Qbserve

Turns out, that in 2018 about 30-40% of new conversions were coming from the app's mention in Zapier's article about time trackers for Mac. This article was ranking really high in the search results but it got rewritten at the end of 2018 and Qbserve instantly lost a huge chunk of revenue.

Getting back to square one after a whole year of promotion efforts was too demotivating, so I stopped doing marketing and the revenue was slowly falling since then.

After half a year of content marketing and SEO efforts, Qbserve finally reached $2,000 monthly in the middle of the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. While we had more successful months before, it was the first time when it happened without any additional efforts.

We also tried the "side project marketing" tactics with a small browser extension related to personal productivity. Sloth Worth was quite easy to build because we already had a database of distracting sites from Qbserve.

It did well on Product Hunt and brought a few backlinks from reputable sites, including Lifehacker.

The article about productivity improvement was intended as an unremarkable first post, just to have something in our blog before "more serious" content. But it got a ton of upvotes on Reddit and Hacker News, bringing at least $4,000 in additional revenue that month.

So far it's the most successful article with over 125,000 unique readers in a year. It also beats all other posts in conversions to sales because Qbserve is directly recommended in the text.

After a brief press outreach (mostly unsuccessful), I worked for the whole year to fulfill popular feature requests like project tracking.

Doing so much development and UX design completely overloaded me, so I ignored marketing in hopes of getting more press attention and conversions when the project tracking is ready.

But all the new shiny features barely moved the revenue, and the press was still ignoring a Mac-only app. I went to the other extreme and started learning marketing and writing almost full-time.

Hacker News literally bootstrapped Qbserve: we earned over $20,000 in one month with a $4,269 peak on the day when the trial ended for most new customers.

In the following year, the revenue was only $15,370, so without the initial HN boost I wouldn't have been able to work on Qbserve full-time.

After a brief beta-testing, we released the app and submitted it to Product Hunt. It became #5 that day and earned its first $1,000.

During the year 2015 I did freelance, rarely touching Qbserve (though some progress was made). After finishing a long project, I didn't look for new clients and developed Qbserve full-time for 4 months.

I wrote some code to try out tracking other applications on Mac. It worked well, so I decided to go ahead with the idea of making a time tracker.