BrainTool

I was surprised this Saturday when I started to get a steady stream of comments and support requests on the BrainTool Web Store listing. It turned out that I'd had a very positive review posted on ZDNet (https://www.zdnet.com/article/every-google-chrome-user-should-try-this/) that subsequently showed up in the Google News feed for a bunch of folks who were likely users. I spent most of the weekend responding to questions and trying to figure out why BrainTool would not install for Linux/Chromium users!

I'm not sure there are any clear lessons learned but some observations include:

• I got a tiny trickle of users with my postings here on IndieHackers and various subreddits. Getting a targeted news article published made orders of magnitude difference.
• The article came about because I googled relevant terms, tracked down authors and cold emailed. This was one of those fire-and-forget emails that a week later hit the bullseye.
• The first few dozen independent engaged users has given me great feedback. The expected, that my Auth flow is the trickiest hurdle to getting a user running, and the unexpected, the head smacker that of course everyone would want an existing bookmark import function, and everything in between.
• The Chrome Store metrics and comments do not get updated frequently. I'm still waiting for reviews to be posted publicly for which I got notification emails the day before yesterday. Ditto download numbers. I've had >20 people report issues installing on Chromebooks but my total downloads as of now show as 13, something doesn't add up!
• The hardest lesson, capitalization matters! (BrainTool128.png !== Braintool128.png). That was the cause of my Chromebook failures.

PS BrainTool is up on https://betapage.co and https://www.producthunt.com/posts/braintool RN. I'd appreciate any upvotes! (Plus check it out on https://braintool.org)

I have a poor memory and have been experimenting with note taking techniques and apps forever. Over a sabbatical last year I came up with a plan for an MVP, started exercising my coding muscles and got BrainTool to the point where it was usable for me. Since then I've been enhancing and tinkering with it on the side.

Over the Summer I decided to launch it publicly and had some family members check it out. Turned out there were many install and authorization issues, followed by a number of App Store hurdles to jump through (web site validation, collateral text and images, privacy policy etc). But finally it was publicly available this weekend!

Having looked at the install number sit at 8 all day I'm realizing I'll need to do actual work to get folks to look at it! I've used a lot of alternative similar tools and I think mine is pretty good. I'm hoping to give it some visibility and get feedback to evolve it to be more useful to more people.