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Launch day: 250 trial users, first paying customer

Last Wednesday Later was featured in the "New and noteworthy" section of the Slack App Directory. I took the morning off from my day job to try and capitalize on that placement and "launch" Later.

I knew that whether I got a pop on launch day or not, this is just the beginning of building the marketing machine for this app. But I was pleasantly surprised!

On Tuesday night Later was installed in 15 Slack teams, mostly from emails to friends and a little effort on Twitter. My goal for Wednesday was to reach 50 Slack teams - the thinking there being that if 2% of them converted at the end of their trial, I'd have one paying customer 😄

By that measure, launch day was great.

I ended the day with Later installed in over 100 Slack teams. It's now up to 150, with 250 individual users between them.

I was also shocked to get my first paying customer that day too, signing up for my $50 per month "Startup" plan. That was a real surprise because there's no restriction during the free trial and no serious nudge to upgrade until you're close to the end of the trial.

Reflecting a little bit on the day, here's how I'd sum it up:

What went well

  • Launching on Twitter with a tweet from my personal account: My personal following overlaps pretty well to the types of folks who might find this interesting. That's what got the whole ball rolling.
  • Endorsements from my early adopters and beta testers: I've been working on Later since April. There are a handful of people who have been happily using it weekly, and they showed up on Twitter to help spread the word. I'm extremely grateful.
  • I learned a ton about how people perceive this product: I'm still not exactly sure how I should position this tool (is it "the essential Slack app for remote teams" or just "intelligent scheduled send for Slack"?) but I've got a lot more data now than I did a week ago. There's a lot I can go on now for refining the next phase of my marketing.

What I'll do differently next time

  • Wasting time on some long shots: I posted on ProductHunt and Hacker News, even knowing it was a long shot, and got basically zero upvotes in each. I should have just skipped them and accepted that I wasn't ready for sites like that yet.
  • Pricing wasn't easy to find on my website: My hypothesis with Later is that it needs a lengthy, three-month free trial to prove its value to enough people in a Slack team. Because I don't require a credit card up front and because the first person to install Later in a Slack team might not be the person who sees the most value in it three months down the line, I didn't make pricing information easy to find on my site. That was a mistake: a few people explicitly asked about it, and implied they considered it reckless to trial Later without knowing how much they might have to pay eventually. I fixed that halfway through the day. Still, a good lesson learned.
  • A few small bugs: Overall the service has stood up really well this week, in part because I'm not skimping on Heroku resources. But launch day exposed a few bugs: Later broke when people would send messages to guest Slack users (I've never used this feature) or when testing Later in a DM with Slackbot (should have expected this one). More through testing might have helped me catch some of these.

Overall, though, I couldn't be happier with this week. After almost a decade of working as a professional software developer, I've never had a paying customer for a side project — and that feels pretty good. This business' greatest (and quite likely 😅) threat is that Slack realizes this is a missing feature and builds it in a sprint. But at least I'll always be able to say I got this far.

One last fun story: a few emails came in to the [email protected] address throughout the day. One was someone asking about how I keep messages secure (short answer: encrypt them as rest, erase them as soon as they're delivered). After exchanging a few emails he just said "Want to call me?" and gave his phone number. I gave him a call and we talked for 15 minutes. They're a remote startup in the healthcare space and they were excited about using Later but they're wary of Slack apps because of all the personal health information in their conversations. After talking him through how I store and erase messages, he said he was satisfied and decided to turn on Later for everyone at the company to use.

Didn't expect to take a sales call on day 1 😂

  1. 6

    Nice product. Well done on getting a paid customer :)

    Do you think you're leaving money on the table with such a high starting price?

    • Why such a long trial period?
    • Might be good to add an FAQ to explain security etc
    • PH launches require your full effort and a few days planning
    • Get testimonials from your beta users
    • Get rid of coming soon for enterprise and change it to contact us
    • Get rid of home and help from the navbar :)

    Some quick questions for you

    • Did you look at templates?
    • Did you look at landing page builders?
    1. 1

      Hi! I appreciate you taking a peeking at Later and dropping some thoughtful feedback. Most of that seems like non-controversial good advice :D

      On the long trial period: it's possible three months is too long. The real answer is I'll have enough usage data soon to see how many users authorize Later within a Slack workspace in the first two weeks vs. 30 days vs. 60 days, etc.

      One factor I know will slow down some trials, though, is Slack administrators being cautious about turning on Slack new apps for all users in a workspace. Maybe I'm over-optimizing for customers at larger companies, but I'd hate for a Later trial period to end before more than a couple users see its value.

      But again, it wouldn't take much data to prove that hunch wrong. I'll do a "30 days in" milestone update and include some data to share the answer.

      As for templates and landing pages: I did buy my template off Themeforest. I thought about a builder (web design is obviously not my strength 😅) but I knew I needed a custom page to run Stripe Checkout on for the upgrade transaction - I didn't think a landing page builder would let me add a custom page like that too.

      1. 2

        The landing page is nice and clean :) You could probably have used a page builder (depends on which one you chose), but not having used one impacts your speed in a positive way. The one suggestion I have is to move you .back-to-top icon (perhaps a bit higher) because the Intercom chat icon overlaps with it and makes for a confusing little corner.

        Congrats on the first paying customer!

  2. 2

    That's a great story, thanks for sharing !

  3. 2

    Good job Andrew!

    "That was a real surprise because there's no restriction during the free trial and no serious nudge to upgrade until you're close to the end of the trial". My suggestion is to add a discount for people who upgrade early. Maybe a discount that decreases in amount with time, to leverage fomo. Send it to people who are still using it after 2-3 days.

    God job again ;)

    1. 1

      Genius! Added to the backlog - thank you!

  4. 2

    Congrats on getting to market!

  5. 2

    Congrats on the successful launch and thanks for the write up! It's always cool and encouraging to hear stories like this :)

    Did you do any research/validation for this idea? Or is this a "scratching your own itch" kind of product?

    1. 2

      This was very much a "scratch my own itch" project, since I lead a remote team at my day job.

      And I definitely feel that the most likely end to this business is Slack building this feature themselves in a single sprint. So I'd never bet my career on this idea, but I'm having a lot of fun building and growing this business so far :D

      1. 1

        Awesome! Fun is definitely important :)

  6. 2

    Little tiny feedback, and this is totally preferential;

    "The essential Slack app for remote teams." doesn't say much when you see this. Maybe the name implies what the slack app is all about, but this hero text seems a little cheesy to me, its like saying "This slack app is good".

    I would have expected the hero text to tell me that later is a fast scheduling app in slack.

    On the other side, I think the landing page tells what the app does, maybe If I were building this product I would do some AB testings with the hero text.

    Don't know about others, but when I'm in the buying mode, hero text is very important for me.

    Also I started giving feedback, but I hope it is ok. I love the app and easy to use command interface!

    1. 1

      Feedback is what I was hoping for from this community! Thank you!

      And yeah, can you tell I've struggled with how to position this app? "Scheduled send for Slack" is largely accurate but doesn't hint at the value that feature unlocks, especially for a remote team. But there's not much to Later besides that core feature, so positioning it as something more has felt like a stretch 🤔

  7. 1

    Great job! Great story!

    • trial for max 30 days.
    • build onboarding so users get enough value at 14 days, so subscribing at day 30 is a no brainer
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