Nice article, be interesting to see if 9 weeks of work is enough. I hope the author follows up more.

Normally I'd just upvote, but I figured it's worth a comment to second this. It's always good to see the 'launch' article, but it feels a bit more promotional than informative. I'd like to see a post-launch with some of the gory details.

It'd also be good to see some detailed predictions about what they think is going to happen. There's nothing like pen and paper to close the predictive feedback loop.

Edit: And of course, good luck to the folks at Cladwell!

My prediction last night = a tiny, tiny trickle of sales at first, because we have missed on some important assumptions.

But ultimately we have no idea what'll happen, hence why it's so valuable to get the product out in the wild.

Thanks for feedback Josh.

We'll find out today if 9 weeks is enough... Odds are, we've screwed up enough of the app that very few people make it all the way down the funnel to the revenue layer.

With learning as our goal, though, we'll have a super successful day today, vs. continuing to build features that may or may not matter.

I'll definitely do a follow up post :)

Ry,

I am curious about the learning part. Did you setup a list of questions and how do you plan to get the answers? Did you guys define "success" for today/this week in terms of what you want to learn?

The most important metric is revenue. Can we get anyone to pay for the app. We have 250+ people sign up so far, but didn't have to pay us anything... Can we convert 25 of them to pay us $6.99/mo? Or will it be 2 of them?

Update... so far, no sales. But we have a queue of trial recommendations to fulfill, which we expect is a prerequisite to people paying us.

If we can't get people to pay up front, we'll switch to allowing them to upgrade, but not billing them until X days after signing up.

Whatever it takes to ethically maximize conversion-to-paid ratio.

Thirded. I'm really interested to read a follow-up article on how it goes.

(And from a marketing perspective - if I see this company's name around a few times, at one point I'll probably remember to sign up myself!)

For what it's worth, the text in the footer looks fuzzy to me (in a way that hurts my eyes on a TN panel, on IPS it's slightly less bad)

(Chrome, Windows 7 64-bit)

Yep I told our designer that. Rotating text then rotating it back is how you can fuzzy your text, if you want to replicate it :)

Seriously tho, we're going to fix it... too bad clean CSS technique ends up this way.