
How did you overcome 'Trough of Sorrow' period? - docuru
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&#x27;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
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docuru
The vague answer for my own question.

#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?

#2 A quote from Paul Graham tweet: "If you don't know what you need to do,
figure it out."

#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

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brudgers
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.

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.

Good luck.

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docuru
Thanks @brudgers, I guess label users from the spike as visitors is similar to
“curious users”.

What is your blog by the way?

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brudgers
I don’t maintain one. I try to avoid writing in the second person because the
generalized “you” doesn’t have a blog and also because people often take “you”
personally. Both impede communication and my maintaining a blog is not
particularly relevant to the question.

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docuru
Oh don’t get me wrong, I really like reading blog, since it usually share
personal experience. And I often ask if someone have a blog to learn from it.

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brudgers
My apologies for not being clear. What I meant was I talked about blogs in the
first person to communicate my main point more clearly. It was hand waving
over a lot of details that fall between having a blog and my weasel worded “I
don’t maintain” because those details don’t support my main point and that’s
the only reason I am comfortable with the factual ambiguity.

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docuru
Oh, I got your point now :)

