Eventually — Let’s make it happen

I have a bad memory. Or maybe I just don’t make the effort to remember things. I mean, I can remember precise events from 10 years ago but when it comes to names, I am completely lost. When I first moved to Strasbourg in France, it took me two years to remember which one is ( wait, I have to check it on Google Maps ) Place du Corbeau and which one is Place Kleber. And I am talking about Strasbourg, a smaller city than Paris or SF.

Where am I going with this ? Well, all this — not remembering names and places — is frustrating. About a year and a half ago I was in NYC. First time there, I wanted to mix the tourist stuff with the lifestyle. People were telling me about all this cool places to check out, like hidden bars, less known places, etc. But, whenever I was trying to decide what to do next, my brain was just like: “I don’t know man, you’re on your own”. Luckily, I was with a friend, more organized than myself and with him and Yelp, we were in a good spot. But what about the things I once wanted to do in NYC and thought they would be great to do / see ? Well, they were lost somewhere deep.

Oh, I forgot to tell you: I am a software engineer. I’ve been building stuff for years. Moslty for others, but my own projects too ( we’ll get to that, eventually ;) ). So, my frustration reached a point (somewhere on 2nd — ish Ave in NY ) where I realized I could have a solution to my problem: I am going to build something. I start telling Andrei about this new awesome cool idea I just had: I want to build a list where I can add places. This way “dude” I am not going to forget them anymore. You know, use Forsquare and Yelp, add them to a list, put them on a map. Even better, whenever you are around a place, you can get a notification to tell you that your are around it. ( BOOM! I dropped the mic. ). He seemed interested, we changed some ideas and that was it.

( I should’ve had an app to remember me to start working on it but … you know, bad memory )

Months after, I was grabbing a burger at Li’l Woody’s with Jason in prepartion for The Kooks. Several beers after, we start having “meaningful” conversations: what are we doing with our life, where is this all going, should we build something together, outside of our work place ?

The Apple Watch was announced, and if I remember correctly, he wanted to build an app for it. So, the app idea came to my mind and I start telling him about it. He immediately loved it. (YES!!) I was not the only one having memory issues. He start telling me we could add movies and books and so much more. He’s been struggling with those too, so why not.

(By this time we were in a cab) The beers were making us even more excited about the idea, until he said (something like ) this: bla bla , we should call it “Eventually”. I was so excited about the name that I wanted to kiss him (spoiler alert: it didn’t happen).

After that, it was real. We met a couple of days after to talk about the next steps on a more sober note. We created a kick ass playlist on Spotify and we start brainstorming about what Eventually needs to be-eventually- and where we would start:

Eventually — the name: We all want to do stuff. But sometimes is not a good timing. Maybe you don’t have the time, the money, the people to do it with. But once that you start adding them, we will do our best to help you make them happen
We are not just an ordinary bucket list. Eventually would add an intelligence to connect this things and help you achieve them. Let’s say you love Justin Bieber (mhmm) and you want to see him in Seattle. Well, if you are like me, you’ll probably find out about it after it’s sold out. So why not add it, and once he’s coming to Seattle, you’ll get a notification (as an example)
Everybody is working hard on recommendations, why taking a step back? There are apps that are doing amazing recommendations. But until now, we didn’t find a service that would help achieving the ones we care the most: recommendations that our friends make, the ones we read or hear about it, things we already want to do
We will not reinvent what’s already out there. We would use APIs like Foursquare, Yelp, Goodreads, MovieDB, GiantBomb, etc
We will give back. E.g. You can easily check it on Foursquare from our app

We had many features in mind and we decided to start small and grow. So we listed a contest for a design on 99designs.com and we gave them this:

(How amazing are my drawing skills, right? )

We envisioned the E being you, your desire to do things. And all those little boxes being what you actually choose to do. By adding them you complete yourself, your experiences. A couple of weeks after we settled for this:

So, we decided that for V1.0 we will offer four main features to test the waters: Places, Movies, Books and Games.

Since this was a side project, it took us a while to work it out. Meanwhile, when we were already deep in the project, we found out that there is a new app called Soon. We download it and that was a crisis point. At a first glance, they were basically a copy of Eventually (or we were o copy of them). We honestly thought this guys from Sweden stole our idea. We came with theories that they saw it on 99designs or whatever and just copied it. And then we panicked. But you know what, that was good. Don’t get me wrong, it would’ve been great for us to be the first on the AppStore. But having competitors, gave us the motivation to push ourselves and it enforced our assumptions.

Where are we now ?

Well, I quit my job at Amazon and moved back to Paris. With that, we were able to finally publish the app on the AppStore on March 19th. We were proud to present our first version to the world. That’s it, done with forgetting all those cool places, movies, and letting the things you want pass by.

So that’s it, we are millionaires, I just bought a new house and a kick ass Lambo. Thanks for reading my story and don’t forget to download Eventually.

….

I know, I know, bad joke.

March 24th is the day when the reality kicked in. We start sharing on Facebook, Twitter, call our friends, etc. We thought we are going to hit the roof. But no, a couple of weeks after the release and we are still at several hundred downloads.

What did we miss, it was supposed to be a success

When we first start working on Eventually, people were excited about our idea. And by people I mean our friends and random people we met along the road. They were all confronting the same problem and most of the time the solution was Notes app. So what happened ?

It seems like things have changed. Rewinding a bit, I’ve been building iOS apps since 2010. I worked on apps that were a success at the time (at least in Europe): Nespresso, BestWestern, P1, Courtepaille, etc…

In 2011 I launched my 2nd personal app - iSeries - allowing you to track the TV shows you want to watch. As a side-project and no money for marketing, Mathieu, Christophe and I were able to reach the top in AppStore and have around 100k users. So naturally, I thought Eventually is following the same track.

But no, things have changed. Today we are competing with millions of apps on the AppStore. Plus, at the time, many websites were reviewing our app without even asking. I contacted several websites to do the same for Eventually. Most of them, never replied. The ones that replied, they asked for money. The same website that reviewed us 5 years ago, today was asking for 800$. Ouch…

So now we are regrouping and try to find alternatives. Our fault, we didn’t quite investigate what are the options before shipping the app and we shoudl’ve. I guess we were too cocky.

What we have in mind for now:

Improving based on the existing feedback and keep going with other features
Social networking
Published already on ProductHunt
Experimenting with Facebook and Instagram ads
Submit our app using Promotehour
Contacting other websites and early adopters

Well, this is not the end of it, is just the beginning. Probably I should’ve done it earlier but in case you didn’t, give Eventually a try : https://appsto.re/us/FLPabb.i

P.S. If you have any feedback, suggestions or you just want to say hi, give us a message or email : [email protected]