06 Apr 2015
Josh
Existing month to month, December 2014 and January 2015
The later I leave these, the less value they have on their own, so I've decided to combine two months into one. Let's get into it.
Product development
December
This month most of our user-facing progress was in the mobile apps. We sent both our iOS and Android apps out to a small group of beta testers. The iOS app focuses on tracking mood, while the Android app shows a mobile representation of the dashboard.
Web-wise, we allowed paid users to suspend their accounts "self-serve" without emailing us, and added more logging for things like payments and account suspensions. There was also work on the API to support updating attributes from the mobile clients.
January
January also saw most of our focus on the mobile apps. The Android app received more polish like "success" animations for reaching goals, insights, and allowing mood submission from within the app. On iOS, Belle started working on bringing the app to parity with Android by adding a dashboard tab and background sync.
On the web side, we redesigned the attributes page and stopped allowing people to disable attributes individually, as this was causing dependency problems. Some more API work to add insights was also completed.
I started planning the architecture of Littlelogs, and looked into using Elixir and Phoenix to build it, but was dissuaded by the pre-1.0 status of both Phoenix and some of its components.
Marketing
Belle organised her guest appearance on Brett Terpstra's podcast, Systematic, and recorded this in January. She also did an interview for a community radio show on economics, which hasn't gone live yet as far as we know. We also decided to try and focus more on publicity and press outreach, though nothing came of it by January.
Other business stuff
Belle came up with the idea for Littlelogs, for which we registered the domain and began planning. We also applied for IndieVC as it seemed like a good fit for us, but with no luck (as usual).
December numbers
Business stats
- 422 users (318 paid)
- 78 free trial signups
- 8% growth with 29 conversions from free to paid (37% conversion rate)
- 13 suspended accounts
- $1,064.10 income after Stripe fees
This is the first time we've made more than a thousand dollars solely from Exist. Milestone!
Site stats
- 3,779 uniques to our landing page (+17% from November)
- 16,056 uniques to the blog (+83% from November)
- 7,644 unique hits to our ever-popular blog post, How does your fitness tracker know when you're asleep?
- Top traffic sources: Direct/organic search, Twitter, Lifehacker
We saw a massive jump in hits to our blog over the Christmas break, with the sleep tracking post seeing triple the traffic. Lots of people researching their new activity trackers, we think.
January numbers
Business stats
- 481 users (326 paid)
- 85 free trial signups
- 5% growth with 24 conversions from free to paid (28% conversion rate)
- 25 suspended accounts
- $1,011.82 income after Stripe fees
The number of suspended accounts continues to grow as paid users choose this option over deleting their account and all their data.
Site stats
- 3,569 uniques to our landing page (-6% from December)
- 19,954 uniques to the blog (+24% from December)
- 10,326 unique hits to our ever-popular blog post, How does your fitness tracker know when you're asleep?
- Top traffic sources: Direct/organic search, Twitter, RescueTime
The post-Christmas trend continues, with many more people getting to our popular blog posts from organic search.
How'd we do?
In November we decided to work on getting our mobile apps ready for an early 2015 launch, on which we did indeed make good progress. Good work, us.