19 May 2015
Josh

Existing month to month, April 2015

April was a busy month in terms of both managing users and building Exist.

Product development

The Android mobile app gained a settings page, and both Android and iOS apps gained the ability to properly "own" mood attributes so they could be updated.

On the web side there were a number of large changes. We retired the Social tab as part of the outcomes from our user survey. We removed some gigantic and slow database queries so data-heavy pages like the Dashboard and Trends pages felt much more snappy. We also decided to finally retire the 'beta' tag, which of course jinxed us as the next week we had some stressful site issues. With our single server starting to become overwhelmed by our thread-based tasks (these keep user data up to date), I decided to move to more robust task queues. There were many days of teething problems while this was sorted out — definitely one of the most stressful weeks in Exist's lifetime. But we passed through the other side, and Exist is better for it.

We also added some minor attributes like "mentions" via Twitter, and sleep and productivity goals (based on averages) so we can track user streaks.

Marketing

We switched our podcast host to Simplecast and recorded two episodes, 04: Year two and 05: Failure to fund.

Belle published four links posts and one article on some interesting Exist mood tracking stats. She was also interviewed for two other articles, one on ReadWrite about Exist and one for My Morning Routine.

Other business stuff

April saw a lot of progress on Littlelogs also. We introduced user invites for all existing users to hand out (bring your friends!), and the ability to both log and reply to logs via email. The email integration has allowed some enterprising users to create integrations with other tools — we have shell scripts, Slack (via Zapier), IFTTT, and Alfred so far. We also created RSS feeds for all pages.

Following March's user survey we also emailed all users with the results and our plans for the year.

Numbers

Business stats
  • 486 users (408 paid)
  • 84 free trial signups
  • 11% growth with 53 conversions from free to paid (63% conversion rate)
  • 2% churn with 11 cancelled accounts
  • 55 suspended accounts
  • $4,312.87 income after Stripe fees

Our income was particularly high this month as all our early backers recurred for another year, at AU$30 for the year rather than a $6 payment.

Also worth noting is that suspended accounts are growing fairly quickly. This isn't an issue for now but after a period of suspension we might ask users either to restart their payments or delete their accounts.

Site stats

How'd we do?

This month saw us continue to make progress on our 2015 goals — with no new services connected it may be hard for users to see the progress, but we're laying the groundwork for our API and mobile apps to appear very soon.