TAGGUN

It is time. All the signs were there to push me to jump in and work full-time on TAGGUN. The company's monthly profit has overtaken my full-time salary. My employer didn't like me having TAGGUN as a side gig. I saw TAGGUN's growth is declining because I have neglected it. Competition in this space is increasing. I think I'm still addicted to my full-time salary. I don't know why...

I was stoked. I have some savings. I could start to imagine that I can quit my day job to work and grow on TAGGUN fulltime - something I'd absolutely love to do. But the podcasts and books have taught me that if I were to solely rely on TAGGUN to pay my bills, the pressure would kill the love for the work. So, I stayed employed full-time, even if it means slower growth for TAGGUN.

After acquiring the first customer, we had zero growth for the rest of the year. I started to dip my toes in SEO, content marketing, growth hacking, organic traffic, bottom-up sales, lead generation, keywords optimization, pricing, enterprise sales, licensing, conversion funnel, and every skillset that normally a developer has no affinity for. TAGGUN finally started has some sign of traction.

I'm very thankful to Will from SmartReceipts. Will is from New York and he founded SmartReceipts as a side gig. SmartReceipts has over 500K downloads and 4.6 stars. At that time, TAGGUN could really disappear and ceased to exist any day. But Will took a big risk and trusted me to deliver the goods. And that trust keeps me motivated to improve and grow TAGGUN for the next year without any real incentives.

I modified a free website theme built on Bootstrap.js to have a receipt OCR demo on the front page. And I launched it on Hackernews. I was scared. I feel like I was being judged. I didn't know whether people are going to love it or hate it. I didn't even have any credit card sign up process. Just a text box to capture email addresses. In the end, I got some traffic to the website, and some questions and comments. But, no real tractions.

I started putting a solution together for TAGGUN on nights and weekends. I chose node.js and hapi.js as the platform to build on because I love and respect the community behind them. And also, I didn't have the opportunity to dabble with these open source libraries in my enterprise software developer job.