GQueues

After 14 months of a free beta product and amassing 10,000 users, I finally put a subscription model in place. Yes, that was a crazy amount of risk waiting that long to see if people would pay for the product. And I was definitely scared they wouldn't. But keep in mind there were no books about "lean startup" back then, so I was making all the mistakes myself!

Fortunately, it all worked out. I made $890 on the first day, $17k within the first 6 weeks, and by the end of the year was making more than the developer salary I had left in 2009.

Back when 37 Signals was pretty much the only one talking about bootstrapping, I launched the beta version of GQueues. It was built on Google App Engine, which had just launched a few months prior. And GQueues was one of just a few apps that allowed people to sign in with their existing Google account. This was revolutionary stuff back then!