12 Jan 2017
Belle

Existing monthly, December 2016

Exist

I finally released an update to the iOS app that's been in development for a while now. This update focused on syncing more data from Apple Health to Exist, including active time, heart rate, workouts, and nutrition data.

Josh added day length as an attribute from Dark Sky, and added a map to the web version of the Today view to help users understand where we think they are (which affects how accurate their weather data is). He spent the last few weeks designing a new end-of-year report for users, detailing some important stats from their past year.

We also made the decision to stop offering a self-serve option for suspending your account. As a courtesy to our paying users we previously let them suspend their accounts rather than deleting them entirely. Users can't log in to their suspended accounts and they won't be charged, but we keep their data up-to-date while the account is not in use. This is designed to make it easier to take a break from Exist and come back later without having big gaps in your data, but unfortunately too many users were suspending their accounts and never coming back. Even worse, several users suspended their accounts and then just opened new ones when they did return.

We were wasting server resources on keeping all these accounts up-to-date that were unlikely to ever be used again. This month we took away the self-serve option and instead asked users to email us if they'd like their account suspended. We saw a 91% drop in suspended accounts this month, so it seems to be working.

Larder

Josh brought the Larder Android app out of beta this month with a v1.0 launch. He also created a landing page to explain the GitHub weekly release email feature of Larder. The email keeps you up-to-date with any new releases in GitHub repos you've starred, if you connect your GitHub account to Larder.

We shared this landing page on Product Hunt and Hacker News and saw a small bump in traffic and signups, but nothing huge.

This month I published two posts to the Larder blog, which helped us triple our blog traffic from last month: Things that make me feel unwelcome online and What it's like to be a junior developer in charge of half a company's development.

Changemap

Josh continued to work on the beta of our new roadmap app, Changemap, giving it a redesign to bring it closer to the idea he had in mind for it originally.

Numbers

Exist business stats
  • 849 active users (601 paid)
  • 173 free trial signups
  • 52 conversions from free to paid
  • 42 cancelled accounts
  • 4 suspended accounts
  • $3,603.99 income after Stripe fees (no change)
Exist site stats
  • 5,804 uniques to our landing page (+36%)
  • 24,646 uniques to the blog (+54%)
  • Top traffic sources: Direct/organic search, Lifehacker, Todoist
Larder business stats
  • 782 accounts including trial or lapsed
  • 23 paid users
  • 30 trial signups
  • 6 conversions from free to paid
  • 0 deleted accounts
  • $99.07 income after fees
Larder site stats
  • 320 uniques to the home page (-15%)
  • 364 uniques to the blog (+211%)