TapeReal.com

Not many businesses reach or surpass their first year. Some fail beforehand, are not able to grow, or they simply give up.

I'm so grateful to reach the one year mark and celebrate my first year at TapeReal. It's been a crazy ride with many ups and downs:

• UP: gained some early press exposure
• DOWN: wasn't retaining enough users
• UP: released new features, attracted more early adopters
• DOWN: lost users when we released paid features incorrectly
• UP: started generating some initial revenue
• DOWN: lost key members of my development team which ended up stalling progress and new updates
• UP: gained more insight into users and spent more time on our new site design/positioning, and planning the right features to release next

Next milestone: COMPLETE YEAR 2!!

TapeReal.com is now generating revenue! We launched our Premium Membership plans on the App Store. People can choose various tiers to support their recording lifestyle.

We converted 80% of our creators into paid subscribers. This is huge validation for us, but of course, it's only the beginning.

It took approximately 2.5 months, but we were finally able to launch the alpha version of our product on the app store. Here's what I've learned so far:

• Feature creep is a real disease. Be aware of it, analyze it, and suppress your need to add more features.

• Focus on your core MVP feature and build it right. Ours was the ability for two people to follow each other, place an audio or video call, record it, and publish it to the TapeFeed for people to like and share.

• If you build it, they will never come. You then have to promote or reach the right audience who will become your early users. Start exploring the right communities beforehand. Ours was aspiring and established podcasters looking for a new audience.

• Get a press write up to help attract early adopters. We got luck with Podnews.net and Mobile Syrup featuring us and writing about us. But we also put in the effort be preparing a proper press kit, writing a proper press release, and pitching the story the write way. Lots of resources on this, read up... I learned from reading whitepapers from publicize.co

• Get early feedback from users; talk to them, adore them, engage them. Make them feel involved in the creation/ideation process. Do it respectfully, but also understand that not ALL feedback or feature requests are worth pursuing. Choosing the right ones is part art, part science.

I came up with the idea for TapeReal (formerly Tapebook) while on a sabbatical in South America where I spent time at a retreat working with shamans and medicine from the Amazon jungle.

In my previous failed startup attempts, I was building with the hopes of getting acquired and retiring rich... that was the dream... especially after reading these types of success stories on TechCrunch and other media outlets.

But when I came back, I realized I was missing "purpose" from my life and I need to align myself to a purpose before I could build a business. So I searched within...

One trans-formative experience that I had in South America was the grieving of my grandmother who died at a very young age. I was only 3.5 at the time. The only memories I have of her are photographs or stories from my parents.

This made me wonder... we have a photo album for moments in time which act like snapshots of our memories, but why don't we have an album for our meaningful conversations?

This is what inspired me to build TapeReal.