TAYL

The numbers for https://tayl.app have been improving a lot lately thanks to increased organic traffic.

10.84% conversion rate (signup Right pointing backhand index paying) and 68.94% day 7 retention after key event on average over the past 30 days.

Still no marketing, but the numbers are looking promising enough to start with some payed marketing now I think.

https://imgur.com/a/zHwfsgG

For the past five and a half years I’ve been working as CTO of a startup. We worked to digitize the personal development space, intending to improve people’s well-being. Think Tony Robbins, BJ Fogg, James Clear, meditation CDs and such, all re-packaged into apps for the modern consumer. Throughout the years our positioning changed, but what remained was the focus on goal achievement and life balance. I love the company and all the people working there. We achieved great things during our time together. But lately, I’ve had this growing itch to go do something on my own, and now it’s outgrown my reasons to stay.

Read the full blog post, including my master plan:

https://ultimatemachine.se/articles/i-quit-my-cto-job-to-work-on-my-own-projects/

Since launching tayl.app, March this year, I've managed to grow the subscription base to 52 paying customers. In August I noticed the growth had stagnated for a few months, stuck around 27 paying customers. At the time I could not work on the app or even spend any time on marketing, but I decided to set a goal to have at least 60 paying subscribers by the end of 2019. In October, I realised I had to change something in order for me to accomplish my goal. So I introduced the long-overdue Standard Plan and began posting the app on directories and a couple of subreddits. See my previous posts here on IndieHackers for more details, but the end result is that I managed to grow the service from 27 to 52. 8 short of my goal, but I'm still happy with the result, considering my relatively low-effort attempt.

The end of year MRR is at $310. It's okay, but I think I should be able to do much better. While setting the goal mentioned above, I also set a goal to reach $500 in MRR by March, 2020. So far, I've attained 26% of this goal, while using 63% of the allotted time.

2019 has been both good and terrible, but I'm hopeful for 2020 and expect great things to happen!

Happy new year, IH friends! 🚀🥂

https://imgur.com/a/Pri8NmQ

Earlier this week I introduced the "Standard" plan for my app at tayl.app. I did this to adress the number one complaint "it's too expensive", in hope of reaching a wider audience.

Less than a week later the number of payed customers has increased 20.69%, now totalling 35!

I've had an increase in traffic thanks to posting on Betalist, ProductHunt and Reddit so I suspect the traffic will decrease the next week, but I will do my best to keep promoting the app elsewhere.

I think it's mature enough now that I can start doing some non-payed marketing to experiment with different messages and such.

https://imgur.com/a/2cP0tBL

Almost six months after the initial release, I'm now happy to officially launch version 2.0 of TAYL.

This release brings not only support for more languages and voices (now totalling 180+ voices in 30+ languages), but also marks TAYL's entry on the smartphone market. With native apps for iOS and Android you can bring your Tales with you at all times, and create new Tales easily right from your phone's share sheet 📱

Now it's easier than ever to integrate TAYL with thousands of other apps and workflows without writing a single line of code. Send tweets straight to your podcast for listening, subscribe to a blog and listen to each new post or send your Tale's audio version to your own website for publishing. The possibilities are endless, and I can't wait to hear about the creative use-cases you come up with!

All of the above is nice, but my primary goal of version 2.0 is to make TAYL accessible to more people worldwide. I try to do this with the introduction of a new plan, called Standard. It's an affordable plan that gives you 5-7 hours of audio per month, using the standard voices, for the low price of a single coffee ☕️

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tayl-2-0

When I first launched TAYL I aimed for simplicity (in terms of both development, but also for the user). While the launch was successful, the number 1 complaint was about the price being too high. This was expected, as I initially set a high price from the get go because I rather lower the price in the future than raising them.

Well, now it's the future and I'm lowering the price. Sort of. I'm introducing a new plan, called "Standard". It has exactly the same capabilities as the more expensive plan, but comes pre-loaded with 1/4th of the credits of the "Premium" plan. This still gives you 5-7 hours of audio each month, which will be enough for most. The system won't reject those who want more... they'll be able to continue to use up credits, but will be billed for the overage use by the end of the month.

I'm happy that I've now been able to make the service accessible to more people world-wide, while addressing the number 1 complaint/user feedback. 🙌

Already, without any marketing, 2 users have subscribed for the new Standard plan.

https://www.tayl.app/pricing/

A few days ago I submitted tayl.app to betalist.com and today, finally, they featured my app. I have no idea how big betalist.com is in terms of traffic, but it's still nice with an extra link for SEO and such.

I also got a mention by @BetaList on Twitter (64.5k followers)!

https://betalist.com/startups/tayl

So after successfully launching on iOS (the app got approved by Apple the first submit 🎉), my next target was Google Play. I had the app running fine in debug mode on Android, but somehow it failed to run after being compiled to a release bundle.

Luckily, I could ask my colleague who's an experienced Android developer for suggestions on how to debug. With his help, I used Logcat to identify the culprit. Somehow during the minification of the bundle, classes that are needed to run the app got lost. I simply disabled minification and it worked fine. The app bundle size is still small, so it's not really an issue now.

I submitted the bundle to Google and after a week or so it was published on the Google Play store. 🙌

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.ultimatemachine.tayl

People deal with stress in different ways. I've come to terms with how my body reacts, and how I can read the signals. So after the death of my father that took a toll on both my psyche and my body, I kind of knew from experience what I had to do in order to get back on track again.

I thrive on routine, so I wanted to get back to work. I knew my body needed more rest than usual, so I made an effort to sleep 8-10 hours/night. I spent more time outdoors than usual, either running in the forest or riding my bike. I meditated a couple of times a week (unguided, no fuss), usually after running.

I knew I had to get back slowly, not to break. So I set small goals initially. The first week on getting back, I only wrote 10-50 lines of code. The next week I wrote 100. And I kept on increasing the effort until I was back in phase.

I wanted a smartphone app for my product TAYL, so that was my next project. From my previous experience with smartphone apps I know launching on both iOS and Android can be insanely time consuming. The cross platform-solutions available are not always on par with what the user expects in terms of user experience. Luckily, I had come across Flutter a while back and decided to try it out.

Flutter seems very inspired by React, which helped me in becoming efficient. I built the entire app in only a couple of days, and was ready to launch first on iOS. I couldn't launch on Android straight away, because I ran into some issues building the release bundle, and didn't feel like spending a lot of time debugging something.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1471504094