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:
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 😂