Revere

While not a product milestone, joining Indie Hackers is a personal one.

I've always been self-sufficient and solitary in my work. It's made me a jack-of-all-trades which has served me well, but it's also limited how many people know about this project, not to mention made it a lonelier road. Joining this community is a big step for me and I can already feel it's the right one.

This was a bittersweet milestone. On one hand 50 subscribers is halfway to your first 100 paying customers but on the other, I expected growth to be faster.

What became clear to me was that Revere wouldn't become a viable business if I didn't get serious about marketing... something I find quite uncomfortable.

The Holy Grail of an app creator is to get featured like this on the App Store, and it was really exciting, but it wasn't a game changer in terms of revenue. First off, it was only on the Canadian App Store which has 1/10th the reach of the US store, but also because downloads ≠ users ≠ subscribers.

If anything, it exposed the weak parts of Revere.

Thing I didn't expect... all your friends thinking you're now a millionaire 😄

Two days after launching subscriptions in Revere the first person subscribed. It was a monthly subscription. The last time I was that happy to get $5 was when I was 10 years and still getting allowance.

I put the date in my calendar and took a thousand screenshots – I knew this would be a cool moment to look back on someday.

This was a big deal – Revere was now free to download and with a Premium subscription level. It represented the first step to Revere becoming a sustainable business.

Building subscriptions into iOS is a monster project and I was glad it was over. Definitely hire a developer who has done this before – there are so many edge cases and opaque, poorly documented functionality that it'd impossible to get it right your first time through without a good guide.

I made the decision to grandfather in existing users to be 'Premium for Life'. It would forgo some subscription revenue from a group of early adopters but I did it for a few reasons:

1. It wouldn't be fair to someone who just paid for the app the day before to have to double pay.
2. Would create some good will from the early adopters
3. It felt like the right thing to do
4. In the long-term, a few extra subscriptions wouldn't be worth the bad vibes

I sent a message to a generic email address at Apple meant for developers to provide updates new app updates or releases. It was literally something like updates_981c9d0@apple.ca and I expected it would end up in some massive avalanche of emails.

However, I still took the time to write a really thoughtful email outlining why Apple customers would love Revere. I hit all of Apple's sweet spots – simple design, easy to use, helps make people's lives better, built by a single person, only available on iOS – and to my surprise, I got an email back and a feature on the 'Apps Page'.

That was a crazy day!

After a few months as a free app, I set Revere to be a paid download on the App Store.

This was a huge milestone because it represented the moment the market would decide if Revere was worth it.

Revere is available to the general public for the first time. The beta was the least functionality I thought would be useful: add a person, a note, and a reminder.

This was a quiet launch only through personal social networks to start getting feedback from people using it in real-life.

This is when the current version of Revere began to take form. This was my 3rd attempt. In the first two attempts I learned you need to know enough about the technical side for the big decisions, and a lot of people like the idea of being a co-founder but don't appreciate how much work is involved.

As a non-programmer, I asked a few friends to build the app for me. I paid them, but well under half what they're worth, and I'll be forever grateful for their help.