User Sentry
Get alerted with sound effects when users visit your website
After 10 days of back and forth with Google, my app is finally verified so that users don't see a big "Unsafe - proceed to safety" interstitial before logging into the app.
As I wrote before, the process was equal parts frustrating and helpful. I'm going to try to write up a quick post here this week explaining what to look out for.
Until then, 🍾🥂
The main idea of User Sentry is to play sound effects when users are active on your website. So I was hesitant to add a dashboard-like feature that would be similar to what Google Analytics shows.
But after a couple beta testers kept asking me questions about how they could understand how many people were on their site when they heard a sound effect, and I realized I was keeping Google Analytics Rrealtime open myself, I decided it was worth adding a simple feature to show the activity:
Hope this will reduce some frustration and tab-switching and make the app more sticky!
Check it out with your own site for free: www.usersentry.com
An app I built in a few hours got 8 users, which I consider successful for a toy app. This is despite the fact that Google APIs show a big "Unverified"/"Unsafe" warning when logging in.
The app plays sound effects to alert you as visitors use your website, and keep you motivated. It connects to your existing Google Analytics.
Based on this success, I decided to add some styling to make it a "real product":
Before
After
I keep going back and forth with Google on email for them to remove the big "unsafe" warning. If I manage to do that, I'll try to promote the app further!
(If I ever do convince Google, I will post a milestone on how I got approved!)
When I launched, it had no styling at all, and didn't work on iPhone at all, but it did play sound effects when people visit!
I'm curious to find out if others are similarly motivated when they can hear their website visitors coming and going, accessing pages, in real time.
Let me know what you think
2 Comments
I feel your pain, I found the process very frustrating too. I only got what seem to be template responses so you can't really question any of their feedback. At first they took issue with my logo and quoted some guidelines that various other approved apps also break 🙄
Thanks!
Yeah, they are clearly sending back templates. When they did respond with something not in the template it was incorrect English pasted in awkwardly with a different font 🤣
I tried to "Yes, and" them -- "Thanks! Based on your feedback I have changed $RANDOM_THING_THAT_MIGHT_HAVE_BEEN_RELATED_TO_YOUR_TEMPLATE_RESPONSE. Let me know if I can improve anything else for you."