Calculist

Calculist was on the front page of Hacker News for a several hours. Thankfully I received an email from my analytics tracking service about a traffic spike, and I was able to respond to the comments people were posting.

This caught me by surprise, but things turned out well, and it ultimately led to my first real paying customers.

Financial pressure has finally forced me to take Calculist out of side-project mode and turn it into a real business.

While preparing for this launch, I kept missing my self-imposed deadlines. There was always just a few more "release blockers" to address. What finally got me over the hump was accepting that there will never come a point where I actually feel comfortable launching. I had to admit to myself that these supposed "release blockers" were really no such thing, and there was actually nothing blocking me from launching other than my own fear.

There are so many things that could be improved, but sometimes you have to take a "ready, fire, aim" approach in order to get the ball rolling.

Even though I haven't been actively promoting Calculist for a while, there has still been a steady stream of signups. This week we hit the 1000 mark.

More importantly, a large fraction of those signups are still actively using the app months or years later, including many of the original Kickstarter backers from 2016.

The Kickstarter campaign successfully raised $2181. I wasn't sure going in if there would be enough interest to get past the $2000 goal. Luckily there was.

In hindsight, I wish I had put more effort into planning out how I would continue promoting the campaign after the initial push to get the word out. If I had done more prep work, I probably could have found more backers.