OwlOCR

Capture text easily on the Mac

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Productivity

Personal need, thought it would be cool if it would exist and what was on the market wasn鈥檛 as good.

March 25, 2021 2,400 MAU in the last 28 days

MAU went down briefly after the crazy days in late 2020 where lots of people tried the app and for some of them it didn't stick of course. March has been great with a few media pickups that always helps a lot.

Looking back at December, it's a good +33% increase in 3 months! Happy with the rate, as people have still been psyched about the app and are enjoying it.

December 14, 2020 Product Hunt #2 of the Day

How did I accomplish this? Not sure, part luck I suppose. Honestly I did close to nothing on the day it was featured. When I logged on in it was already second and stayed there.

I did prepare the other release otherwise according to best practices found online like adding a video and screenshots. I think people get drawn to visuals so I'd like to think the video made an impact. After that I suppose it's down to the product and whether the popular people find and like bringing in their followers.

Feels great that this turned out such a success after an initial disappointment on the actual day it went live!

December 8, 2020 Product Hunt release!

Launching on PH today and I'm really nervous about it. Did my best to prep by putting together a demo video of the features and everything.

If you haven't yet checked out OwlOCR for Mac this is exactly the right time to do that and the link is this: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/owlocr-for-mac

If you have and like it any support via letting your friends now or leaving a comment on the site is much much much appreciated as these can be huge events for a bootstrapped like myself. 馃檹

I'm hoping to find lots of new happy users today. 馃槉

December 4, 2020 Doubled monthly active users in a month!

Just passed 1,800 over the last 28 days!

The growth curve has been insane over the weeks leading to Black Friday and moving into December.

I plan to write something longer to dive into this at later time.

For now, just feeling grateful to reach so many people and a lot of new users finding the app and enjoying it!

-Tommi

November 23, 2020 1,500 active users over last 28 days

It's been so exciting to see this kind of growth in the past three months. Looking back at my milestone update exactly three months ago, OwlOCR crossed 700 monthly active users and now it's more than doubled since then.

Much of the thanks here goes to the recent publication in Germany that brought in a boatload of new users.

How to keep it up is the main question.... Now the big waves come with articles, but it would be more sustainable to build on organic growth and search hits.

November 17, 2020 +40% monthly active users in a week

It's been an incredible week and weekend in particular.

OwlOCR was featured in a blog post / article (https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/owlocr-kleines-tool-erlaubt-texterkennung-unter-macos/) that got quite bit of views.

Downloads spiked to the second highest daily mark and many of those people also used the app.

This was great timing with the article since Big Sur launched this week and with that OwlOCR received official German support!

I could not be more grateful to the author of the article, feels so great to be able to reach more German users with the latest release.

November 9, 2020 1k monthly active users

In my August update I wrote that I hoped to break 1k users "perhaps next year", happy to break through that sooner.

While OwlOCR does not have subscription fees, a larger happy install base should be good for organic growth and with more growth I can justify more time to improve the app.

I resumed some promotional activities a few days ago and that led to a spike in downloads. I'm happiest with the product I've been so far so I have high hopes to retain many of these users. :)

November 7, 2020 900 monthly active users and v4.0 release!

I've done very limited promotion as have been waiting for Big Sur release to push out the latest update.

Finally Apple released Big Sur RC and Xcode to build Big Sur support into the app so I jumped on the chance and just released v4.0.

Super excited to push this now since I'm quite happy with the app itself at this point!

September 9, 2020 800 monthly active users

Just over two weeks since passing 700, it seems like 800 has now also been broken.

Downloads have been going down a bit lately, so will probably need to do something to keep momentum.

Happy to see this number increase though, it means people find value in the product and keep using it!

September 1, 2020 Record monthly revenue breaks through $200

August was another month that ended up going really well. Half-way through the month a competitor launched their app which was a really good thing, since it kind of woke me up to this being a good idea and market fit, but not enough people still know about it.

I put more efforts in the later half of the month including:

  • More active in Twitter / Indiehacker and other forums
  • Refreshed landing site to be more value-oriented

Sales increased again from the previous month, so I'm happy with the result. Excited for September!

https://ibb.co/vZN2NqB

About

Personal need, thought it would be cool if it would exist and what was on the market wasn鈥檛 as good.