NotePlan
Manage your calendar, todos and notes in one place.
After months of tweaking NotePlan 3 is finally ready for a public beta. Along with the beta I built a new landing page and made a video explaining how NotePlan works conceptually and in practice.
I'm very proud and happy to get to this point. There are a ton of local NotePlan users who helped me on this exciting journey! :)
It's time again to build the next big version of NotePlan. That's the only way to get enough attention in order to boost your revenues in the App world, if you don't get enough blessing by Apple and are featured around the clock. So thats what I'm building next. And I'm planning to try out the subscription model as the one-time payments are very shaky.
Highly requested feature and well received. It's one of the features which are supposed to boost the growth of NotePlan. I consciously choose only big and exciting features for releases which are then worth speaking about in emails, twitter and in general.
After trying paid marketing for a while (sponsored blogs especially) I decided its time to "communicate" more by sharing what's new and exciting going on in my app. Since I pump out new highly requested features about every two weeks I had some raw material to work with. I dug out my newsletter which accumulated already 4.5k+ subscribers and decided to use it. From now on monthly to announce the new features so that people see things are moving and people who are just watching the product might be inclined to purchase.
So, I announced it on Reddit (different subreddits with text I adapted for the audience), HackerNews, Product Hunt and the newsletter. I think the Newsletter and a specific Subreddit were the most effective. It was about 3 days of heads down marketing work and about $20 in expenses for the newsletter service. But I think it pays already off compared to the $1k+ sponsored newsletter with almost 0 effort on my side. It was also way more fun! Now the challenge is doing this on a regular basis.
There are a few productivity blogs which have exactly my audience. In September I launched the costliest sponsorship till date to test if it pays off or not. Earlier sponsorships didn't produce much traffic. This time I'm including a 10% off coupon as a learning from the previous times.
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Can you share details of how much they cost and the readership of those sites?
I think a coupon is a good idea, would be keen to hear how it goes!-
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Not sure if I can share the exact details. But it's >$1k and below $5k. I'm just guessing here, but I think Apple and tech enthusiasts are the readers.
The sponsorship is over and till date I don't think it paid off too much. From the numbers I saw 1-2 years ago in tests with Facebook, it seems much more expensive.
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I'm release about bi-weekly a new release to keep the pace up and the risk of working on the wrong things low, always monitoring the feedback on email, twitter and reddit. And this time I shipped a version with 3 highly requested features at once: Printing notes, improved tagging support and opening notes in new windows.
After the second version was rebuilt on iOS I didn't lose any time and migrated the code back to macOS. It was not just a rewrite, but I have incorporated big UI changes from previous learnings. And I noticed I should have done this first and early. Doing the iOS version was a bit of waste of time. The macOS version is where the real niche is.
Unsatisfied with the performance on iOS I have decided a while ago to build NotePlan from scratch again to get it on solid pillars for the future. Originally it was written in C++ / Qt / QML, because I knew the language well and could get started quickly. Big mistake. The frameworks were full of bugs, so I pulled the trigger and started rewriting everything in Swift. Everything got better afterwards.
One of the most requested "features" was an iOS version so you can run NotePlan not only on your Mac, but also on iPhone and iPad. Making it a truly powerful and synced productivity experience. So thats what I did shortly after launching the Mac version and improving it for a while.
This is my very first launch and I have collected about 1000 people on my mailing list. The launch was small and insignificant, but users couldn't stop writing me emails on how to improve NotePlan and I also needed just more features and a mobile version!
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