Kenmei

Just after 5 months, I've got another 2 thousand users join the site. A couple of bigger promotions, steady improvements over the months as well as the regular SEO improvements, have really increased month by month acquired users, resulting in these 2k users.

The plan for 2021 to get to a point of getting a thousand users per month!

Even while Kenmei remains in alpha and have been deliberately not advertised too much, just through word of the mouth and small shout-outs here and there, we have reached 1000 users, much faster than I would have imagined.

This is a big milestone and proves yet again the potential and demand for a high-quality manga tracker. I am excited to see how quickly we'll reach 2000 users!

Another huge milestone, the ability to sign up on the website, have the imported or added manga be persisted and of course, being able to sign in.

This resulted in half of the mailing list signing up on the website, which was another great validation of the work being done.

Next step was to add a simple Trackr.moe importer. A lot of the first users that signed up, were coming from there and I also expected users that would come later on, to still have been using that website to a degree, this had to be one of the early features for me to add, so I got right onto doing another MVP.

This still only included MangaDex entries and only one of the lists (out of 3 default ones).

I've released the first actual functionality to the website. I've set up a Ruby on Rails server to act as an API and then updated added full Vue.js setup on client-side, to be able to look up add series by providing MangaDex URLs.

I wanted to release a simple MVP, to show the functionality and keep the 🚋 going, by showcase the progress.

Seeing as I had a window of opportunity to get Kenmei on the radar, with people commenting on the Trackr.moe announcement, asking for the replacements, I quickly made a simple landing page with the ability to sign up for email updates.

I got the first 50 people to sign up quite quickly, which was great to see

Trackr.moe, the best place to keep track of manga releases had an announcement of being shut down. I was using it daily to keep track of over a 100 series across multiple sites and read the latest releases. So I knew if nobody would make a replacement, I would have to be the one.

I also noticed that a lot of people were, just like me, sad to see it die and even suggested to pay for hosting and such, to keep it going. That gave me that extra validation that there needs to be a replacement, with that much demand on display