(image source)
A few moments ago, I was sitting around coding when Mike said, "Hey, guess what day it is?" I thought about it for a second and realized, "Woah, we launched a year ago today." And to prove it, here's the TechCrunch article.
So I thought I'd write a birthday post, filling you in on where we are, where we've been and where we're going.
Where We Are
Registered Users: Approximately 100,000
Active Users: Approximately 30,000
How long the average user has WorkFlowy open each day: 4 hours
How long the average user actively uses WorkFlowy each day: 1 hour
Growth Rate: Pretty fast.
Gushing emails we get every day from our awesome users: Lots.
How much fun we're having building WorkFlowy: 10/10
How grateful we are to all our users for spreading the word and supporting us: 11/10
That should give you a decent sense of how things are going at the present moment. Now, let's shed some light on what's happened over the last year.
The Past Year
Launch ... Wow, people love it.
When we launched on Nov 4, 2010, we were blown away by the reception. The post sat as the most popular on Techcrunch for many hours, and we got more than 10,000 new users. The next day, Lifehacker wrote about us and sent another nice burst. People seemed to really like WorkFlowy, and we were impressed that a lot of those people from launch day kept using the application. In fact, a lot of them still do. After launch, the product just spread through word of mouth. We haven't done any marketing.
The initial signs that things were going well came in part from the fact that our user numbers grew and our help inbox filled with nice emails and great suggestions for how to make the product better. The most compelling sign, though, was from our friends. Tons of them just started using WorkFlowy, and kept using it. Over time, more and more were using it. Soon, it seemed like I couldn't walk into a room without seeing three or four dedicated WorkFlowy users.
One of my best friends, Lukas, didn't get it though. I'd tell him how great things were going and he'd clearly feel happy for me. But once in a while, he'd say something like, "I think it's a slick app, but why do people love it so much? I'm not into productivity tools and would never use it. It's just not my kind of thing." This didn't bother me. In fact, I never encourage my friends to use WorkFlowy. I don't think I get anything from a handful of people using WorkFlowy out of guilt.
Then sometime during the summer, Lukas said, "You know what WorkFlowy needs? A timer." Then he proceeded to tell me why he thought so. He apparently had started using WorkFlowy every day. I don't know why he hadn't told me, I'd like to think he was too embarassed. Somehow, despite his opposition to the idea of the product, he'd gotten hooked. Now when I walk around his office, I see a lot of people using WorkFlowy.
And that's basically how WorkFlowy has grown. People find it surprisingly useful, and they tell one another about it.
What we've done
We use WorkFlowy all day every day to manage it's own creation. We spent the beginning of the year improving the core product, because we felt that it wasn't complete enough to be really proud of. We added collaboration, basic mobile support, dramatically sped it up, and made a ton of other basic improvements, with equal focus on new features and increasing usability.
In around June, we decided it was pretty awesome wanted our active users to start growing faster. We were losing users at about the same rate that we were getting them, so the usage graph wasn't yet up and to the right. So we spent a few months working on improving the new user experience. We launched a new user tutorial, introdcutory emails, summary emails, a simpler landing page and some other stuff. These changes immediately changed our growth curve and we've been enjoying healthy active user growth ever since.
We've now moved back to working on the core product and it feels great. Over the last couple months we've launched new features and started working on big new ones. There's nothing more fun than plugging away on it.
The Next Year
Our first priority for the immediate short term is to launch a WorkFlowy Pro plan, so that we can start to make a little money. This will help us pay for scaling the servers and for hiring more designers and developers to improve the product. After doing that, though, we're super excited about where the WorkFlowy is going over the next year. Our focus for the next year will be on mobile, collaboration, and simplicity.
Mobile
Everyone who uses WorkFlowy wants it to be awesome on their phones and tablets. They want it everywhere with them. It's clearly a huge opportunity for us, and we want to essentially replace the Notes application that comes with every phone. (For all those wondering about offline support, we'll have it for the mobile and the web application).
Collaboration
WorkFlowy needs to be as fluid for a group of people as it is for one of them. We always concieved of WorkFlowy as a powerful collaborative tool, but we needed to nail the single user functionality first, so we launched without any collaboration. The collaborative features we currently have are great, but they're rudimentary. It is just the tip of the iceburg. Expect a lot of improvements for collaboration in WorkFlowy over the coming year.
Usability
We feel proud of the WorkFlowy interface as it stands right now. It can, however, be so much better. Thus, one of our three main product priorities is simply to make the existing features work better, and to make small but important changes that make WorkFlowy more enjoyable to use. People often email us saying, "Keep making it better ... but don't clutter it." And that is genuinely what we are working toward.
Conclusion
To make a long story longer, we're happy and bright eyed. WorkFlowy is a blast to work on and our users are fantastic. We love the product and are excited to make it even better. Expect great things over the coming year.
