OddAlerts

After almost 3 months of building up the brand and listening to early users, OddAlerts has graduated out of beta. At the time of writing this, 13 days after launching v1, there have been 43k alerts created by 1.2k users. The product is now profitable and I'm 48% towards my initial MRR goal that was set before launching.

After the product went paid, I experienced an interesting mental shift both in my own brain and those of my users. On their end, there was suddenly an expectancy where there had previously been delight and novelty. For me, I found myself pushing the marketing a little too aggressively and had to take note and address that. Slow and steady will work just as well.

I'm still not actively marketing OddAlerts, just publishing updates on YouTube and Twitter and letting it grow organically within the betting and tipping community. The traffic is increasing slowly as the brand spreads but, more importantly, the users are coming back time and time again to set alerts. The feedback has been great and this weekend saw the 432nd user sign up to start creating alerts. As I learn more about the different use cases, I'm starting to develop a bigger picture of where this could go.

I plan to start charging for OddAlerts inside the next couple of weeks, with two price points: Lite (£4.99) and Pro (£9.99). The cost is a monthly recurring fee. People will still be able to use OddAlerts for free, but the number of alerts they can create will be limited.

I have a couple of additional features that I'll be launching this week that will improve the offering. As more people use the platform and more alerts are created, there's a chance the quality of the service could deteriorate. The time it takes to send an alert could increase. That's why I plan to put the majority of the early money back into creating a stable infrastructure for the service, one that could handle 5x the current amount of alerts being sent.

As the site closes in on 300 users, I am starting to learn from them and make the existing features better. As an example, I recently overhauled the UI for creating alerts based on the first 2000+.

Previously, the user would have to open a native selection option and pick a number between 0-90 (for the minute of the football match). Now, I have designed a custom keypad that is preset with the most popular options from the database.

Here's a video of me walking through the changes. Since I last posted here, I have pushed an all-new fixture feed making it really easy to toggle between games that are live and upcoming.

https://youtu.be/v4mxS3CgHIM

At the time of writing, there have been 1,080 alerts created on OddAlerts after the first week. I'm really surprised by the way people are using the site and it has given me some fresh ideas to implement in the coming weeks. I'm now at 149 users, with 68% of those setting up alerts once they registered.

I have hit this milestone after five days of my Reddit post going live. It's the only place I have posted OddAlerts. I'm very happy with that number as I'm not actively looking to market the product anywhere at the moment, nor will I be for the next couple of weeks. These initial users are providing me with enough feedback and insight to improve the product.

After a really slow development process, I finally gave myself a deadline of getting an MVP up and out the door. I was annoyed with myself for not launching earlier, given that the core functionality was working in December of last year.

I was never happy with the way it looked, or that some parts of the user-flow were not yet finished. I finally got over this and started preparing for a soft beta launch, personally inviting ~10 users that I knew were interested in using something like this.

Those users were invited a couple of days before I planned on posting OddAlerts in a popular subreddit for those that frequently bet on football matches. This is a place where users post their research and analysis, so this tool is right up their street. I launched on Friday 19th and as of Monday 22nd, there are 97 registered users and 444 alerts.

I do not want to spam the subreddit but will post again once I have built-in some noteworthy features.

The Reddit thread was great for getting initial feedback. I accompanied the post with a video walkthrough.