We built Idle to make your free time more productive. Now it’s looking to be our best lead generation tool…
Do you ever find yourself spending more time thinking about what to do than actually doing it?
We are certainly guilty of this and that’s why we created Idle.
This post tells the story of Idle and why we, a bootstrapped London startup, decided to make a free app (with no ads).
I guess you could say we are a strange bunch. Four mechanical engineers — one student, two engineers working in industry, and one a full-time ski instructor. Together we are Jascro Technologies and are united by a strong drive to design, build and sell software to establish an income stream on our terms.
For over a year we have been honing our once non-existent business skills by attempting to ship software to the consumer market. And for over a year we have been met with almost complete silence. This has really tested our commitment to the side-hustle.
Being young naive entrepreneurs we logically believed that all our ideas would be celebrated across the globe and with no effort at all we would be quitting our jobs and riding into the sunset. Of course this turned out to be very far from the truth.
We quickly realised that the only way to succeed was to embrace failure and develop a relentless resilience which would allow us continue to push new ideas to market despite previous failures and criticism.
And we think it is beginning to pay off… Recently things have slowly started to pick up and whilst our Teslas are not yet on order we have felt the excitement of users signing up and paying a monthly subscription for software we have created out of thin air! Although hopefully just the beginning of our journey we have learned so much during this exciting time!
Our main product, SuccessOnTap, is the source of almost all our revenue. Currently it exists as a subscription-based web application and is a platform aimed at helping our users set and achieve their goals.
Following a few months of capturing user feedback we are now completely overhauling SuccessOnTap — a significant investment of our time but one we hope will facilitate a step-change in user growth. So please, if you do check it out and sign up please don’t judge until we have released the update in mid December :).
Of our team of four co-founders, three have focused on web development and one on iOS development. As a result, the latest push to overhaul the SuccessOnTap web app has opened up some free time for me, the iOS guy, to work on a project that has been at the back of our minds for some time. That project is Idle.
We have always thought it would be useful to have “task generator” app able to tell you which chore/task would be best to work on based on how much time you have to spare. However, being a bootstrapped startup we have always been looking for immediate profits and couldn’t see much opportunity in distributing such an app so kept putting it off. Our reasoning was that it’s feature-set was too limited to charge for and too niche to capitalise on an AdSense-type program.
However, with SuccessOnTap beginning to gain traction and currently hovering around £50-£100 in monthly recurring revenue and with spare iOS capacity we finally managed to find a commercial justification for building the app we have been wanting to build for over two years. And we think it is pretty savvy…
Back to SuccessOnTap… our ideal user is someone who loves productivity and is very goal-oriented but perhaps has not yet found a good system to execute on these activities. Maybe someone who downloads a free task generator app may also be interested in SuccessOnTap? So we propose a deal with these users…
Would you, in exchange for using a very useful (and free) task generator app, allow us to keep you in the loop about any news regarding SuccessOnTap?
This way everyone benefits.
Our Idle users hopefully find benefit by gaining access to the free app we have created and in the process are introduced to a product which will help them become more organised and effective at achieving their goals. And we (hopefully) have a constant stream of leads coming through for SuccessOnTap.
As you can probably tell we are very excited to see how this strategy plays out and even more excited to keep developing new software.
If anyone reading this article is interested in either Idle or SuccessOnTap then please check them out below:
Cheers,
Scott, Robbie, Bencie and Jack
Jascro Technologies
