After spending a tremendous amount of time on shipping a beta for Simple Schedule, fixing loads of bugs and moving hosting provider, I took a break from it all.

It’s now been one month (and a few days) since I launched the beta version of the app. I’m pretty happy where it ended it up and I am also happy that I took the time to learn the process of creating an app using the Rails framework.

I don’t… can’t… go into much detail of what I did for a whole month, so I’ll just dig in on what is next.

The newsletter

Before I move on though, here are some interesting stats from the newsletter that went out. I didn’t track how many people actually opened the email. It doesn’t interest me… I find it clouds my judgement. MailChimp didn’t give me an option to disable tracking on links though… you have to pay for that.

1. Out of 80 that signed up within the 30 days, 10 were fake accounts.
2. 1 person, who clicked a link, and signed up via the newsletter form, reported the email as spam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3. Out of 70, minus 1, no one signed up from that newsletter.

So, interesting insight really. I’m not sure why people signed up for it and then ultimately decided that a few days later that they don’t want to sign up. Perhaps it was the promise of a free account for people that supported the project. I’m not sure.

However, seeing people sign up to the newsletter gave me hope which ultimately kept me going. I went through some super difficult time in life, so working on the site kept me going. Even if you didn’t sign up, I want to say thank you for keeping me motivated.

Pricing

I decided to ditch pricing for now. Easy as that. My current servers are more than capable of handling the app, so I have no need to do anything special. Once there are a few thousand sign ups, I’ll rethink it. But as long as I can sustain it personally I am more than happy to keep it a free service.

Things are missing

I didn’t complete everything, with two items still outstanding. I’ll get to them eventually but I’m in no rush at the moment.

On top, I have been working hard on client projects. These pay for keeping the lights on and gives me the luxury to make it a free service.

On that note, I would say that Simple Schedule is in a good place and now just needs a bit of time to hopefully gain a bit of traction. I don’t mind if that is a slow process over a year or even longer. My goal is organic traction, so let’s see.

The most important part is that I shipped something, I learned a new framework and that I am happy of where it got me.