Pullwalla

We technically launched the ability to sign up for a Pro subscription in Pullwalla 2 weeks ago in the App Store and on Nov 20, 2019 we got our first real (not me) paying customer. I just recognized today because I guess Apple's analytics take a couple days to actually show up.

Now, there are a few things that have happened since we initially launched and when we got our first paying customer.

Price

We were debating about pricing for quite a while originally with this product as we did the math and to get close to supporting a developer in North America to be able to continue to develop a product at App Store friendly prices ($1.99/mo) you need somewhere around 10,000 paying customer range. This felt like a lot so we decided to initially go with $5.99/mo or $59.99/year kind of arbitrarily. Well and because the number of paying customers we would have to get would be significantly less.

Despite launching with this price we felt like it was too high compared to other developer tools in the space and what they provide. So, we did an evaluation of all the developer tools we pay for, how much we pay, and how much we felt they provide and came up with a new price point based on that, $3.99/mo or $34.99/year. We made this change on 11/19/2019, the day before our first purchase.

Features

During this time we alsofixed a bunch of bugs stabalizing the app, cleaned up some small UX issues that were bugging us, added Notifications, and provided a Compact PR View preference for users that have extremely large descriptions in their PRs.

Support

Shortly after initially hitting the App Store we got a support request from a user that was running into a bug. We immediately emailed him back to try and identify the issue and resolve the issue. It was back and forth over a couple days via email working with the customer before we had narrowed down and identified the actual issue. Once, we did we resolved it and quickly got a new version of the app out into the App Store and communicated it to this customer as well asked questions about him, how he planned to use the product, how he found the product, etc. to try and understand our customers better.

He was kind enough to respond providing answers to the questions I asked as well as provide feature suggestions. This facilitated us responding to him and asking aditional questions around based on his response. One of the suggestions he made was the Collapsable pull requests feature we built. He also mentioned he was very interested in the Notifications feature that was on our public Roadmap ( https://pullwalla.com/?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=indiehackers-post-first-paying-customer ).

Conclusion

I truly believe that being responsive with support, and helping a customer that wasn't paying us and using that opportunity to build a relationship with that customer will pay massive dividends in the end.

Doing this helped us understand a customer better, his particular use case, features that would better address his needs, and get our first paying customer as he responded to an email where I personal reached out letting him know we released a version of the app with Notifications and Collapsable pull request view that he mentioned in the previous email letting me know that he already updated and purchased the Pro subscription.

Now looking at this you could be saying wait, THIS DOESN'T SCALE. You are correct! But I am a big believer that the only way to actually learn about your customers and hone in on the marketing and product feature set that will reach them is to do things that don't scale. At least in the early days.

Now, we just have to figure out how to get our second customer, ;-).

We just launched on ProductHunt. This is the first ProductHunt launch I have done. We basically had zero hype generated prior to the launch so I am not expecting too much. Though it would be nice to see a little bit of traffic come from it.

I clicked the launch button after putting the content together the previous day and just did some final edits this morning right before pushing the button. I then shared it on twitter and in the few small online communities I am a member of in the hopes we would get enough UpVotes to get some sort of visibility and traffic.

If you wouldn't mind helping us by checking out the product and potentially giving us an UpVote, or even sharing it with your friends maybe together we can get a little visibility and traffic.

Thanks in advance. Love this community!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pullwalla

Pra v1.4.0 is now available ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pra/id1447158795?mt=12 ).

This release was focused largely on reliability and robustness. Specifically my goal was to address existing logging being poor, JSON decode failures of fetch pull requests resulting in zero pull requests, and no mechanism of getting details about JSON decode failures to be able to resolve them.

I tackled all of these issues in Pra v1.4.0 as well as resolved a couple bugs.

It definitely feels like from a product standpoint I am heading in the right direction. Though, I need to exert more effort into getting it in front of people and having them use it.

Woot! Woot! Just got Pra v1.3.0 into the AppStore ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pra/id1447158795?mt=12 ). This release is a pretty significant release. It adds the foundation for a completely new feature concept, Quick Filters.

It does this with a new sidebar and a list of Quick Filters that allow you to quickly adjust your focus of Pull Requests based on your current mindset. For example if you want to check-in on how your own Pull Requests are doing there is a Quick Filter for that. If you want to see Pull Requests assigned to you there is a Quick Filter for that, etc.

What is even more important is that it includes the foundation work to support various Quick Filters going forward. This release also includes the ability to Ignore Organizations. This is an extremyl useful feature to help focus your feed of Pull Requsets down to just the ones you care about even quicker than before.

I hope people really enjoy the latest functionality.

We were struggling to sell one of our side projects (https://orangecal.com) while also selling our consulting services as they were for completely different audiences. So, we decided to build and sell products that fit with our clients (software product makers) in the hope that we would find some overlap in sales and at least streamline mental focus for us in terms of sales.

So we looked at the various product spikes we had created as side projects / open source projects and laid them all out on the whiteboard and had a team discussion to weigh pros & cons of each one.

We ended up netting on building a product based on an open source project I built as a ruby command line tool called Pra (Pull Request Aggregator) https://github.com/uptech/pra . At the time it had approx 15,419 downloads. We also knew that some of the developers on our teams at the last few companies had used and others didn't specifically because it was a command line tool.

So we decided that was enough interest for us to build a macOS Desktop MVP and see if we could get some traction with it. The plan was to essentially provide the same core functionality in a nice macOS Desktop app and solve some of the problems that prevented people from using the command line version. We figured we could expand on it with other features and figure out the paid product beyond that. I had written down a small list of possible features that the guys seemed to think were good. So, I started coding.