The first few days actually looked promising. got some decent initial traction from X and Reddit (first slide). was hyped to see people actually clicking through and exploring.
But then I checked the cohort retention and it was a bloodbath. Most of my Feb cohorts had a week 1 retention of about 2-4%. I spent a few nights just staring at the screen, thinking the product was useless or that I’d built something nobody wanted. Honestly was already preparing to sunset the project or do a massive pivot.
Before giving up I looked into the performance metrics. Realized my LCP was spiking like crazy (check the graph below). Basically half of those users were staring at a blank loading screen for nearly 10 seconds and bounced before even seeing the UI.
Spent the last few days optimizing DB queries and fixing some caching issues. Difference is night and day now. Stupid mistake to make during a launch, but I guess that’s part of the learning curve.
Lesson learned: Don’t just track who is coming to your site, track if the site is actually loading for them lol.
Anyone else had a launch "fail" for purely technical reasons?
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