First Stripe Invoice issued!
Oh yeah. That feeling. My first Stripe invoice was issued on 1-st of June. It took a while. It took more than I thought. The sign ups to conversion rate is lowest than I've expected. But it's the moment when the product did the whole loop from the time invested to the profit came in. Now it's a product and it's waiting for its next customers.
Marketing is 80% of your success
Yes, marketing is everything. After the launch I've been promoting my API for free on any resource I could find. There is the list of links and directories for API promotionI've used https://medium.com/@uvimate/places-to-promote-your-api-for-free-495b5c86bda5. I've also done some SEO for the landing page and taught myself how to use Google search Console and Web Masters Tools. My goal was to be on the first Google Search page for the UV Index API request. 5 months later I'm on the 5-th place. worldwide.
The baby is born
Oh what a month it was! I had two babies born that time. My daughter came into the worls at 13-th of Feb and the brand new OpenUV.io Dev Portal and API was deployed on Prod by 16-th. Let the fun begin!
Landing page for mailing list created
That time I've decided to launch with mailing list and the landing page. My goal was to reach 50 emails by the end of the month as a prove to go ahead with the implementations. As any developer I couldn't help to wait and started to code immediately. Tip: for free landing page and email gathering I've used www.quickpages.co. The service has some lack of LP customisation but ideal for super fast idea testing.
Brainstorming next product idea
By that time I had some ideas in my mind. Actually the simplest one to ship has won. OpenUV.io is based on the backend I've coded for my mobile app UVIMate and I've already validated that people are interested to consume the sun safety data as a REST API (had 150 signups for the old API version). So the idea it is.
