2019 Stats for Sheet Gurus SMS, 18k messages delivered

Sheet Gurus SMS is an add-on installable within Google Sheets that lets you send mass dynamic text messages: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sheet-gurus-sms-send-text/caifjmaanhnclfninjjfhbmigekmkeeh?src=ih

The add-on was first published to the Chrome store in mid August of 2019, so while it has not existed for a full year yet I figured I would wrap up 2019's stats for its first 4 months.

SMS text messages delivered: 18,461
Users registered: 423
Avg messages sent per user: 43.6
Stripe-verified revenue: $432.20
Additional revenue: $96

Spam messages filtered: ~4,000

At the time of my first post on IH regarding this project you can see I was quite disheartened by the amount of users who abused this add-on to send mass unsolicited spam/marketing texts. These users would often also create new accounts, use up the free starting credits, then repeat over and over sending hundreds of free messages each.

At the time of launch, I had nothing to combat this. However I'm happy to say that since then I've been able to implement multiple countermeasures to protect against actions that break the add-on's TOS, namely locking the majority of free credits behind SMS verification, as well as finely tuned shadowban criteria for suspicious accounts.

Regarding anti-spam, the most exciting development on the horizon is the deployment of a simple machine learning model I'm working on to determine and auto-flag suspicious accounts and messages without manual oversight needed. Luckily for me, spammers have given my model thousands of messages to learn from ;)

As for the positive side of things, I honestly did not know if anyone would use this add-on when I first created it. I have spent $0 in marketing still and am therefore pleased with the adoption it has seen so far. I hope to 5x the user count in 2020.