Update: February 2017
Wow, February legitimately just flew by. That was a quick four weeks.
Let’s dive into things, shall we?
Victories
- Spoonbill has momentum! My goal last month was to hit 200 users and that goal got crushed (in a good way) thanks to an unexpected Product Hunt launch and a bunch of word of mouth marketing after that. It’s now growing fairly steadily, though the increased attention means I’m focusing more time and effort towards it (which is still non-profit) than I’d like.
- Floradora’s marketing push went great! I launched on Two Dollar Tuesday, which got a big jump in purchases, pushing Floradora briefly up to the top 10 in Productivity on the Mac App Store. It’s since come back to earth, but the groundswell of users has made a noticeable impact on steady-state sales since.
Setbacks
- I missed two of my other goals from last month – namely marketing Barback and launching iOS Numbers. This was understandable – after Spoonbill started doing really well, I focused my attention there – but it was still a miss.
- Heroku expenses are down, but I had to bump them back up to accommodate all the new async work necessary for the new users. I’ll try and bring it back down (by migrating the async architecture I’m using) this month.
What’s next
This month should be pretty simple – a couple small deliverables and mostly working on Spoonbill.
- Floradora 1.1 – adding attachments (the most commonly requested feature) and a couple bugfixes.
- Barback 4.1 – fixing a couple stray bugs and adding quality of life stuff.
- Lots of small Spoonbill stuff so I can ride the wave: goal of getting this to a point where it’s relatively sustainable. (It is, but I still feel like I need to babysit it every morning.)
On the nose of it, this won’t be a high-revenue month, but if I can sustain the momentum of Spoonbill then I can start looking into monetization possibilities. (Right now I’m thinking either ads in the daily email or premium features – neither are really thought through, at least yet.)