>Good luck.