Check Sheet

We had our second paying customer sign up for a monthly subscription, 100% growth! 😛

They signed up completely organically as well a few days after first installing the app which was a pleasant surprise. I was kind of assuming most of the early sign ups would require some manual discussion back and forth before they sign up. I reached out to them via email to ask about how they found us, offer to answer any questions etc but have yet to receive a response.

It's been a crazy year in so many ways. I've spent a lot of my spare time over the past 5 months working on refining Check Sheet which has been a welcome distraction at times.

I've had some great feedback from users who have found use cases for Check Sheet that I hadn't considered. A number of people are using it as part of their process of dealing with COVID-19 which certainly wasn't in my original set of use cases.

I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to try and monetise Check Sheet so over the past month I've worked on adding a paid subscription plan alongside my current free usage tier. The free usage tier limits users to being able to send 500 notifications per month. A couple of users contacted me pretty early on saying they were running into these limits and asking if they could be increased. So before I'd even started on integrating subscriptions I placed these users on a "trial" by essentially hard coding in their user ids and conditionally increasing their limits. MVP! After a bit of research and discussion with the users on the trial I settled on charging $4.99 a month in exchange for an increased usage limit of 2,000 notifications per month. After signing up myself first to double check everything was definitely working I was pleasantly surprised to have one of my users who were on the trial convert to a fully paying user today! Another user on the trial has asked about being able to pay annually so that's next up on my list.

There's still a lot of work to do but that is by far the most satisfying $4.99 I've ever earned 🥳

After giving myself around 2 months to work on Check Sheet full time I've gone back into full time work, the bills still need paying! It was great to have a solid block of time to work on it and I got a lot done. I'm very much still planning to continue working on it but it'll be back to evenings and weekends.

After hovering nervously over the button for longer than I care to admit I put Check Sheet live in the G Suite Marketplace today. It's been a more work than I anticipated and I've struggled at times with being too much of a perfectionist but I'm proud to see it live in the store. At the time of writing I've had 2 installs that aren't friends/family, here's to many more!

Check it out and let me know what you think 😅

https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/check_sheet_notifications/239755856136

Yesterday was the last day of my contract software engineering job, whilst I gradually start to look for my next role I've decided to give myself around a month to work on Check Sheet full time and see how it goes.

I'm hoping I can get the first version released into the G Suite Marketplace by the end of the month. Fighting my inner perfectionist is going to be tough but I'm really keen to get some people using a basic version of it and see what they think.

After some hacking around for a week or so I made and pushed my first commit to GitHub.

At the very start of a project I often end up with quite a big first commit as I don't want to spend too much of the initial "exploration" phase worrying about descriptive commit messages etc.

Here's to many more 🚀