The story of KanbanMail — Part 1

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What is KanbanMail?

• Tell people what KanbanMail is if they don’t already know

The idea

• How I had it

• When I had it

Starting out

• Why I told people about it before it was released

• Buying a domain name

• Starting a Twitter account & posting ‘sneak-peeks’ to get people excited

Building KanbanMail

• What technologies I used & how I decided on them

• My crappy code quality & why I programmed like that

• My coding set-up, music choices, etc.

Staying motivated

• Why you can lose motivation

• Don’t stop, keep up momentum

• Building your network

• Maker’s Kitchen

• Twitter

Logging my progress

• Why did I do it?

• What it gave me

• Why should you do it?

• Makerlog is cool :D

Launching the beta

• Why I did it

• Getting over perfectionism

• Design & wording choices for the landing page

• Adding live chat

• Why I pretended it was paid already

• Sharing it!

KanbanMail made it to #1 on Hacker News the very next day 😮

• Mini-narrative because it was an awesome day

• Stats — page views, sign ups etc.

• Deciding whether to make the beta free forever

• Deciding if/how/when to let people in

• How to deal with sudden virality

• How to face negative comments

• How to stay realistic when you got to #1 on HN but have earned $0 so far

• The excitement slowly dropping off (only partly though)

More building

• Getting down to work and doing all the things I’d been putting off but needed to be done before launch

• It was especially important to do one thing each day at this time

• How to decide whether to include features before charging

Giving everyone beta access

• One day I woke up and said “stuff this batching thing, let’s let everyone in, what’s the worst that could happen?”

• Getting over that fear and giving 450 people access all at once

• How to make people remember you and still be excited when they signed up 1 month ago

• How to respond to feature requests

• Debugging with users

• People are so helpful!

KanbanMail itself was ready… But there was more to do

• There’s more to launching a product than the product itself

• Payment

• Transactional emails

• Legal stuff

• Making sure that everything is obvious

• How to tell users about features that aren’t there yet

Deciding on pricing

• Sending out surveys

• Asking the right questions

• Making the graphs & analyzing

Charging for KanbanMail

• You’re taking people’s money and you’re responsible for everything

• How to overcome the fear of charging when your product isn’t good enough

Soft-launching

• Just because it’s a soft-launch doesn’t mean you have to make it boring

• Share stats

Preparing for launch

• Making a video – OBS + iMovie

• Making a GIF – SVG + CSS + EZGIF

Launch day

Livestreaming the launch

• Why I did it

• Benefits

• Downsides – You don’t have time to think

• Was it worth it? – YES

• Livestream stats

After the launch

• Share stats