<i>I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients.</i><p>Great!<p><i>The open rate of the email was 45,8%</i><p>That's excellent.<p><i>...and 27 people replied.</i><p>Oh. Oh dear.<p><i>~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague.</i><p>96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is <i>by far</i> the more important number. If the people who'd tried the app were a random sample of the population then 2.2% might be enough to suggest there's a valid premium business model there, but the people who tried the service weren't randomly selected - they were a self-selected group of people who are interested enough in user testing to sign up for the service. If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (alledgedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a <i>big</i> messaging problem.
I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.
I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to tinker with, while you work on other stuff!
I like this kind of posts, a side project helps creating side projects. it was a matter of time until I figured out that to make money you can simply teach people how to make money. who wouldn't want to learn that :)
This goes along with a good site I saw mentioned in comments yesterday, <a href="https://www.goodui.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodui.org/</a>. If your site was still up, I'd sign up. You might even go cheaper with something like a shared hosting solution, like webfaction. it's cheap, it's easy to setup stacks, you'd have plenty of space, and you don't have to manage your server.
It sucks that you had to kill your project because of costs but honestly I don't blame you for going the Heroku route. It does it all for you with some "mininmal" configuration. I like linux and have done enough maintenance on various sites so I generally don't feel lost but I'd kill to have someone walk me through the process of setting up a production ready web app just once.
Dude! $250 doesn't make any sense. I've been running a MUCH more complex side project in Heroku with ~80k visitors per week for way, way below that, closer to what you would pay with DigitalOcean or the like. For a checklist app and your traffic you shouldn't need the dynos or the database upgrade.
Aside from the free nature of the app, I think what's missing was a consistent growth strategy. In your opinion 1/ how much would be a fair price for such a service 2/ which/who sales/marketing saas/specialists would have helped it attract customers 3/ what would be the next features appealing enought to convice users to try it, use it more frequently, and invite other, should this app continued to live
<i>"To learn more about my users, I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients."</i><p>brilliant read, one thing I'd modify is ask some/all these questions on signup or login. Tweak enough questions and techniques to ask [0] so as not to discourage. This way you can gain more info as as people use/try/login.<p>[0] Must be numerous ways to gain info building it into actions of tool.
For all the people saying Heroku is too expensive: a basic single server, 10M row database and SSL is around $50 a month on Heroku:
<a href="https://www.heroku.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.heroku.com/pricing</a><p>Personally, for the reduction in admin tasks (which I think people greatly underestimate), improved deploys and rollbacks, and improved uptime about $50 a month is completely worth it compared to a standard server.<p>I don't know why the monthly bill in the article is $250 though.
Here's another checklist style app, only built on PHP AppEngine. So far there hasn't been enough traffic though to make a reasonable estimate of cost.<p><a href="http://www.fallinloveapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fallinloveapp.com</a>