Ryeboard

Ryeboard has had the privillege of joining an excellent company and bringing the product to more people than we have ever imagined. We're working with new tech and new resources to build an even better product to help people collaborate and be even more productive online.

Very thankful to all of our users and our investor @Khidr9 for making all of this possible!

The growth is slow but steady!

It's honestly quite flattering we've managed to reach this number despite the lack of marketing and the presence fierce competitors. Not to mention our beta stage!

For now, most of our visitors are mostly from blogs and platforms from our earlier explosive era. An increasing amount of users are also coming through recommendations from colleagues which is also exciting.

We'll launch our 1.0 soon as important core features like team plans and mobile views get sorted out. Really excited about the future of Ryeboard :)

We ended up getting our first office while also increasing our team from three to four awesome people! Super excited

Things are starting to get back to normal here in South Korea as the virus is ravaging the world. Feeling lucky we're situated in a place where everyone from bus drivers to cops are wearing masks and practicing social distancing.

Bootstrapping definitely has its perks. Ever since we decided to go fully bootstrapped last year, we had full control over the creative direction of our product. It's been great for exploring the market and the capabilities of Ryeboard. However, the financial burdens were also always there. As our savings ran out and we postponed committing monetizing the product, we found ourselves distracted with figuring out other ways to keep the lights on besides working on our product.

That's why we were so excited to have @Khidr9 join the team as an investor and co-founder. He has 15+ years of experience as a lawyer and has a keen interest in maximizing productivity through digital tools and workflows. In fact, he's developing a law-firm focused productivity app of his own! His experience and insight is as important as the financial resources he brings to the team.

We're really excited to see what new opportunities we can unlock with the new team!

Through an extensive user survey, several interviews, and data analysis we were able to narrow down our product to tackle a single "real" problem - project content management!

This is really exciting as we are finally targeting a single tangible problem instead of being a "general, satisfy-everyone" product.

To reflect this change, we updated our landing page and have seen registration rates jump around 70%! Really excited about the new direction for the product.

Nothing always goes according to plan.

This time around, it was unfortunately for the better - I think? Wish we were better prepared for the explosion!

Our previous 3-day all-nighter sprint resulted in Ryeboard rising all the way to #3 on HackerNews and lingering in the top 10 for around 8 hours or so with 179 upvotes.

Stats are as follows:

• Total visitors: 12.3K users in 24 hours
• Total users: 440 users
• Conversion rate: 3.5%

While HackerNews does usually have low conversion rates, part of the very low conversion rate is attributed to some page breaking bugs and landing page mishaps in the early phase of the explosion!

The team gathered together for three days to push out the major features needed before our first paid ads go out. It was a rush with many ups and downs with a grand total of 6 hours of sleep for three days.

But we got a lot done! The product has improved drastically as well as the landing page :3

Reached 10 paying users for the first time! Really pumped!

Our growth hasn't been particularly fast recently but things are starting to pick up as we're marketing the product for the first time.

The team is really looking forward to our future growth!

Our new card system just launched today!

We're really excited about this as it opens up more flexible ways for our users to share their content more selectively or with non-users. And of course, shared content is also automatically synced!

We can't wait to see how people will use this feature!

Transparency and honesty isn't always fun and this milestone really makes it hard as well.

The Ryeboard team was a bootstrapped team that has been working hard for the last year on personal savings and very small angel investments. Due to unforeseen investment fallouts, delays in taking money out from Paddle, and stalling freelance projects, the team is now officially broke for the first time! As in we can't pay for a private repo on Github broke!

Not really a fun topic of course but I want to mark it down on the calendar so I can do EVERYTHING TO AVOID SOMETHING LIKE THIS FROM HAPPENING AGAIN. Hopefully that freelance project will work out within this week haha.