A Month of Gratitude

So I officially launched The Daily Gratitude Drop one month ago. It's entirely a guerrilla effort - I spent nothing on marketing. Just a post to ProductHunt (which flopped), a post here (where I talked about it), and the usual bothering of my friends and family. Luckily my kids, all in college, are more extroverted than me and have done what they can to pester their friends as well.

What is the Daily Gratitude Drop?

It's a simple site that encourages daily gratitude practice by showing you 5 crowdsourced, anonymous thank-you notes every day. No signups, no ads, no drama. Just gratitude. The idea is to take one minute out of your day to focus on the good things in life. You can also add your own notes if you'd like.

How's It Going?

Well right off the bat, we've got 367 unique visitors. And, let me tell you, I don't have that many family and friends! So at least I know the project's gotten in front of strangers, who hopefully found it useful.

People have added 143 thank you notes to the database! The site needs 5 notes/day to keep running, so we're basically right at the minimum of where we need to be. Honestly I'd like a much bigger queue, but I'm happy with how we've done so far. Am I writing some of them? Yes, but that was always part of the deal - there's plenty of stuff I'm grateful for, too. I always intended to make something I would use myself.

Time on site? A little under 2 minutes. Which for most sites would be crazy, but it's right in line with what we expected. The tagline even says "One minute, zero noise." It's not supposed to be a very sticky site. So we'll call this a win!

I have event tracking on all the different things users can do, so here's a quick summary:

• "next note" tracks at a little over 5times/user, which is great! That basically means that all users are reading all 5 notes, just like we wanted.
• "heart" clicks (for notes you especially like) is only being used by about half the users, who are using it 3 times on average. The three times makes sense, it wouldn't be a good feature if every user just liked every note all the time. But I'd like to see more users interact with that feature.
• the "calendar" icon, which allows the user to add a daily reminder to come back to the site, has been used a little over 10 times (I did add that feature late). Whether or not those users are adding the calendar notification, I can't tell, but at least people see the feature and know it's there.

Next Up

The site needs more regular visitors, no question about it. I stressed that this was a "no signups" site, and I mean it, but I'm wondering whether to add an optional email collector that I could use to send people a morning teaser email.

I think the heart feature may need a tool tip or something else to make it clear what it is.

There's always room for more analytics. I want to get a handle on the "notes per user" metric, which I currently don't have. I can see the total number of notes and users, but I cannot see which users are writing the notes. You can add more than one, but do people know that?

I've toyed with the idea of a "Need an extra boost of gratitude?" feature that would allow users, for example, to see yesterday's drop if they missed it. That would allow for some more interactivity/stickiness, as well as an opportunity to add hearts and possibly decide to add your own notes.

Anyway, that's it for now. If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know! And of course don't forget to stop by and share what you're grateful for!