Signils

@JLMartin had several good recommendations.

1. He recommended that we use email as a welcome tool. We no longer require email addresses in v3.0.1 (release 6 Jan) so we don't have them for new users. Instead, I sent a Newsletter for January and I'll send another in early February.

• 3996/4192 delivered emails
• 23% open rate
• 1.6% click rate

At some point, I'll look at in-app notifications or push notifications and put together a welcome campaign (I think this is an awesome idea).

2. Another recommendation was to run a survey. Which I did yesterday. I can only send 1,000 at a time with free Survey Monkey. Out of 996 invitations, we only got 12 takers (1.2%).

Interesting feedback:

1. Improve Bluetooth detection and identification - we have enhancements we need to integrate and release.

2. Missing features I want - nobody commented and told me what they want.

3. Don't understand why they would need or use it. Perplexing since our listing is in 60 languages.

4. I suspected that Leaderboards, Statistics, and the Popular Device Marketplace might not be favorites and these respondents demonstrated that. What was interesting was that our 2 column feature was ranked #2 out of 10 by 8 people. Dark mode was #5.

5. 6 of the respondents asked in-app tips and tricks, 4 want more battery saving features (we have 1 new feature coming), 3 for a product tour, and 3 for Widgets.

6. While 7 people said they'd pay $.99 for our app if we resolve our issues and add more features, we had 3 that said they'd pay $4.99 or more.

I tweaked the survey questions and will send this new version out to a different 1,000 people starting at midnight. Oh, this time I edited the subject line to mention Signils. I missed that the first go around.

I'm hoping these surveys confirm my suspicion that people might be willing to pay for specific features they value over and above a base version.

I did some research on optimal trial lengths. Originally I thought we'd offer a 14 day trial. After some heavy reading, I decided that 14 days is way too long given this is a consumer product and it's priced fairly low. I changed the trial length to 7 days, thought about it some more, and changed it to 5 days.

That means that some of the 7 day trials should start expiring today, followed by the 5 day trials tomorrow. The 14 day trials should start to expire on 20 January.

Despite our issues with java causing crashes, the app continues to show some degree of popularity and continues to get downloads and active trials. We should start seeing some trials convert in 3-4 days. After that, I'll have a better idea how the trials are converting and what (if anything) we might be able to do to improve that number or other metrics.

There's a possibility we could attract a private advertiser in our market (they manufacture Bluetooth devices), but I haven't formulated a coherent proposal yet.

We're getting killed out there! We've got two "java.lang.IllegalStateException" errors that have caused 926 crashes and impacted 266 users - they're seriously affecting our rating bringing us down from 4.3 to 3.97 since we launched v3.0.1.

We've gotten:

6th - 1x 5 star, 3x 3 star, and 1x 1 star
7th - 2x 5 star, 2x 4 star, 1x 3 star, 3x 1 star
8th - 1x 5 star, 4x 1 star

Obviously, the app still works well for many other people but this is and will stall our traction until we can get it resolved - the problem is we've run out of funds to pay the developers.

It's also ironic that it coincides with one of our highest download days at 2,030 on 8 January. Our highest was 2,153 on 19 December. We've got 4,471 active trials and I reduced the trial period from 14 days to 7.

This version features an in-app purchase model with a free 14 day (fully unlocked) trial. Once the trial expires, the user can choose to either keep using the free version or pay to unlock the upgraded premium version.

This version means that we can keep the app free to download, not kill our download momentum, and still start generating some revenue.

This version also includes light/dark mode and removal of the registration requirements which were both requested by several users .

We are removing the registration to unlock feature in favor of an unlimited 14 day trial / free version / premium in-app upgrade premium version. Users will no longer be required to enter a username and password - instead, we use a unique app ID. We'll also start collecting statistical information from all users instead of registered users.

We just hit over 100k downloads in the Google Play Store. This means that we'll get a new download badge for the app - which should help fuel more downloads.

I also added a new short explainer video to our listing which has helped improve our download numbers.

Downloads are up 32% since last week and up 23% since last month.

As our users add devices to Signils, we collect various metrics about the specific devices they add, device types, and we keep track of counts. This information is then published in the app on our Leaderboards and Statistics pages. Up until now, this information has only been available to users of our app.

https://www.signils.com/leaderboards/

https://www.signils.com/statistics/

This day we hit some good milestones for the app despite our technical issues. 21k devices actually refers to the number of active Android devices. Users have successfully added 12,919 devices via Signils. All of the apps statistical numbers are generated exclusively by registered users which will change once we remove the registration requirement. We'll start collecting metric data from all users after the next major release.

We're very close to releasing the next version of the app that has the trial/free workflow, removed registration requirement, and a few bug fixes including one major Bluetooth issue resolved. We started development on two new features to improve engagement and differentiation: 1) in-app calling and 2) improved battery life via automated Bluetooth on/off and automated charging control.