Keepthescore.com

This is a very technical milestone. Up till today the webapp was mainly a server-rendered product with some very ugly hacks. As of today there is an API using a vue.js frontend. Technical debt has not been totally paid off, but still a big step forward.

The lesson here is: your initial product can have a very primitive tech stack. It really doesn't matter that much.

Today I finally implemented a major feature: payments via Stripe. Here's the text from the blog post:

Running Keepthescore.co costs around 171 USD each month, whilst the revenue is close to zero (we do make a little money by building custom scoreboards now and then). This is an unsustainable situation which needs to be fixed – we hope this is understandable! To put it another way: Keepthescore.co needs to start making money to continue to exist.

As of today, we will be attempting to make some money. Some principle we will try to uphold are:

• there will always be a free tier that can make use of all of the features (e.g. setting custom colours). We don’t believe in “premium features”.
• If you cannot pay, write us an email explaining why and we will upgrade your scoreboard for free!

“Upgrading” Scoreboards

Scoreboards can now be “upgraded” via a button at the top. An upgraded scoreboard remains upgraded forever. The cost of the upgrade may vary because we’re doing some testing to find the optimal price. It will be somewhere between $0.60 and $4.00.

If you scoreboard has more than 15 players, you need to upgrade it to be able to share the public version of the scoreboard (click the link to see an example).

If your scoreboard has less than 15 players, you don’t need to upgrade it.

Payment is handled by Stripe and currently only credit card payments are available. But Apple Pay and Google Pay also work. If you’d prefer some other way of paying, let us know!

Another reason for upgrading is that you won’t see ad banners on your scoreboard. See next section.

Ad Banners

In the very near future, we will also begin showing ad banners on some scoreboards (again, this is being tested). We will be doing a fair bit of experimentation to find the optimal setup for this.

Ad banners will only be shown on scoreboards that are not upgraded, so if you want to be certain that you won’t see ad banners on a scoreboard, then upgrade it!

Starting tomorrow, I'm taking a leave of absence from work to develop my side-project (https://keepthescore.co). I am super pumped about it. My main goal is to add monetisation so that I get an idea of whether I should invest more time in it.

If it turns out that I can make a little money, then I don't expect to be able to quit my day job. However, I hope that I can reduce my working hours to spend more time developing my project even further.

In 8 weeks I will know more!

Up till recently, my product has been growing virally but pretty slowly.

However, since the Corona crisis hit, I've seen a big increase in visitors. Basically my weekly visitors doubled within the space of 14 days.

I'm seeing lots of classroom activity and people creating scoreboards for family games played at home.

My product is (still) free and I'm happy that I can help so many different people in difficult times. You can see examples of scoreboards here: https://keepthescore.co/latest/