changelog page gets 11 views a month and users still ask for shipped features Changelog

A changelog page is reference material, not a channel. Nobody wakes up and browses your release notes. Two things moved the needle for us:

• a single line of in-app copy that only appears on the screen the change touches, dismissable, and only shown to accounts created before the ship date. Discovery of the feature it pointed at went from something like 4% of active accounts to 38% in a fortnight.
• an email, but only for changes that alter something a person already does by hand. Roughly one entry in five qualifies. Everything else is noise and trains people to ignore you.

The page still earns its keep for a different reason: support links to it, and anyone evaluating you will read a year of entries to check the thing is alive. 11 views a month is a perfectly good number for that job.

11 views is not really the failure. Go read your entries out loud. Mine were basically a git log with the commit hashes taken out - "improved export performance", "fixed an issue with filters". Nobody can tell whether that affects them, so they do not read the next one either.

Rewritten as "CSV export of 50k rows now finishes in about 4 seconds instead of timing out" the same entry gets clicked, because it names a thing somebody was annoyed by last Tuesday.

In-app beats every other option by a wide margin, but watch out for badge fatigue. We put a dot on anything new for two weeks and within a month people were dismissing the dot without reading, which is worse than not having it because now you have taught them the signal is meaningless. Cap it at one active announcement at a time and let it expire.

New to shipping in the open here, so mostly a question: does anyone put the changelog on the marketing site rather than behind the login? Ours is behind auth and I have started to think that is why nobody sees it, including the people deciding whether to sign up.

Put an RSS feed on it and link it from the footer. Costs an hour, and it is how the handful of people who actually care - integrators, a couple of power users, the person writing a comparison post about you - stay current without you emailing anyone.

"That must be new" about a feature from March is honestly the most complimentary version of this problem. At least they found it.