Chime Social

The first name was "Squearl". It was sort of endearing in a quirky sort of way.

The idea of the name was to be a mash-up of "squirrel"—the fuzzy little tree-dwelling creatures—and "queue". Because you stash things away for later.

The .com was available.

But, it was hard to pronounce, hard to remember, and hard to spell.

I went with "Chime Social" or just "Chime" for short, hosted at chime.so.

The initial price point was $7/mo (and then a $69/yr) plan.

I raised prices to $9/mo. Before I did that, I announced on Twitter that I would have 10 spots at the initial price point and then I'd raise them.

They were gone in just 2 days, which was a big confidence booster.

New prices are $9/mo and $89/yr.

Dustin McCaffree (@terribledustin) was running a Twitter campaign where he would become your first customer if you didn't have one.

I had to wire in Stripe that day just so he could pay.

Dustin became my first customer at $7/mo.

It was my first customer for Chime ... and first customer ever!

I didn't overthink it.

I wanted to build an audience on Twitter this year (at the time, had ~30 followers). Twitter automation seemed interesting.

So, I started building "squearl" at the time with the tagline "Twitter scheduling for developers."

Built and launched an initial version within a few weeks.