Evolve Tracking Freelancer

About a week ago I did release a new version of Evolve Tracking Freelancer and changed some of the keywords. After that the app started to jump from place 28 to place 8 in the app store results for a specific keyword. Which in turn seems to translate into more downloads (which should not be surprising I guess). So ASO seems to really be a thing and I will further try to get more insights into what works and how I can position Evolve Tracking Freelancer as good as I can. It still feels kind of limited regarding what you can do with ASO, in comparison with what you can do with SEO but hey: It is what it is!

Additionally I twittered more often than usual. I try to be as consistent as possible with posting on Twitter, although it's one of those things I do not find easy.
Additionally I tried to post more on Reddit so I create more touch points overall where people might hear about Evolve Tracking Freelancer. I even did some small Posts in relevant groups on Facebook to help with that. As a result I am seeing people visiting the https://evolvetracking.com Website from Reddit, Facebook and Twitter.

So users looking at the Website are definitely up since I got more serious with spreading the word about it.

Plus: I also got a recommendation for the mobile version of the website from a Reddit user who happened to see a problem with it. Which I was able to fix. So getting some feedback was a nice Bonus.

That's it for now, be safe!

Following on from my last post about https://evolvetracking.com in which I set up a few goals that I would have liked to have achieved in 2019, here is the result:
I wanted to go from 411 to 500 downloads and, if possible, to 9-10 paying customers. Unfortunately, this was not the case. At the end of 2019 there were 457 downloads and it remained with 6 paying customers.

Overall, I am still satisfied with the first year and hope that the use of the app continues to increase.

Let's get to 2020

Because of the holidays and the many family visits, I slowed things down a bit. But then I wasn't completely lazy. In the past few months, I've mainly worked on the possibility of synchronizing the data between different installations of the app. So that one (for example myself ;-)) does not need to manually move data between for example the iMac and MacBook Pro installations.
I also added some currencies because the available currencies were quite limited before that.
Yesterday it was time and I was able to publish a new version that featured iCloud Sync. I supported the launch with posts on Twitter and Reddit and, as it looks, it also helped with the number of downloads and access to the product website.

With this bigger chunk out of the way, I now feel like I can increase the release cycle again, as I still have a lot of functionality on my list that I would like to add. I also decided to make the vision for @evolvetracking more specific. The aim is now to expand the functionalities with useful details, so that the app becomes a freelance office software that can be classified as a "professional" solution. That simply has more functionalities to offer than other time tracking software.

Of course, this also means a lot of work that I'll still have to put into @evolvetracking. But when I think of where the app was a year ago and where it is now, I know that a lot has happened there and that motivates me to stay tuned and I am confident that over time @evolvetracking will bring value to more and more users.

That's it for now, keep on hacking and stay healthy!

I launched Evolve Tracking in January this year merely as something that I thought would be basically a MVP. Looking back I don't think it was really a MVP at time of launch as it probably had stuff that was not needed for basic functionality.

At the same time there were so many areas that were unpolished both from a design perspective as a well as functionality goes. I knew that, but I wanted to achieve my first goal, which was to finally ship a product that I had built myself and which was in a state that could be useful to others as well.

I started to feel a little bit embarrassed about how everything looked. I was not satisfied with the status quo that I had achieved. So I started to feel a lot of self induced pressure updating the app to make it look more polished and to add more functionality which would make the app more useful.

I'm still not done and there is still a lot of things I can do better, I also have lots of ideas for missing functionality.

But what I learned was that I need to do one step at a time and be persistent. That persistence will lead to an product that has even more features than now and will continue to have nicer looking UI. That mindset also helped me to stop putting too much pressure on myself.

Through the remainder of the year these small steps and the persistence in doing them led to an app that I can happily say looks much better now and has much more important functionality than it had at the beginning.

Right now Evolve Tracking Freelancer accumulated 411 Downloads and 6 paying subscribers.

I don't think my app will ever explode in users or something like that. But what I'm hoping for is that the user base will gradually grow, so I'm planning for the long term.

My aim for the rest of this year is to get to 500 Downloads, keep the now active subscribers and add maybe 2 or 3 more subscribers.

If that works out I'm happy and either way I will be opening a beer or two at new years eve on having achieved all the stuff I mentioned earlier.

So long and happy building!

Today I released a new version which changed the dashboard. Before the change I noticed that I myself basically never really looked at the dashboard. So obviously what was displayed on it wasn't really important to me.
So I knew I had to change something and the aim was clear: I need a dashboard that is showing information which is important enough for me to want to look at it.
So I came up with a few ideas and I soon realized I also wanted users to be more engaged with the app.

So here is what I came up with:

• I added the possibility to add targets for your working hours, income and new customers.
  Users will see their progress in reaching all these targets directly on the dashboard.

• To drive up engagement, I also added a "Success Indicator" which shows you how you are doing in just one number.

• Finally I added the possibility to share the achievements directly from the dashboard. It will create a screenshot of all your dashboard graphs that you can share however you like. To make that data shareable you only see the achievement reached in % so if a user wants to share this, s/he doesn't share his financial data or stuff like this by accident.

I really hope that this is a step in the right direction, let's see.

Right now there are three running subscriptions. Two yearly and one monthly subscription. The monthly subscription was actually renewed this month, whereas another monthly subscription was cancelled. So my churn rate right now is 50%, which is not so good but given the minimal amount of running subscriptions probably also doesn't mean too much right now.

I'm in the finishing process of redesigning the dashboard, which I hope will be released next week and hopefully have a positive impact on engagement with the App.

I changed pricing from a fixed upfront price to In App Purchases which lets customers download and evaluate the App for free.

I'm now much more confident that only people who actually like the app will pay money. Whereas before, some of the customers might have been disappointed after paying and downloading the app because they were not sure what they will actually get.

For now there are two subscriptions. A monthly and a yearly subscription. Each subscription starts with a discounted first period. And the yearly subscription costs less than the monthly subscription for the same period.

Today a customer from Portugal downloaded the paid App. That is really exciting. The only thing that worries me is the point that s/he might not like it.
As of now you can not test the App without paying first, so you only see the website and the app store screenshots and have to decide based on that if you want to buy the App or not.

As cool as this first sold App license is, I think I will need to find a way for people to test the App first.

I guess I don't want to have customers that pay for the App only to find out that it is not what they thought it would be.

Basically I wanted to create some kind of In-App purchases for the App so customers can test the app before they buy it. But I didn't work on it because I was eager to release the app and In App Purchases would have required me to implement some more stuff which would have taken more time.

So let's wait for the reviews.

Wow, it took 2,5 years to finally feel confident enough to release Evolve to the public. The main reasons for this are the time constraints that I had just working on it as a side project. So a lot of work for customers came in the way of developing Evolve. The other reason is that I was completely new to developing for the Mac platform and there is still a lot to learn.
I'm actually not really satisfied with the current version, but I was very eager beginning this year to finally release it to the public. So I know I still have a lot todo. But eventually I hope I'm getting there. Let's see...

Today was the first productive work log entry that I created for one of my projects. It was a meeting on a clients location and lasted 4,5 hours. It is great to see that this work in progress can already be used although right now I could easily replicate its feature set just with a spread sheet :-)

After going back to freelancing from the co-ownership of a software agency. I had a lot of experience in dealing with clients and running a business. So I wanted to apply that knowledge also to my freelancing, so I could get off the ground fast and avoid some of the problems you eventually run into as a freelancer.

So one thing I knew was that I wouldn't be getting paid by the hours I worked but instead I would get paid for the bid I made upfront to my clients. Which basically means, that if I work longer on a project than I anticipated, the costs were on me.
I also knew that you can easily fall into some kind of self-deceiving trap were as soon as you get paid, you forgot how hard it was to get through with the project. And you think to yourself, that everything turned out good. But just because your brain starts to focus on the good things and tries to ignore the bad things in hindsight.

So I knew I needed to track my working times. Which was always something which I wasn't really consistent with in the past. Furthermore I did not only want to have a log of worked hours. I also wanted to be presented with how much money I actually made per hour per client. That information should only be one click away. Because it would be my core metric on how good work for a particular client really was (without the self-delusion).

After I couldn't find a software that looked promising to me, I started to think about creating it myself.
When I thought about it I came to the conclusion that if I, again, start working on a software for myself I should at least have the aim to get it far enough so I could release it to the public.
Because in the past I would start with a software project and just abandon it after some time. And I thought: "Not this time!" :-)

So I started working on "Evolve Tracking Freelancer" with the clear aim of shipping it to the public.