TogetherLetters
Collaborative group newsletters for families, friends, more!
We're back at it again and have a lot happening under the hood. We're moving from our old app (Ruby on Rails) to a new app (NextJS). The plan is that we'll be able to implement new features at a much faster rate with the new setup. Some things won't change since they are performing well - namely email sending with AWS SES, where we're sending about 2k emails each week. We are going to shift from Stripe to Polar.sh to alleviate any issues about dealing with sales tax liability. With this move we're trying to focus on what is the important value that we deliver with our app and shed anything that isn't unique to us as a service. More coming!
It's been a while since we've posted but we broke 2k users a few months ago. We're working on new features and functionality. We're getting some really interesting use cases and think we might be able to start moving into some more nuanced solutions for certain verticals in the future.
We've had TogetherLetters running in the background for a few years and things suddenly clicked a few months ago. We're still not sure why but we're experiencing an ongoing large flow of new users. We're even starting to see users who are invited in for one group logging in and creating their own groups where they invite other users. This is the viral loop we were always hoping for and now finally are starting to see this happen. Maybe we're finally at the point of users where this kind of growth can really take hold.
In the meantime, we're starting to work on some new features as well as fixing a lot of bugs that we've seen over the years. 2024 is going to be a fun year.
We broke through 1,000 users on the service. We're growing at a really fast clip now (and we don't know why - we've done zero outbound marketing) and starting to focus on new features and functionality. We're considering new paid functionality and looking to realign our pricing plans to something easier to consider and commit to.
It's been a while since we've written and worked on TogetherLetters but lately things have exploded. Folks are starting to find out about the service somehow (we don't yet know how) and we're adding a lot of international users. Revenue is growing too and we're going to start spending more time on this to help it along. Maybe more posts and stories coming in the future!
When we originally built the TogetherLetters app, we just hacked together an email templating solution. That was a huge mistake. We have now transitioned over to a standardized version using an add-on that lets us put some of the generic logic into our email templates. This should help us moving forward in implementing features much more easily and making sure emails reflect the proper information to the correct audiences.
In addition, we're now including fields that tell people about the group they are getting emails for and potentially what kinds of updates are being solicited. They also know when the deadline is for their updates but hopefully, this causes a sense of urgency to click and provide an update instead of letting people procrastinate. Time will tell on this!
We redesigned the website for TogetherLetters with the hopes that we better explain how and why someone should use the service. In the process we moved to Webflow for the front end and think we'll be able to better react and make changes to the marketing site when we add future features to the app.
Ten days after we were ready for revenue, we've achieved our first dollar (five dollars to be exact!) of revenue. It's true that the adage "if you build it, they will come" doesn't work and instead it should be "if you build it, then talk about it relentlessly, eventually they'll try and come to buy". Well we did the first two parts and eventually they have started coming and started buying. Looking forward to more customers coming and buying in the near future!
We just launched a version of the app that now allows us to collect money from users if they want to upgrade their groups. This has been requested by a number of users who we don't know and hopefully that means it won't be too long before these users convert into paying members.
I look forward to doing another post (soon!) to declare we've gotten our first dollar of revenue!
After a week or so of work, we've finally launched a responsive interface for the TogetherLetters app. We added some features but overall we're now at the point where I'm no longer embarrassed by what the app looks like. It's fairly modern looking and appears relatively streamlined.
Along with this we've updated our website to reflect the same look and feel as the app. It's a much lighter look whereas the previous version tended to be very dark.
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