January 2021 Retro
Amicu
January 2021 has been a record month for Amicu. I made almost as many sales in one month as I made in all of 2020 ($170).
- New subscribers: 5 (3 monthly, 2 yearly)
- Churned subscribers: 2
- Total subscribers: 15
- MRR: $ 48.49
What I worked on
January was mostly bug-fixing and marketing. I didn’t add any major new features. Unfortunately, my fixes and performance improvements in one update included a regression causing crashes, when adding new contacts.
A lazily computed property in my model was automatically synthesized with the Codable protocol. And this caused database save requests to fail as the column didn’t exist. The property is derived so it shouldn’t be encoded or saved. I didn’t yet have the time for making Unit Tests for Amicu. So normally I do QA with key features and new features. But I was running out of time and wanted to ship. That’s the price I paid for not doing all QA steps.
I refactored the Amicu codebase to add more extensive logging. Customers can now share logs for support. But for privacy reasons, they’re not uploaded anywhere automatically.
One Amicu subscriber contacted me as he got a new device and couldn’t restore the subscription. I replied in under 30 minutes and got a positive review in return.
Launched No More Facebook
It lists privacy-friendly alternatives to Facebook products. Feel free to submit alternatives.
I saw a lot of discussions on Facebook breaking the promise to not merge WhatsApp data. And figured it was a good time to make a copy of No More Google by levelsio.
24 hours later I was on ProductHunt for my first launch. It went better than expected without any email list. During the day I got to the 2nd Product of the Day, but in the end, it settled for fourth place. I had more than 700 upvotes, but there’s a lot of fake users. They got deleted later. As of now, it has 455 upvotes.
It also got featured in the ProductHunt newsletter.
