Tinkerwell

For the time being, we've promoted Tinkerwell to our existing audience on Twitter and in our newsletter. This worked but it looks like we've hit the ceiling and have to attract more users that don't use the php artisan tinkercommand yet.

This is why we've put together The ultimate guide to php artisan tinker

Today, we released version 2.13.

This new version solves more than 40 issues and adds new convenience features to the app that our users requested for a long time. We are going to push Tinkerwell and have the goal of 1,000 new users a month to scale the user base to 100,000 users long term.

We estimate that there are millions of PHP developers and hundreds of thousands who use Laravel – our framework of choice. All of them would benefit from Tinkerwell and we have to spread the word about it instead of getting distracted by other product ideas.

Version 2 of Tinkerwell is a year old now. We learned a lot and want to give the app a refreshed design as well as new features – like the heavily requested code competition feature.

We've decided to use this and do an update to version 3 – that gives us the opportunity to remove features that only a fraction of our users use and that add lots of maintenance for us. If users want to keep using these features, they can stay on the old version or use both versions in parallel.

This month, we released a new product: Invoker

Luckily, this launch was a huge success with ~$100,000 revenue in the first month for limited lifetime licenses.

We still decided to double down on Tinkerwell – but also hire a developer and grow our team to three people.

After more than 5,000 sales, we decided to double the price to $30 – and the license extension to $19. A Tinkerwell license includes updates for 12 months and has a perpetual fallback license. We knew that our first customers would need to renew their license keys for updates very soon and the success of the product lead to a price increase.

Luckily, the community was fine with the price increase and we got mostly positive feedback. $30 in the first year and $19 in the years after is still pretty low for a tool that many developers use multiple times a week, if not daily.

For the last months, we continued the work on additional features and the regular Twitter sharing of this development grew our follower base and the app kept selling daily.

At that time, we still worked for clients and started to work on other products, too. In April, we released a 2nd product for the same audience, HELO.

After a rewrite with Electron, version 2 of Tinkerwell supports Windows and Linux too. We migrated everything to a single codebase and started to work on new features. At that time, we had 1,500 users of the mac OS version and sales kept growing while we entered the Windows and Linux space.

We started questioning the $15 price but did not have the trust in our product to increase it.

We got a lot of feedback and many people suggested useful features that would make the app much better – so we built them and shared this process on Twitter to our existing audience of 10k+ people. This drove demand and sales a lot so that we hit the 1,000th sale within the first month.

Many developers kept requesting versions for Windows and Linux and this is what we are doing next.

Tinkerwell hit a nerve and many people wanted to try the app. We sold it for $15 at that time and had basically no expectations at all. Some influencers tried the app and pushed it for us so that we got an initial user base pretty quickly – but we also realized that there is demand for other operating systems too.

After 4 weeks of prototyping, we released the first version of Tinkerwell as a macOS-only application. The app was written in Swift because we wanted to give the real native feel a try.

We posted our development progress on Twitter all the time and collected newsletter sign-ups for a launch announcement.