Let Them Eat Cake
Boost team productivity w/ encouraging & delicious feedback
This happened a while ago, but I figure I would make a follow up post now that I'm back on IH again.
I decided to switch jobs back in July of 2021. As part of that transition, my boss asked if he could purchase the app because we were using it a lot internally. We did a little negotiation and came to a number we were both happy with.
I'm not sure how long the revenue figures will stay up, but he and I are still on great terms and talk regularly so I've got a bit of insight into how things are running.
They have replatformed the app to run on Laravel Vapor and have onboarded an additional paying customer or two! It's not the primary money maker for them so growth isn't the priority right now.
Hopefully it stays around for a long time to come! :)
Since my last update in September, I haven’t worked on the product much. The end of 2020 was pretty rough for me emotionally and I was burnt out on everything, including my side projects.
2021 rolled around and I was feeling a lot better, and I eventually jumped back in to working on the product in my free time. I had a small backlog of bugs from the previous six months; one major upside of using the product every day; so I had somewhere to start.
A couple of weeks ago, someone reached out to cancel their trial, which was a bummer, but they were soon back and today I convinced them to sign up for a paid account with the promise that I will implement a new feature. I definitely am aware of the precedence and don’t plan to make a habit of it, but customer #1 also sees a use for it after I discussed it with them earlier today.
100% growth in 6 months isn’t horrible right?! 😉
Excited to see what the next 6 months brings! 🎉
It's been almost 2 months since I started on this little project but I've made a lot of progress! Today, I pushed the final features to production for my launch. Now it's a waiting game to get approved on the Slack app store and then commence with the "real" launch!
It's weird shipping my first live service product that is now changing all the time. It's nerve wracking to know that if I screw up, it could interrupt the experience of using the app for paying customers.
I'm also grappling with the temptation to optimize for scale too early. I purposefully just launched a feature that I'm sure will be refactored within a year if I gain any traction. I'm excited though to use it as a learning opportunity for making "large" data migrations in a production environment.
Stoked for the next few weeks!
I convinced my boss to buy a subscription for LTE🍰
We used a similar tool already so it was an easy purchase for the company. Excited to work on more features though! It feels so good though to see all of the subscription code I wrote and integrated working and charging real cards for my own SaaS.
Now to get some more customers!
Had a demo with a friend where I asked him to sign up for the app and add billing details and a test subscription. There were a few hiccups but overall it went well.
I need to remember to transfer new bot scopes between my dev and production environments before I deploy. Once I added those, everything was smooth sailing!
git push origin master
I decided to use my bread and butter stack of Laravel. I'm also trying out Alpine.js and of course using TailwindCSS!
This project has the potential to need to serve a lot of traffic, so it will be interesting to see how things progress.
After searching for other products that do something similar, I finally decided to try and build it myself. I was motivated to get something out the door to replace a mediocre service we were using at my day job. Surely if others are using the solution we tried, maybe they had the same hangups?
1 Comment
Congrats on the sale :)