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Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?

68 points by commiebob ↗ HN
I know there were a lot of people working on launching an app by the end of November.

Well, it's December 2, so I figure it's time for some show and tell.

How did everyone do?

119 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread
patio11
Appointment Reminder launches "for real" on Monday. (A cold cost me a few days from the planned schedule.)
commiebob
Congrats! And will you be doing a final wrap up blog post about the process? If so, I am looking forward to it.
patio11
Sure. Anything you want me to cover in particular?

I'm also in talks with Twilio about producing something with them about it. Preview of coming attractions: everybody should use Twilio. Oh goodness. It is freaking amazing. It is like email: add it to an application, just about any application, and it gets suddenly, radically better. (And the existence of it makes possible applications that wouldn't be possible otherwise, like AR.)

lionheart
I've played around with Twilio and I'll second this statement 100%.

Now I just need to think of something to make that can take full advantage of their capabilities.

commiebob
Nothing in particular, I just really enjoyed the first two you wrote. Seeing the entire process of launching a product laid out was very interesting. Thanks!
koenbok
Well, we did not launch but had two major updates to Kaleidoscope and Versions: http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com http://www.versionsapp.com

We're especially happy with our changeset feature for git/svn/bzr/hg: http://vimeo.com/17363481 and would love to hear feedback.

dominostars
You work on versions, do you? After using it at my last job, I've found that my work flow completely depends on it. You can tell it was an application designed for the mac, not just by the way it looks, but by the way it works ('Reveal in Finder'? Thank you!). I love how easy it is to see view my changes. I love how easy it is to see that there are changes in the repository, and view what those changes are. I love that you can view the full history of a file, along with who committed each change, the commit note for it, and the diff.

I have to say, though, that if the app was only $10 I probably would have bought it for personal use 9 months ago. As it stands, I'm still struggling with the price, even though I'll probably cave in and buy it after the trial ends on my new computer.

pstinnett
I use Versions and Kaleidoscope all day. They are integral apps to my workflow. Functionally, I think they're awesome. I have two quick questions regarding the UI though:

1. In Versions, the active Timeline/Browse/Transcript button is the one that doesn't look pressed. Why didn't you go with the opposite? http://yfrog.com/fyh6rp

2. What's up with that navy background on the initial Versions screen?

Not big issues, just curious! Keep up the good work.

aspir
Still working on it. But I started late. It's also my first app push - I'm a "business guy" learning to code.
nlakhani
I am in this position as well, learning to code and work on my idea at the same time. Very interested in hearing about what resources and tools you used!
jseifer
I'm so close! I should have something up by next week. Got a ton done, though. You know, that whole last 90% thing. I'm totally pumped, though.
binarysoul
I got to a working prototype on my phone.. now all that's left is getting an app icon, splash screen, adding some graphics to the UI. But the app itself already works
europa
I am still working on mine. It'll take a few more weeks before the MVP ready to be launched. I have my landing page up at http://www.serverfabu.com/

The inspiration for this project came from the feedback I've received for my ASK HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815344

patio11
I am very interested in seeing what you come up with, even if I have no immediate use for it now. The last month taught me, again, why I am not a sysadmin.
europa
Thanks for showing interest in this. I'll definitely post my launch here. Also notify you if you have signed up at my landing page
kaffeinecoma
Just signed up for your contact list. I'm itching to move off of Google App Engine, but not looking forward to jumping back into the sysadmin game, which is what I'd need to do in order to move to AWS or Rackspace or whatever.

I have no idea what your pricing will be like (and I'm guessing that you don't either, at this stage), but it would be great if you had something for micro-ISV type shops (read as: cheap).

As a solo dev, I'd love it if there were a service that would set me up with a linux image on AWS, nicely configured for MySQL/Postgres, JBoss/Tomcat, SSL cert, firewall rules, etc. If I could pay you a one-time fee for that, and then be off and running it would be very attractive.

europa
As of now, this is what exactly I am planning, One-time fee for setting up the server, hardening for security, installing/configuring software etc. I think the price should have a bearing on the complexity of the setup.
gbrindisi
Question: you will do all the configuration by yourself helped by some scripts or everything will be fully automated?
europa
It will be automated with a GUI to customize the server build,firewall rules and software installations etc.
amoore
I launched one. See all of the groupon deals in your town and others in one simple interface: http://www.groupongroupie.com/ I'm still working on a few kinks in the daily email list. The daily inspirational emails from 21times really helped.
bwooceli
Ha! Since I 'discovered' this I've used it nearly daily in preparation for Christmas travels as well as gift shopping for friends around the country. I had a suspicion that you were a HN-er.
amoore
Whoah - a user. I've heard about you, but didn't know you existed. Thanks for trying it out! (and tell your friends).
tommizzle
I launched the beta of my app in mid-November, although I must admit I did start mid-October so I'm hoping I still qualify!

I decided to build a revenue generating URL shortener. This was one of the first full projects where I basically did everything myself - research, design, development etc, which was a bit frustrating a times. It's ridiculous how unproductive my design days were compared to my development days, but I guess I'm just going against the grain there (I'd be interested to know how many people have 'mastered' both design & development.) That said, I learned quite a lot about the whole process, so definitely a good result.

I decided to launch before a lot of the esential functionality was complete (conversions, payments etc) just to get a feel for what people wanted, and most importantly if it was worth persuing the idea further. I'd probably do the same again next time, although I must admit I felt a bit helpless in the first week of launch when bugs were being uncovered/features were being requested and I was still working on the core.

I'm now onto marketing my app with my business partner. The market we're trying to is obviously insanely saturated, so it's a little frustrating at times, but I'm super motivated to get this out so lets hope we get some traction sometime soon :)

The URL of the app is http://shrtn.co

poincare
It looks like users can make money by having their affiliate codes embedded in (qualified) links they submit. But, how are you making money?
tommizzle
We have the relationships with the merchants, the users don't. We take a small cut of each sale.
dejv
I launched http://imendi.com

It is basically some web app to learn other languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Czech right now, few will follow soon). Principle is very simple: you assign foreign words to its english equivalent.

I build this because I am learning Portuguese right now and it is hard to learn grammar without knowledge of basic words. There are around 300 most common words in the app right now.

foxhop
I didn't launch but I made huge progress to my webgame

Looking for advice and suggestions to the alpha release version:

http://four2go.gumyum.com

Feel free to login as foxhop, no authentication needed, and try it out with a buddy.

Uses ajax long polling to update the games.

metageek
I launched my first Android app, Fanorona, a traditional board game from Madagascar. So far I've made four sales. At 99¢ each, minus Google's 30%, I've made $2.78. But it was fun. (I also listed it with Archos's AppsLib, but I don't expect to see any money there; they don't pay out until you hit $50.)

http://fanorona.thibault.org/android/

dpcan
Getting a Lite version out will probably help you tremendously.
metageek
There's really nothing I can take out and still be Fanorona. (Well, maybe Undo, but that'd be insanely frustrating.) Maybe an ad-supported version.
muhfuhkuh
If you have the chops to do multiplayer (either by turns or bluetooth/network-based), you can charge a premium for that.

Play the CPU for free, play your _friends_ for 99 cents.

metageek
That would be nice—and, yes, I can certainly do the network programming involved. The app is even built with an MVCish architecture that would let me just drop in the network player.
imack
I managed to amalgamate some similar projects into http://feedladder.com and move it from activerecord to mongomapper. Basically it allows for twitter feeds to have their own submission and voting for their tweets. Best example right now is probably http://profquotes.feedladder.com.

Haven't gotten around to making workflow to add new ones automatically though, school and work take a toll.

nhangen
Working on a game called Santa Strike. Should have a prototype for HN in the next day or two. Remember Elf Bowling? It's a bit of a tribute :)
markkanof
Terrible, although I am smack in the middle of selling my house and moving from the east coast to the west coast, so perhaps this wasn't a great time to try to build and launch an app.

I really like the idea of setting a deadline to launch an app though. November wasn't really a workable time period for me personally, but it would definitely be helpful for me to set a deadline and possibly make it public so it would force me to really get something done.

CWIZO
Started working on mine webapp, but unfortunately other things came in the middle so I'm about 5% finished :\ I'm planning on completing it someday as we need it internally anyway. So maybe some day.
kaffeinecoma
Inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I launched Quick Brown Frog:

   http://www.quickbrownfrog.com 
   http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com
It's at the MVP stage, and while a technical success (I think it's an awesome in-browser app), no one seems to be interested in paying for it. I reduced the price to $10 prior to launch, and I still haven't had a nibble. I burned through about $200 in Adwords/Bing/Facebook ads so far. I guess it's hard to compete with the many free typing tutors out there.

Still, I plan to keep plugging at it. I have no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, so next on my list is to get some badly-needed design help.

Many thanks to everyone who provided invaluable feedback during the past month. I really learned a lot and had great fun developing it.

patio11
That is a wonderful application technically. Chat me up sometime when I'm more coherent and I'll give you some marketing/conversion pointers. The only one I trust myself to be accurate on at 2:30 AM is that you need to charge radically more.
percept
I won't claim to have answers but I can share some impressions.

The number of clicks you mentioned isn't a lot to judge a PPC campaign on. In such a small sample you never know where the clicks may fall--sometimes you'll get a bunch later and be surprised. I don't mean to suggest you should continue your campaign (especially if you're paying a lot for clicks while lowering your price), just that I wouldn't measure its success based on such a small sample size.

Price drops like that just seem like a race to the bottom, and it doesn't appear you've generated enough traffic to know for sure whether it's necessary. If/when you do find someone who'll pay $9, maybe they would have been just as happy paying $29, or more.

If it does turn out you're "competing with free," there are articles out there discussing tactics you can use to compete. Can you white-label it and sell to businesses, such as temp firms (I assume they still do typing tests)? Or professional training programs?

If that doesn't work, can you give away the tests and sell something else? Use it to generate traffic and promote a broader/different product, etc.?

kaffeinecoma
I was thinking the same thing, that 500 clicks was an awfully small sample size, and that I needed to collect more data. But I could go broke trying to get to a meaningful N. :-)
cosgroveb
I think your "free typing test" might be sort of a marketing vehicle if you could provide embeddable badges of results for blogs, or shortened links to your results for a Twitter stream, FB, etc...

Or maybe not. The sort of people showing off their mad typing skills probably wouldn't also be people who want to buy your service :)

kaffeinecoma
My intended market was the kind of person who googles "learn to type", finds Mavis Beacon, and then orders a CDROM from Amazon. That's what I did a couple of years ago, and it was a painful experience.

First I bought a downloadable version, which then sent me on a wild goose chase for Stuffit Expander, which was required to uncompress the image. Then when I finally got that, it wouldn't run on my OSX Mac.

Finally I learned that there was in fact an up-to-date version available for Mac, but only on CDROM. So then I purchased THAT (yeah, I paid twice!) Ultimately, the software was great, but getting it installed was a major PITA.

I imagine that there are a lot of traditional desktop apps like this that you can only get on CD (or dodgy software downloads). That's the "niche" I'd like to target.

revorad
I tried your app once and loved it. I just bought an account. Congratulations!

Please keep working on it.

jaxn
This comment made me try it out. I do wish I was a better typist. Maybe this is the kind of thing I could do in my spare time instead of playing Angry Birds.
jaxn
It would be extra awesome if I could navigate through the lesson via keystrokes.
kaffeinecoma
Hit any key at the end of a lesson, and it will bring you to the next one. I should add tab navigation for "fast forwarding" though...
dpcan
I'm going to be negative, sorry.

I think your biggest difference from Patrick is that you are in a B2C situation where he's definitely in a B2B situation.

A teacher or event planner needs to make bingo cards to save time - which is money.

If I just want to type better, I have to justify this expense as a consumer. Is this something I will spend $9.95 on? No. I'll probably spend 20 minutes looking for a free typing tutor that will ultimately have me repeat type what I see on the screen until I get better at typing.

kaffeinecoma
Hey, no worries; to each his own. I happily spent $30 (twice!) to buy shrink-wrap typing software.

I think my app outshines the top Google result for "learn to type online". But as you mentioned, not everyone will be willing to pay for that difference.

getsat
Very nice application. I like the graphing of your progress over time. Maybe you could expand it to include DVORAK? I would have paid far more than $9.95/mo for DVORAK lessons when I was learning it. :)

One thing, though: http://i.imgur.com/rCTzE.png

I type between 130 and 140 WPM. The fastest I could get on your speed test was less than 100 WPM. Maybe some other fast typers can verify that this is a bug?

Good work!

kaffeinecoma
98 WPM @ 100% accuracy is probably not my main demographic. :-) It is a known bug though, and on my list to fix, but thanks for taking the time to screen cap it.

What tool have you used previously to measure your rate at 130-140 wpm? QBF counts every 5 characters as a "word"; other apps might measure differently. Did the tool not keep pace with your typing?

Thanks for the feedback!

getsat
I've used a lot of sites, but I'm most fond of typeracer.com's racing system. Most sites peg me around the 130-140 WPM mark.

Good luck with the site!

Deadsunrise
How much did you "train" to get to that speed? I moved to dvorak a couple years ago and I'm actually at 80-90wpm. I used atypetrainer4mac to get to 50-60wpm, then I did this http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadsunrise/4338226640/ and I'm up to 85-90 but to get slightly faster now I have to invest too much time.
getsat
I'm not sure. I was at 60 WPM at age 16 according to Mavis Beacon and steadily increased over the last decade. IRC was my training program. :)

I do not even type correctly and I have had no formal training. I only use three fingers on each hand (index, middle and ring) and my right pinky finger to press Shift. I actually press the spacebar with my right index finger and occasionally my left thumb.

Sorry that I can't accurately answer your question!

27182818284
> free typing tutors out there.

Why tutor? At a glance I thought it was a very cheap way for employers to test via the browser an possible hire's typing speed. A certificate is printed by the person at home who brings that to the employer. It should have a URL that could be used to prove they didn't just make up the result.

rmc
That's a great idea. You can target it to job seekers ("Improve your CV") and employeers ("Find better employees"/"Know who they are before you hire them").
ismarc
I think this is really well made and only have a few comments on the speed test portion.

I'm not sure if you scale the dial showing your speed, but at 100 words per minute, it's not maxed out, but it is at 123 words per minute (I'm assuming the max is 120 words per minute). I'm assuming so that people can target 60 wpm? I would actually suggest it go either up to 100 or have it go up to where 50% would be the target or average, and maybe scale past that.

Also, for the accuracy on the test, typically it is measured by whether the word was correctly typed after the spacebar is pressed to move to the next word, not a character by character as it's typed (as in, type tou<delete><delete>hough<space> and it's correct). I've always thought it odd that it was done this way, but I naturally correct while I'm typing and that had negative consequences on your test.

That said, you've got something really, really solid here, worth way more than $9.95. It almost lends itself to a subscription model.

kaffeinecoma
The WPM gauge is set to go from 0..120. I didn't expect to have many customers that can type > 100WPM, but perhaps I was mistaken. If anything, I thought that I might end up dialing that down to 0..75, so that most users at the lower-end of the range feel like they're getting a positive result. Maybe I could make that a configurable option in a future release.

As for measuring typing accuracy, that's surprisingly complicated. I wrote up a blog posting on this:

http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/measuring-typ...

Thanks for the feedback!

europa
I second the subscription idea. Probably you could charge like $5(or more) per month with a minimum commitment of 6 months.
kaffeinecoma
For everyone who has launched, have a look at this site:

   http://www.44tips.com/b/Eric/Where_to_submit_your_Startup/
Spend a few hours submitting your site to whatever review sites from that list are appropriate for your app.
carbon8
I put together Markup Converter http://markupconverter.com/

It's a simple web service for converting markup from one format to another. Most of the conversions in the app are done using the Haskell library Pandoc, but I'm also using Discount, Python's Docutils and Ruby's RedCloth. It was also an opportunity to use MongoDB a little more. Right now it just converts snippets to snippets, but I'm in the process of adding additional options, like autolinking URLs when outputting HTML and adding headers and footers for formats like RTF that require them for complete documents.

I really liked the November sprint idea and am going to try to launch at least one thing a month this winter, even if only a simple microapp.

benologist
I rolled out a series of huge updates for my site:

- released a JavaScript version of the API

- released an ActionScript 2 version of the API (AS2 is an antique I wasn't going to bother with but one of my users back-ported my API for me so I took it from there)

- added custom data for leaderboard scores, can't wait to see what my users do with that

- added some awesome new reports to help developers make their games more engaging and generally ease them into data-driven development, a lot of casual game developers "launch and forget" which is something I'd like to see phased out

- launched the level sharing API for user-created levels

- announced pricing, still haven't implemented it yet but that's coming ASAP

And I made the whole thing real time ... 8 billion events a month and growing!

zmitri
Made an app to upload and play your music library online through the browser. Not only that, but enabled one click library sharing between friends with an access link.

for example: http://ymitrimusic.appspot.com/share/5ef46

You can login with your google account. The front end is based on the open source sound cloud player, and i've left some of the soundcloud functionality in for streaming.