Crayon Bits Blog

User Experience, Frontend, Code and Life

Day 191-221 — Product improvements, credit card for trial and more.

life UserBit entrepreneurship

Product improvements

So May was an active months. I had users migrating their years worth of data on the platform and they reached out helping me improve the product. This was exciting. I enjoy helping people and UserBit is making them look good. This is why I started this journey. UserBit is providing value so to some degree I’m successful.

Some significant new features:

Revenue has also grown, still not sustainable but going from $0 to making enough money to get coffee everyday has been exciting. This is mine.

Taxes

I don’t think I talked about this before. Having a business means business taxes — they are a pain. I got tired of looking for an accountant and ultimately ended up doing taxes myself. I don’t want to do it again. So looking for an accountant. If you know a good one in NYC I’d love to hear from you.

Marketing & Growth

I’m just dipping my toes in it. Knowledge base in marketing is overwhelmingly vast and I am the first to admit that I don’t know anything about it. So I’m starting pretty much from scratch. Have to keep reminding myself that roam wasn’t built in a day.

But here’s something I don’t get about marketing. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts with people giving advice and tips on marketing and here’s my takeaway:

  • Marketing is a lot about experimentation
  • Most experiments need to run for a month or more to have any statistically significant result
  • Most experiments cost money

Given that most of these people have a marketing budget and some money to play with, and revenue coming in, this makes sense. You can spend time experimenting and iterating.

But when you’re just starting out, first, you don’t have the budget. Second, let’s say you do have some money, you’re changing things so frequently that it’s tough to give any change enough time to observe results.

I’ll try some stuff over the next few weeks and see what happens. I’ll update here.

Mental

So, the highs and lows continue. May was a slow week, I realized that free trial was getting really messy. Stripe was treating each trial as potential revenue stream however my app was set up in a way that free trial would give you access to export and things. People would sign up for free trial just to get personas and then are gone. So naturally I had a ton of people signging up for a short term thing never to be seen again.

I am now experimenting with put in payment to try. Let’s see how that works. Overall though, starting a business is tough. Very tough. Not just because of how much technical skills, or knowledge you need but mostly because mentally it is a crazy battle. So far, I think I’m doing well. 🤞40% of my mental energy goes into avoiding all the “startup noise” people who are all gungho about raising money, high growth, scale faster etc. Need to avoid all that and walk on my own path.