Pushback

I've been reading a few blogs/books about design and it motivated me to take a stab at redesigning my landing page. As I read, I made small sketches on a piece of paper on how I could apply it to my product. After a few weeks, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do.

I took screenshots of things I liked from other websites and pasted them in my figma project (kinda like a pinterest board, but more targeted). Figma is a design tool that I was familiar with from my day job so it was a good fit for me. The screenshots were handy to have for inspiration when I started my design.

It only took a few hours to mock up what I wanted in figma. I was pretty excited once I saw the new design. Especially when I compared it to my current one. I spent a few hours implementing the design over the weekend. I'm pretty happy with the end result.

The next thing I want to do is write up a blog post about some tips I applied to my page to make it look better. I also want to follow up with some current customers to see if they'd be willing to give me some testimonials.

Pushback crossed 1000 users today. It's been slowing ramping up to about 1 new user a day from organic traffic. Sometimes people signup like 5 times, so I must have a bit of friction somewhere. It'd also be a good exercise for me to figure out what users are active or not and track that over time.

The iOS version of Pushback had some bugs that caused it's main value prop (actions on notifications) to not work. Someone emailed in and they were excited and wanted to subscribe, except that Pushback didn't work properly. This motivated me to get my act together and get a fix out.
Once I finished fixing the bugs, I submitted a new version for Apple review. However, my app got rejected by Apple for not having in-app purchases. It was super frustrating since I wanted to get my fixes out ASAP. They hadn't flagged me on this before... I think I got caught up in the free fortnite battle where Epic Games had challenged Apple on it's in-app purchase policy. Long story short, I added in-app purchases and got my update approved.

Shortly after, I got 2 new subscribers! Turns out, if your app works, people are more likely to buy it.

Today I got my 6th paying customer!! I'm thrilled to have 3 of them in this month alone. It's beyond exciting for me. I've been updating some docs and making things work a little bit better for everyone. I've noticed more traffic in my analytics. One mistake I made was not having some keywords such as "API" on my landing page. Since I've done that, I've had some traffic come organically from people searching for "free push notification api".

I got my fourth paying customer today! It has only been just over a week since my last paid customer. It's quite the shift in frequency as my first two were every other month. It's pretty exciting to watch it grow. I've had a few users request some features, so I'm hoping to use this excitement to plow through some of those things.

I woke up this morning to a pleasant surprise with an email from stripe. Another customer bought a subscription. It's pretty exciting to see and gives me some more motivation! I've been spending a bit more time in forums and helping people use Pushback. The main forum was NodeRed, which I discovered from my google analytics. I plan to keep working on my docs to help people in these niche markets and hopefully it'll also help my seo.

I'm way more excited about this customer than my first! I've learned I'm very skeptical, but having more than one person make a purchase makes me thrilled I may have something.

I've also seen an influx of emails offering feedback. It's pretty exciting learning about how people are using Pushback.

I was walking through BestBuy browsing the printers, I noticed an email from Stripe saying I had received a payment. I was in complete shock. At first I was in denial, saying perhaps they accidentally bought it. It has been so long without even a trace of interest from customers. But after I thought about it, it's pretty hard to type in your credit card number and then hit the pay now button on accident 😅.

I released Pushback officially several months ago (but it's actually been released for a couple years) and have had users come and go. I realized I had neglected marketing, because building Pushback was fun, and I didn't really know much about marketing. After reading around IH, I learned I needed to change something. I promised myself to not add anymore features to Pushback and could only work on marketing until I got paying customer.

So I started a blog, started live code streaming once a week, and did minor changes on my landing page. I've had lots of feedback on my landing page that I need to focus more on my target audience, and I honestly haven't gotten it there yet.. The only change I really made was changing how I presented my pricing. Instead of saying "$12/yr", I did "$1/month*", saying it was billed annually at $12/year. The exact same pricing, just presented differently. I don't know if any of these things had any impact, but it was just where I decided to get started.

I've received a flood of motivation to keep iterating on my marketing. It's been really exciting to finally get a paying customer!

Today I'm officially launching Pushback https://pushback.io. It has mainly served as a way for me to learn web development and explore new mobile tech.

I was inspired by IH to work on it just enough to get it to this point to where I am happy with it. Its amazing how much more you can learn by polishing a project. I've done tutorials before, but I never seem to walk away with the same knowledge as when I make something myself.

The tool is targeted toward developers, but I'd love feedback from anyone, thanks!

I've finally got a landing page up. Its been through a few iterations and I'm sure it'll need more adjustment. I've gained a few users over the last couple months from the app store listings, but none of them have stuck around for very long. One user was pretty excited and shared some ideas and features they'd like. I'm holding off on adding more features until I can get at least 1 paying customer.