Chromabill
Meet your new finance companion.
It took some time but Chromabill is now doing $160 in monthly recurring revenue. I want to continue building in public and share with your my success and failures so I'm starting a free newsletter: Perfect Product.
Every week, I'll share insights on what's worked for me, what hasn't worked, and ways to grow your product.
So this is the first year that I've ever had to submit corporate taxes! Usually, I've only done personal taxes. However, In 2020, I launched my first C-Corporation: Chroma Capital, Inc.
One important thing to note. If you have a C-Corp or even an LLC, you'll owe a Franchise Tax (even if you've made $0 in profit) so keep that in mind as a future true expense.
We recently modernized the logo for Chromabill. Given that our team is building a next-gen personal finance app, it made sense to have a clean looking logo.
When you love your logo, it makes you fall in love with your product all over again. I'm really happy we made the change.
The goal for 2020 was to reach 500 users on our app Chromabill and although we didn't meet that goal in 2020, we reached it in the first week of 2021!! We now have over 500 users on Chromabill and we're so excited for all the updates we have planned.
To help with business operations and strategy, we brought on Jeff Allan to the team. He was on the founding team at Lottery.com and also recently exited his own venture, Echo Ridge. Excited to see where this partnership takes us!
We just launched our app on Beta List!
Chromabill is a personal finance application on a mission to accelerate a healthier financial future for the younger generation. We're enabling our users to manage their money better through color organization and gain a strong financial foundation along the way.
If you would like to support us, please feel free to ❤️ the posting!
It would help us out tremendously!
Starting a new chapter of Chromabill with Version 2.0 which migrates all user data into a secure cloud server.
This will enable our team to secure our users' data, deploy new features much more efficiently, aid with unit testing, and ensure that no data is lost as users move between devices.
This is a really exciting milestone for our team since we just finished off Q3 on a good start. We reached 300+ active users in the first three months of going live (we went-to-market in July 2020).
Here are some numbers from our Q3 review:
App Store Stats
- 315 Total Users
- 17% Conversion Rate to a Paid Membership
- Lifetime Plan is selling more than our Monthly Plan
- Ranked #36 in Top Gross Financing iPhone Apps in Canada
- Ranked #242 in Top Gross Financing iPhone Apps in the USA
Website Stats
- 485 Unique Visitors/month (Average)
- 1,000 Total Page Views / month (Average)
- 71% Bounce Rate (Average)
Highlights:
We increased conversion from 0% to 17%
We reduced the Website Bounce Rate from 74% to 69%
In Q4, we are going to focus on reducing churn, increasing retention, and growing our userbase of early adopters. We'll also be introducing new features onto the application every month from now until December.
Reached 100 users today on Chromabill. I'm beyond grateful to have reached this number in just a few days from launching our MVP. I'm going to focus this month on doing customer research, talking to as many users as I can to see if our assumptions are accurate and to tailor the future of Chromabill based on their needs / personal pain points.
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How did you go about getting your first 100 users?
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Mostly from friends / family and doing Apple Search Ads on specific keywords. I had to do a ton of experiments to see what worked and what didn’t. The biggest thing you can do is try to build your backlinks. Get your company seen as many places as you can (Twitter, Indie Hackers, Show Hacker News, Word of Mouth, etc). If you just rely on the app store, you won’t be successful. You have to do the legwork to help you rank higher on the app store. Hope this helped!
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So.......... Apple released an outdated version of our application at midnight today. This gave everyone the notification that our application was live on the App Store. Customers poured in and starting signing up but on an outdated build. Within minutes we already had 50 sign-ups.
I immediately had to take our application down from the App Store until the latest build could get approved (which Apple kept rejecting). Additionally, I had sent a blast message to all the new users regarding the situation. Luckily, we use Intercom so messaging was easy to do. However, this was quite a rocky launch for our team. We've pushed our official launch to tomorrow!
Pro Tip - Make sure the latest build of your app is available on App Store Connect or else Apple will publish the last one that was approved.
I made a post on the subreddit /startups on how to do a better job at vetting candidates. Here are the tips I had shared with the community to get to #1.
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Don't rush the process. I know you have roles that need to be filled, but that doesn't mean you should rush to get them filled.
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Create an internal candidate assessment sheet for every new candidate you interview. Create criteria that you want for those candidates (prior success, curiosity, work ethic, passion, preparation, etc. and rate them on how well they respond to your questions.
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You're a startup, so make sure your candidates can wear multiple hats. If you're looking for someone in sales, make sure they have experience with customer support. Most CEOs at early-stage startups do the customer service aspect themselves and hold many positions. Do any of you have tips you can share on how we can do a better job at vetting candidates? Let's discuss :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hhguhy/how_to_do_a_better_job_at_vetting_potential/
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