Side Project to Startup
A 3 year journey
Three years ago I hit release on Appbot as a side project.
Now it’s a full time company, complete with an amazing (or ‘totes amazeballs’ as we’d say at standup) co-founder, kick ass employees, office space, customers that pay us money and a lot of fun and laughs.
But it’s been tough, really tough. It’s still tough.
We aren’t profitable. The founders are still working for free. I’m not complaining, we aren’t owed a wage because we decided to do a startup. We have to earn it, we have a lot of amazing customers, we just need more.
Bootstrapping is tough, but so is being VC backed, I’ve done that too.
The side project years
Rewind over 3 years and I was founder of a mobile app startup with some level of traction (we ended up with over 4 million downloads). Our app reviews were painful to track across all countries, but there was so much amazing feedback in them. 5 star reviews that I want to share with the team so we could high 5 each other. 1 star reviews from people that wanted to love the product, but we’d made it hard for them to.
It started as a cron job, a little task that would run on my computer once a day and email me the reviews.
Then a co-worker asked to get the reviews as well, so I tweaked it to send to multiple emails.
Next someone asked me how we handled our reviews, and they wanted in. So I made it into a proper web application, where you could sign up and track your own apps.
I sent the link around to 6 developers I knew, to my surprise 5 of them signed up and started using it every day.
I didn’t touch Appbot for almost 2 years, somehow people found it and kept signing up. Now and again I’d check back and another bunch of amazing app developers had signed up. Some large companies had over 100 users on Appbot.
Getting serious with AppbotX
When Discovr had wound up I took a bunch of time off, luckily I had a number of apps like 7 Minute Workout, Lean Canvas, Affiliate & Realtime making me a decent income.
Support started to become a hassle, I tried out a bunch of support products but they all felt like web apps where someone had decided that mobile was a thing and decided they should throw together some mobile support. It was pretty crap.
I made AppbotX for my own apps, it was really effective for reducing support and getting better reviews. So I invited a few friends to add it to their apps, they did and gave some awesome feedback.
I launched AppbotX in July 2014. Wow, charging money is a different experience all together than having a free product.
A bunch of indie devs loved it, and the bigger guys asked why I wasn’t adding it to Appbot.
I had this delusional idea that a billion dollar company, with over 100 people on Appbot that were telling me how much they loved the service would want to shower me with money. Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy.
The rise of the Claire Bot
Here’s where I knew I needed help, I couldn’t keep going alone. There were major holes in my skill set, pricing, marketing and just someone to bounce ideas off.
At the time I had started chatting to Claire about helping me out on the marketing side. She brought awesome ideas and skills that complimented mine. So one day I asked “why have you never been a founder before?”. It all happened pretty quick from there.
Now I have no idea how I did it without a co-founder. Going it alone makes something really hard even harder.
Taking Appbot paid
Appbot had grown steadily over the years, the majority of users still opened the daily digests. Of course they’d want to shower us with money right?
We took a guess at what they would want and built it, unsuprisingly it’s not what they wanted at all.
All our best and most loved features have come from talking to our customers.
Pricing is hard
We’ve had to be brave about price testing, even though it doesn’t sit well with us. Lots of people said to us “you’re way too cheap”, but it turns out that there is a hard $ value people will pay for a certain feature set. No matter what your mentors tell you, you can’t just treble your pricing and expect an identical conversion rate.
I’ve even had people tell me that pricing doesn’t matter in enterprise. It does (a lot), enterprise customers have to fight even harder to get approval from their finance department.
The new customer high
The awesome feeling of getting that first paid user is no different to the tenth, or hundredth. Hopefully when the thousandth comes there will be the same high 5s around the office.
Churns hurt
The polar opposite of “the new customer high” comes when you have a churn. I definitely have a new appreciation for when a service reaches out after you cancel, that feedback is possibly the most valuable you can get.
Hiring
I hear the stories of startups trying to hire in California and how impossible it is. Tris and Estelle have been amazing for us. There are so many amazing people in Perth, I wish we could hire them all.
The culture
It’s hard to stay sane in a startup. It’s such a rollercoaster that culture is so important to keep everything levelled. We all share the love of a cat GIF (hat tip to Slack for being able to handle to level of GIFs we throw at it), every employee gets a Cubebot, we have lunch together every day and Appbot buys “burger Fridays”.
Claire Bot, Stu Bot & Tris Bot (Estelle Bot absent)
We have gender equality, not by design, we just hire great people. This brings a great mix to the team. I’ve learned so much in the last 6 months about things I never even knew existed.
Staying alive
Fighting for growth and survival as a bootstrapped company has been one of the most stressful, challenging and exhilarating times of my life.
We are just warming up, bring on the next year.
Check out our brand new homepage for Appbot and let me know what you think at stuart@appbot.co or @stuartkhall.
If you enjoyed the journey please hit recommend below :)
