14 Jul 2014
Josh

Existing month to month, June 2014

Welcome! In the interests of transparency (which is not nearly as radical a notion these days) we're beginning a series of monthly blog posts detailing our startup journey.

For background: Belle and I started working on our product Exist around June 2013. It's a platform for personal analytics, and our aim is to take the masses of data we create about our lives and find meaning in it. Just like activity trackers turn low-level sensor data into the number of steps the wearer has taken, we take that low-level number of steps and turn it into higher-level information on their activity. And when we combine multiple sources of data, we can find correlations and help you gain insight into your behaviour.

Since Exist's inception we've applied to (and been rejected by) a bunch of accelerators, focused on health and fitness and then broadened our approach again, and had some fairly favourable press. We launched a closed beta in December 2013, a backer campaign (early access for a discount) in April, and now, at the end of June 2014, we've been in public beta for month.

Development

We spent the start of this month tidying up our signup flow and tweaking some Stripe integration issues. I love how much Stripe does for you, but I hate having to handle the rest ourselves! And although we'd found a lot of bugs early thanks to our intrepid early backers, a fair amount of this month's efforts were spent on bug fixing too.

I also added the Active minutes attribute for Jawbone UP and Fitbit users, moon phase correlations, and introduced a weekly email summary.

Before launch, we'd promised Withings and MyFitnessPal support was first up. In June, we purchased a Withings Pulse and Smart Body Analyzer (it's a scale that also tracks ambient CO2) in order to start Withings integration. However, a number of show-stopper bugs in the Withings API has meant we're still blocked from completing this. Overall I'm fairly unimpressed with Withings' quality, both on the hardware and software side.

We've also not heard back from MyFitnessPal who have a sanctioned API whitelist. We may have to go via RunKeeper to get this data. Have I mentioned companies should be better at this stuff?

Marketing

We published four link roundup posts to the blog (one a week) and three extra posts, which did well. Belle sent some press invites to some press people, although we haven't seen any activity on that front so far.

Hustling, dealing, and shlepping

Our current goal is to persuade/charm/intimidate some high-level people in the industry into becoming advisors in order to give us some clout and visibility. As a product with sizeable stakes in both health+fitness and data science, it would be nice to have the support of someone clever and well-known with a background in each of these. We're also looking to raise money at some point in the future (this is not a solicitation) so we've been meeting with angel investors and VCs to begin relationships and get advice.

In June we talked to some lovely people and got some great advice on achieving those goals. We have some leads, but no solid results so far. It's looking increasingly likely that Belle will end up in the US as we're not having much luck in Australia.

We also produced and refined (a zillion times) a pitch deck that now looks pretty damn nice.

The numbers

We actually launched quietly to the public in the last week of May, but given this is our first month of reporting, I'm going to give us a pass to include that all in this post.

Business stats
  • 347 users (301 paid)
  • 80% growth from last month
  • 24 users deleted their accounts
  • $1,032.71 earned after Stripe fees

Being the first month after launch, this growth number is pretty good! However around 7% churn isn't great.

Unfortunately the amount we earned isn't nearly enough to support the two of us yet. Given we're bootstrapped, we're both working freelance gigs on the side to support ourselves. It would be nice if this changed in the next few months.

Site stats

It's nice to see that informative posts like the one mentioned above are doing well on Google — it seems like a lot of people are curious about how sleep tracking works. Belle's previous stint at Buffer continues to send us traffic also.

June: the good bits

It's fantastic to have launched, and to see some buzz on Twitter around the product. Excited tweets and new signups bring a stupid grin to my face. I'm glad we're finally in a position where, instead of working towards launching, we're now working on making everything even better and adding new services our users have voted for.

June: the bad bits

Churn makes me really sad. As the single developer working on Exist, I feel a strong bond with my work —it and my ego are closely aligned.

So when one person deletes their account, I feel a bit sad. But when a bunch delete their accounts overnight, and I wake up to the automated emails, it's like a punch in the gut. (Exist even helpfully plots when this happens and I record lower mood ratings.) I need to get better at taking this less personally.

Or, maybe everybody could stay a paying user forever so I don't have to be sad.

On a serious note, we still haven't figured out the root cause of the churn, and if it continues we'll probably try things like free trials or free referrals to save people from taking the plunge without knowing if it's their thing.

Next month

We're already halfway through July, but this month our goal is to make our existing customers happy. We'll be working on Google Calendar integration, possibly shipping Withings support, and generally refining the Exist experience to be a rewarding one. Belle's focusing more on existing customers this month, gathering feedback from those who love Exist already and those who find it's not for them, and experimenting with some different marketing options to see what works best.


Exist helps you make sense of your data and understand your life, and is the thing we spent this whole blog post talking about.

Author and co-founder @joshsharp is on Twitter and eagerly waiting to discuss this post.