6 months in: sharing my biggest mistakes (so far)
by JenThe official launch of Lunch Money was 6 months ago and since then, I’ve been sharing milestones on Indie Hackers, both big and small. But that’s hardly the full picture.
While I like the idea of sharing highlights regularly to keep morale up, I thought it would be a good time to reflect and start a periodic series on the biggest mistakes I’ve made (so far).
The TL;DR:
Here are the mistakes I've made:
- Having an ill-prepared launch
- Assuming user sentiment
- Charging too low…
- ...and charging too high
- Offering too long of a free trial
- Being too afraid to share my story
The article in full and complete with gifs and the lessons learned can be found here: https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money-mistakes
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Great story! It is amazing what one person can get done!!
Mistakes - if you had none, how crazy would that have been?
It would be cool to hear the mistake stories from every founder :)Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks for reading! We should definitely all share our mistakes more so others can learn from them!
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Thanks for sharing your mistakes! Really interesting and insightful to read it)
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Hey Jen,
Your latest conversion :) and I must tell you, I loved the simplicity, design and well thought out features of LunchMoney.
Also agree on one of the reasons to subscribe is your story, I was hooked when I read about your life in Japan. You have done an amazing job and its such an awesome journey to read about.
Best
Adi-
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Hi Adi, thank you so much for your kind words and your support! :D
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Thanks for sharing @lunchbag! I also feared sharing our story, thinking that nobody would be interested. But quickly realized part of this journey is sharing it with others.
p.s. Love the website and about us page. "I'm the founder, engineer, designer and customer support at Lunch Money." So relateable! 👍
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Thanks for reading! Can't believe how many other people felt the same way about sharing their personal story!
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Wonderful story, Jen.
I tried the app, and found it doesn't fit all my needs, but receiving you support emails and reading you blog I developed kinda emotional connection to your "baby". So, in the future, who knows...
Thank you for sharing all this!
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Hi dimmi!
Thanks for giving it a chance! I'd love to hear what features it's missing if you're willing to share, just hit reply on any of the emails sent to you 😁
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when you increased your pricing, did your previous customers also get the increase or did their bill stay the same. Are you using stripe for payments?
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Great question, I decided early on that I would allow users to keep their pricing forever. So the first cohort of users are still paying $3 per month! The reason is because I hope to have many more users one day, maybe further in the hundreds or thousands. I really value my first hundred or so users so I want to keep them happy and also making them pay a little bit extra and risking losing them is not worth it to me in the end. And yes, I'm using Stripe!
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Hey, I have a question. I was reading on your blog that you started out using Semantic UI. Is Lunch Money still dependent on that? I did research into Semantic based on your blog thinking I should give it a try. I discovered that the main repository is unmaintained. Do you think there is a risk of that affecting your app if it is still based on Semantic?
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Hi! Great question. Yes, we're still using Semantic UI, but it's the react flavour of it (https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI-React) which should be under active development! So far I haven't had any issues with it!
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Amazing story! Thanks for sharing Jen
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Thanks for the TL;DR. 😀
And congratulations on learning from these mistakes.
Believe it or not, these will be the things that will help you move forward with more confidence and knowledge -- you now have a sense of what works and what doesn't.
You've got the right mindset -- test, try, get feedback, learn and try again. 👍👍
Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks Anita!
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Great read! I tried signing up to your product but unfortunately my bank (AIB in Ireland) isn't available, is this to do with Plaid?
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Thanks!
Unfortunately, we're only able to connect to US/Canada-based banks via Plaid. But we have a few workarounds that have worked well for our international users:
- We have a manual CSV import tool if your bank allows exporting transactions in that format
- We just released our developer API in closed beta, and I know some of our users have already built their own bridges to their overseas banks (if you're interested in this, shoot me an email!)
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Really nice website! Just keep going, best wishes!
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Thank you :)
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Enjoyed that read. I've been eyeing up Sendgrid so forewarned is forearmed!
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Great! Good luck on your own launch!
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Congrats on your progress so far, Jen. Enjoyed reading your story and some of your head-slapping mistakes reminded me of my own.
I launched an app on Gumroad last month and set the quantity of the 3 different versions of my app to 1 (instead of leaving it on infinite). I was thinking I don't want customers to accidentally buy more, like it was an e-commerce product. I started getting messages from people trying to buy that they couldn't. Then when I looked at the drop-down purchasing menu on my sales page, 2 of the options were greyed out so they couldn't select them. Oops! Just when you think you've fixed everything...
Keep up the great work!
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Thanks Tobe! It's always funny to look back, isn't it? Definitely won't be making such mistakes twice 😂
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I really like your about page, always been in doubt if I should have an about page as the jack of all trades for a project. Thanks for sharing!
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Thanks! I would say definitely have some fun with the About page to showcase who you are :)
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
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Thanks for reading!
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
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Thanks for reading! Fukuoka is totally underrated!
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