Global Entry Scan

GlobalEntryScan has been been making a slightly more revenue every month which is great to see.

The app has been on autopilot for a few months. The only times I have touched it is for one off requests for customers.

I really think this app is better, simpler, and cheaper than all competitors so it should continue to grow. Unfortunately, this is not a recurring purchase for users and the TAM is so low that it just isn't worth my time.

We have made $50 this month! woohooo!

For a few weeks I was allowing users to pay what they feel as fair. This led to users simply paying $1 to continue receiving notifications. After bumping this up to a $5 minimum, it has not hurt conversion at all. I am simply making 5x the revenue per customer!

The app has a really user experience and checkout process. Now it is time to get the app out in front of people. It is time for some marketing fun. (I am convincing myself it is fun.)

A few things I am going to try:

• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• SEO
• Twitter Ads?

Now that the eng work is complete and marketing movement takes time more than effort, I am starting to play around with some other projects.

It has been about two months of giving the product away for free and asking for donations through a text message immediately after signup. I have received, ~$20 in donations from over 100 users.

I am going to institute a freemium model where users can signup without inputing a credit card. The users then get 3 text notifications for free. If they would like more donations then they must pay what they think is fair. I will check back shortly.

In the last month I have gotten ~30 people to go to our landing page and sign up to receive free text alerts. It is enough to find bugs and talk to some customers about what is and what is not working.

I am currently giving the service away for free and asking users to donate if they find it useful. No one has donated. Given that this is costing me ~$70 a month to maintain I need to fix that.

I found that the Wix landing page although it was cool was not providing a ton of value. I feel that the product is self explanatory and the form is the only useful thing.

I moved the frontend to Carrd which is ~$10 annually. It also looks alot cleaner too.

Spent the last week building an MVP.

Built the landing page using Wix. At $50 a month to accept payments and forms, it is a bit expensive.

I built the backend using Python and send texts to users using Twilio.

I also setup a cron job and Twitter account to tweet a random appointment every 5 minutes.

This past summer I applied for TSA's Global Entry Program in anticipation of my European trip scheduled for November.

This whole process has been a pain. It has taken 6 months to get pre-approval from TSA and now I have to book an interview.

It turns out the interviews are almost impossible to book online because there is not clear cadence of when they become available.

I Googled for a scanner tool and found a few. THEY ARE TRYING TO CHARGE $39.

I am going to build a competing product and give it away for free.