Gimbalst

Well, agreed, it is a slow start, but knowing I don't do crazy promotions, it is a fair start.

Let's see where it goes from here. This 3rd client is also the first one not in my inner circle of friends.

Lastly, most subscriptions are yearly, instead of monthly. I wonder what it says about the business model.

At least, it covers all the infrastructure costs since launch.

At last, after many years of staying in "beta" mode, I committed to make it a subscription product.

All the beta flags have been removed. I pushed the latest design (with still some bugs) and allowed anyone to signup.

I made a soft launch, just promoting to any beta active users, to leave them a few weeks to get accustomed to it.

So far still standing :-)

It was becoming important to have a legal structure behind Gimbalst, as money will start to be collected mid-september.

So I founded a sole entrepreneurship in switzerland, where I leave, to be able to manage all this.

Soon follows up meeting with accountants to understand what is going on tax wise. My main fear revoles around VAT for a B2B business.

Comming from Switzerland, I don't have to pay for VAT for the first 100k. But, that is only for my transaction in CH. I need to figure out how it goes for the rest of the world. Is it a per-country. Luckily, with my network, I managed to identify2 companies specialized in that that should be able to help me.

On the app front, I started to implement the design that my art director friend created. and implement the stripe process.

Boring stuff, and scary stuff, but exciting all the same :-D

Within less than a month, we go 100+ signups.

It was ahuge motivational boost for the developpment.

I invited most of them immediately, to get feedback.
Generally speaking, only a handful used the tool with their own project( That's to be expected as the tool is not necesseraly a tool you keep using all the time. Also it is a beta, so people might be careful in trying it)

Here we go, after 6 months working on a prototype, I put in place the landing page https://gimbal.st and set up a waiting list for collecting interest in the product.

I went with a very rude process:

• Landing page with a "Sign up email", that lands on a Mailchimp account.
• For each signup, I receive an email. I then attribute an "invite code" (an hash of the email + a salt) to allow people to signup to the Beta page. The code is set in the mailchimp as a variable.
• I automate the sending the email and the follow up email via mailchimp. When I affect the code, I add a tag that triggers the automation.

I wanted to make it simple and the feedback has been overwhelming, with more than 50 signups in a week.