Bean Beast
App for keeping track of coffee recipes
After spending a while away from the app, I'm recommitting to it and reprioritizing working on it. I've kept my self from working on it for a while — mostly out of fear — but at the end of the day, I'm more likely to regret inaction than seeing the project through. I've finally worked through my remaining queue on client work, and am excited to recommit to my personal projects. It's been cool to see that people are still getting value out of the very small-scope app, even when I haven't been working on it, and it'll be cool to build it out more.
I have been doing some consistent marketing (although not so much this past week or so, due to moving abroad) on Reddit and Facebook communities that I'm in, and it's cool to see that I have passed the 200-install mark. I'm not entirely sure how to get analytics on how many of these people are actually using the app consistently, but it's definitely encouraging to see people finding it and installing it, as well as to be getting emails from engaged users.
Next step (in addition to new features, bug squashing, etc) is to prioritize building my email list here, because as of now I have no real way to keep in touch with my users.
The live app has been done for a while, but I've now managed to properly release it; notifying some of my initial beta testers and facebook community that I participate in.
One of my beta testers pointed me today to a reddit post of someone else who's wanting to create an app that covers many of the features mine has. They received a bunch of encouraging comments ("OMG I need that," "Great idea," etc.) but as I look at those comments through the lens of The Mom Test, they are indeed the optimistic future projection comments, and I am still not entirely sure people will actually consistently find value in the app, so we'll see about that as I continue on this next big step of marketing it.
Hollaaaaa! It's been a long road to get to v1, and I know I've only just scratched the surface of the work that's to come, but it feels good to have finally shipped this bloody thing. I reached out to a potential marketing partner who has a big audience in my niche, and he seems interested in potentially exploring a partnership, which is also encouraging. All in all, quite pleased to be making some good progress forward.
It's time to launch the damned thing.
It's basically ready to go and I have just a few more bugs to squash and features to polish off.
Something I've been a bit stuck on is whether or not to build a utility to migrate data from the beta version of the app to live, as all the data gets lost upon upgrading.
On the one hand, there aren't too many beta users actually using the app, so it won't impact too many people. And it will take a good amount of time to build this, I think.
But then on the other hand, it would really suck to lose all of your recipe data upon upgrading.
After a lot of work getting the app to baseline, I brought in my first round of beta users through some of the coffee facebook groups I'm a member of.
It's nice to have the app in the hands of actual users, but it of course is a vulnerable exercise, as I am giving myself the chance to learn that maybe this app just doesn't solve a very big problem for people, and maybe they won't use it a whole lot.
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