Invoker

Invoker is now perfectly prepared for your next late night coding session. With version 2.6.0 we introduce the new dark mode! It's designed to be easy on the eyes and doesn't dazzle you when opening up your project at 3 a.m. in the morning. Besides that, it looks simply amazing and can be used around the clock, just set your preference in the settings.
But not only the look of the theme has changed - we also updated some illustrations and style elements, so keep your eyes peeled!

In addition to that, we added some new features to make working with Invoker even more enjoyable.

Check out the full feature list of this release and some videos and screenshots of the beautiful new dark mode on our blog:
https://beyondco.de/blog/invoker-2-6-0

This is the first release that is published via Beyond Code.

We've changed the pricing model to a subscription of $10/mo or $99/yr and going to sell a lifetime license on launch. The lifetime licenses will be limited to 200 sales and cost $249.

In general, the app got many new features since we acquired it and a new marketing site.

We've acquired Invoker and don't want to keep the responsibility for new sales until we have changed major things in the application. This is why we have added a newsletter sign up to the current site and working with our team on version 2.

Version 2 will be a free upgrade for version 1 customers.

Today, I'm extremely stoked to announce that we just completed the process of Invoker acquisition by Beyond Code. The guys got in touch with me at the right time. I'm working hard on a b2b startup now, so I'm super happy that Invoker now has great maintainers, and I have a free space for new ideas.

So, it was almost 4 months since the launch, and we just passed $4500 milestone. Can I call this a success? Definitely!

The day before launch I didn't have a developer-related audience at all. Then in just three months, I made it to 260 followers on @invokerdev, gained 150 followers on my Twitter account, and (probably, the most important)  my email list grew from zero to more than 800 subscribers.

I also made an extra $4500 from the app that I was building for myself. So I think it's a pretty good start for a "newbie" in the Community.

Keep moving forward!

After the end of the activity, Invoker hasn’t brought a single sale. By the end of April, the app made $1443 (there was one refund) in total.

As the contest was successful, I decided to re-invest some revenue into the advertisement.

I bought a sponsored post on Laravel News. The post came out on May 11th, and within the next few weeks, the app sold on $1519.

I launched a combined contest via ContestKit. The idea was to let people leave their emails and share the tweet to double up their chances (I was giving away 3 licenses via Twitter and another three via Email). And it worked!

The first day brought me 16 sales ($240), and with the next 10 days, it made 45 sales and sold on $675 in total. As soon as the contest is finish, I emailed all “non-winner” contestants and offered them a 20% discount, which shouldn’t have made any difference considering the app’s price.

In the next few days, it was sold on $543 more, some subscribers didn’t even apply the promo code.

I posted about Invoker on Product Hunt, Reddit, and my Twitter account. I didn’t know what to do next and just waited. I haven’t had any audience at all, and within 5 minutes after launch, I thought “No one is going to buy it. You should have built the audience first”.

At that moment I’ve got an email from Gumroad, saying that somebody just bought the app. Then another one. Then another, and a few more. And it just stopped. I made $90 on the first day. Is the experiment over?

The prototype was built as a SPA and was supposed to be a package. But after a few tests I thought, that “no code” thing should work seamlessly with any existing and even already deployed Laravel app. So I switched to Electron.

Once the app is done, I decided to try to make some profit out of it. I haven't launched any products by myself in almost 5 years, so it's pretty challenging for me.

My team and I were developing a mobile app. We were implementing new features quickly, and a client wanted it to be on Testflight at a very early stage, but there was still no admin panel at Laravel-powered backend.

So every time we wanted to check or modify some data in the staging database, we had to use Tinker or Sequel Pro. That’s when I came to the idea that it would be great to have a package or an app, that works as an actual admin panel but doesn’t require any coding at all.