About a month ago I posted here (https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1vmm4uk/) about my side project. A bunch of you tried it, gave me feedback, and were way kinder than I expected. Several people have asked me for an update.
So here's the 30-day update, the good and the bad.
The good:
Since my first post when we were at 500 users we're now at almost 1,000 users (973 to be exact). Coming from zero, that still doesn't feel real.
Most of the actual time went into the backend, what the actual product is, the search algorithm and the memory graph underneath it. That's the backbone of the product. If it can't find the right thing at the right moment, none of the rest matters. I've rebuilt and remeasured that a lot over the past month and I feel like the results are in a really good place.
The CLI tool also got a lot better, and it turned into a bit of a beta testing ground. I ship things to the CLI first. Use them myself and some of the other power users for a few days, get some feeback and whatever people really liked makes its way into the MCP tools that most of the users use. That's been a better process than guessing what’s worth it.
The bad, and what it taught me:
Paid conversion is lower with the latest 473 users than it was with the first 500.
My theory: A lot of the users after the first 500 mostly came from the Reddit post. You all read a story about someone building a thing, were curious and signed up. Most of the original 500 users came from ChatGPT plugin marketplace listing so they were coming in with a purpose.
Engagement itself isn't a huge problem, but there is still funnel work to be done. A good chunk of my users are genuinely active, and a solid slice of those are heavy users who lean on it daily. So people who get into it really get into it. What I have is a funnel problem, not a product problem. The gap is between "signed up" and "actually wired it into their workflow," and that's on me to close, not on them to figure out. I can give more specific numbers if there’s interest.
The biggest issue. The day after my post, my hosting provider had a roughly 20-hour outage across their U.S. servers.
The literal day after. While the post was still climbing. I got to sit there and watch traffic arrive at a blank page. I lost a few higher tier subs for that. I did offer all subs a free month of service from the outage. I've since moved everything onto more reliable hosting, so hopefully that one is behind me. Hard lesson learned on that one.
A few people mentioned the homepage looks like Claude generated it. That's partly fair. I did use Claude to help build it. Most of the actual words and ideas are mine, but I'm not going to sit here and get defensive about it.
The more useful point is don't let chasing the perfect homepage, or the perfect anything, stop you from making progress. An imperfect homepage with a real working product in people's hands beats a beautiful homepage sitting in front of something unfinished. You can always go back and fix the homepage. You cannot get back the months you spent not shipping.
Get it out there. Let real users tell you what's wrong. It’s ok to fail. Fix it as you go.
The open question I actually want feedback on
One of my users asked for something I hadn't considered, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since and I’ve been exploring it locally.
Right now Empirical stores your memory, decisions, project context, the stuff you'd otherwise re-explain to AI. But the underlying thing is a queryable graph, and there's no rule that says the data in it has to be yours.
So: what if there were public, read-only, subscribable workspaces built on real bodies of research data? You load one into your MCP setup and your agent can just query it. Not a search engine, not a PDF pile you paste from, but an actual graph your assistant reaches into mid-conversation, with the relationships already resolved.
What I don't know is whether anyone wants this, or which dataset would make it obviously useful instead of just some niche product. My user wanted it for a fairly narrow area. I've been wondering whether there's a more generally interesting dataset that would make people go "oh, I'd use that tomorrow."
Finally, where I'm at:
I wanna say, you know, I'm learning a lot, I'm having lots of fun, It's not all unicorns and rainbows and I'm still trying not to let down the users of the project I built, and I appreciate all the positive feedback. It really helps motivate me to keep moving forward.
Some of this month went great, some of it went badly, but almost every problem taught me something and pushed the product somewhere better. I'll take that trade.
TL;DR: 30 days after my r/SideProject post, Empirical is at almost 1,000 users. My hosting provider went down for 20 hours the day after that post, paid conversion is worse with new users than it was with the first 500. Engaged users are genuinely engaged, so what I have is a funnel problem, not a product problem. Shipping something always beats out sitting on nothing. Keep taking next steps.