Last week was a crazy one.
Chromabill has started to grow (just hit $160 MRR) and I’m excited to keep shipping new features to make the app even better. I want to start sharing the progress I make with you every week so I’ll start by doing weekly posts.
My hope is to share with you my successes and failures so you have a better understanding of what it takes to build a successful app business.
Hiring
We launched the app back in July 2020 to the public and since then it’s mostly been a company of two (just me and my developer).
Right now, we have a team of 3 people: myself (who handles most the design and business development), my developer (who handles the code and buildout), and my mentor (who provides founder mentorship and strategy for the app). We’ll be adding in one more hire, a fractional CTO to help with our app developement roadmap and to help us stay accountable with our development sprints.
Marketing
Marketing has always been a major obstacle for me since it’s an area that I’m the weakest in. In order to fix this, I’ll be working with a marketing specialist on a contract basis to help us brainstorm a strategy for us.
Our marketing focus is to grow our site traffic, increase app downloads, and get more users to start a trial within our application. Lots of founders struggle with marketing so I’ll post the marketing strategy next week that I’ll be using so that you can get some more insights on what it will take for us to reach those goals.
Although we have traction, this can’t be confused with product-market fit. We’re still enhancing our app and pivoting to meet the needs of our users.
Customer support
I recently did some customer support for a user that loved Chromabill and wanted to switch over from their current service “Bobby”. This was a huge win for me because it means that people would much rather use my platform over my competitors.
The user said that the price was an issue for him so to make the transition as seamless as possible, I offered the user 6 months for free just so he can see the value propsition as we continue updating our app.
As a token of his appriciation, he went ahead and wrote this beautiful review for us. I even went ahead and showcased it on our website:
Chromabill 3.0
Chromabill 3.0 is the next major step for our application. It will introduce much needed changes to our application such as the ability for users to connect to their bank accounts (via Plaid) to get insights on their spending, iOS 14 widgets, and a major interface refresh.
We’re throwing away the old color palette and replacing it with a brand new one! I can’t wait until our users experience the new changes.
In addition, we’ll also be adding two new pages: Accounts and Transactions. We’ll be discontinuing our Budget feature since not too many people use it. It may make a return in the future, but right now the UI/UX for it is choppy and inefficent. I aim to double down on what works (the bill tracking) and walk away from what isn’t working.
What went well
Chromabill
Chromabill has gained a significant amount of more users since our pricing change back in February 2021. This has enabled more users to try the app and see the value proposition.
Personal life
I recently went ahead and purchased the iPhone 12 Mini in that beautiful new purple color that Apple introduced. I had the SE before so this is definitely a step up. The display is so much nicer and it makes me love using my phone all over again.
What didn’t go so well
Chromabill
We haven’t been hitting our Sprint deadlines yet which is causing some delays with our roadmap. To remedy this, I’ll be adding on a fractional CTO to help guide our dev team in the right direction and to stay accountable.
Personal life
I used to set monthly goals for myself but I’ve realized that I keep delaying my tasks because I keep thinking “Hey, I’ve got a month to finish this.. that’s a lot of time… I’ll just do it another day”. In order to fix this way of thinking, I’ve decided to set WEEKLY goals instead so that I can stay more accountable with my time and my priorities.
Next goals
Get back to engineering! Our team has a ton of backlogged tasks and bugs to fix! As well, I want to jump on a call with our fractional CTO to reverse engineer my vision for the app and build some epics/sprints around it.
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