I can see how much effort has gone into this and it looks very well thought out and highly refined. Would like to hear more about why you built it, what didn't you get out of existing productivity products etc and how you managed to get 1000 beta users on board 😄. A wellpolished and high quality product, I am looking forward to putting it through its paces. Good luck.
@leewynne Hi Lee, thanks for posting the comment. Let's go through the story real quick. Back in 2013 I attended many productivity courses and read a lot about this topic. I downloaded hundreds of todo apps (yes there were already hundreds back then) in the search for something that will be able to get the spirit of everything I learnt. Unsurprisingly, I didn't find anything that suited my needs. I decided to sit and create the app's UI and look. I made a few versions and passed them to the entrepreneurs whom I interviewed. After a few interviews, I realized that they are not my target group. They demanded totally different features, the ones that can be found in apps like Asana or Trello. I decided not to get discouraged and showed the app to my colleagues. Their response was fantastic. I decided to retarget the audience and started to develop the app for the normal people. After a year, my friend Kyle told me to open the app for beta testing. Thanks to Angelique, my girlfriend, we gathered almost 900 beta testers when I told her to stop acquiring new users. We were getting hundreds of feedbacks to respond and were running out of places. When TestFlight increased their limit to 2000, we passed smoothly the 1000 beta testers milestone. This was the time when we knew we want to release the app officially. Without the support of such big community, the app would be totally different: not as open and flexible. Right now you can customize almost every feature just for your own needs :).
@mjmcclain Thank you Michael! @angeliquetoque is going to post the first blogpost in her life around today. She's explaining her process of meeting all the people and gathering such strong community. We'll post the link to medium.com later on!
@leewynne Lee, initially we planned Apple only but personally I'm pretty disappointed by their policies and attention to details during the last few months. They started to focus on lots of devices instead of doing a few, really well. There were some Android developers contacting me interested in porting the app to Android, but I didn't receive any offer that was appealing to me yet.
I used to be part of a company called FreeAppADay, a company that shut down after a rise in the freemium model.
As much as it sucked at the time that the company shut down, I'll say that there was good reason. The freemium model gives people a taste of your app before they commit.
$4.99 is a high price tag in app world. And although it may be totally worth it, there are too many free options for many people to want to blindly invest $5.
Just a suggestion, but I think it would benefit you to release this with limited functionality, and in-app purchases to unlock certain features.
I'd recommend having each feature be separate... Such as $0.99 to unlock sublists or $1.99 to unlock the habit tracker. That way people can should which features they value more.
The subscription plans are also becoming more and more popular with developers... Such as $4.99 for a year of all-access with syncing. This works best with a multi-platform product however.
Overall the product sounds awesome, but I have a hard time paying before I know I'll love it, and especially after previously investing in Omnifocus and other great to-do apps. I would be one of those people more easily persuaded by a freemium model as well. 😉
@melissamonteee Hi Melissa, Thank you for your suggestions! We had a hard time coming up with the best pricing model for Proud. After many evenings we decided to go against the crowd and use the Premium model. We saw other todo apps are available for free with in-app purchases. We were strongly committed though that we are releasing a very strong product that people will talk about to their friends. If not, then our product would not be good enough. Freemium is VERY good, but it has a few problems we couldn't solve. We are a small team of two people: my as a developer, graphic artist, ui designer and my girlfriend as a marketing specialist. To maintain a good freemium product you need millions of downloads, a strong team of people analyzing all the data and coming up with updates almost every day (even though we plan updates every week). Obviously we couldn't afford that model. Thanks to @DanCounsell who said in one of the interviews that freemium is only for big publishers, we went premium. If you are unsure if the app is for you, I welcome you to read our PDF about how you can use our app in your life: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.co...
@piotrszwach@melissamonteee@dancounsell
I agree with Melissa. Either a very restricted "free tour" version of the app (e.g. only one list, no habits, etc), or a vastly more detailed video demo is appropriate. Aside from the beautiful design, I can't really make out distinguishing features.
It's not about valuing your work, it's about understanding what I'm buying.
(Edit: Just found the video demos on the website... that's more like it! Still would love a "try before you buy" version.)
2 years, 1 couple: He is a developer, graphic artist and composer - in one person.
She: a 19 years old girl who took care of marketing. Almost 1000 beta users, 100 iterations, and we are ready to announce our productivity tool: Proud. It helps you in many ways: breaking tasks down to achieve even the biggest goals, timers based on pomodorro technique, de-stress function which helps you to calm down in the stressful moments of your life and many, many more. I hope you will like it! Let us know what you think!
New Year is a new opportunity to step up, step forth and grow! Start 2016 with Proud!
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