25 Jun 2015
Josh

Existing month to month, May 2015

May saw the release of our Android app and new developer docs site, as well as lots of blog traffic via Lifehacker.

Product development

On the web side, I tided up the API docs and launched them on the subdomain developer.exist.io with a much revamped interface and plenty of handy code examples. I also added some extras to the API including finalising the OAuth2 "authorise" flow, then sent out some OAuth2 client details to my beta testers. Not much has come of this so far so I think I'll look for a new round of developers soon.

Mobile-wise, Belle had her iOS app approved by Apple but had to wait while the arduous process of verifying our company details was completed. She also added a settings page showing user details and allowing notification toggling etc. With the Google Play Store, I had no such verification dramas and was able to release our Exist for Android app! This attempts to mirror the Today area from the web dashboard with cards showing your progress towards your goals and recent insights. It also allows mood rating from within the app.

We also added a new US $45 yearly plan and the means for users to upgrade from the site.

Marketing

Belle was hard at work this month and published four links posts and three features:

She also had the habit tracking post republished on Lifehacker which was a lovely bonus.

In podcast news, we recorded three new episodes this month for your aural pleasure:

Other business stuff

After April's switch to task queues, we followed up with users apologising for the mood email outages and general flakiness for a few days, sending some retroactive mood emails to users who missed them.

I made some little visual changes to the Hello Code site to tighten it up, and added the blog and podcast to the home page.

Littlelogs gained "trending tags" on the Public tab and some better tag ordering for user profiles, showing top recent tags first, and then everything else.

Numbers

Business stats
  • 487 users (422 paid)
  • 65 free trial signups
  • 14% growth with 68 conversions from free to paid (63% conversion rate)
  • 1% churn with 6 cancelled accounts
  • 34 suspended accounts
  • $2,037.43 income after Stripe fees

While this is a significant drop from last month's income, we knew April was an outlier from the yearly subscription recurrals. In terms of the broader trend, we're doing really well with our 5th month over $1k in income solely from Exist, and our first "real" month of $2k+ income. Hurrah for us!

Site stats
  • 5,162 uniques to our landing page (+20%)
  • 26,436 uniques to the blog (up 103% from March)
  • 9,883 uniques to our new top blog post, Apps to track your habits and goals
  • Top traffic sources: Direct/organic search, Lifehacker, RescueTime

We can thank Lifehacker for a huge boost in blog hits thanks to their republishing of our "guide on tracking habits" post, which linked to the habit apps post.

How'd we do?

We got the Android app and yearly accounts released, two of the big tasks we were aiming for. Unfortunately the iOS app didn't quite make it, but only because of bureaucracy.

See you at June's review!