OKAY, Lots of changes since the last time. First major change was the mascot, the fox was cute but I think the paper crane makes more sense branding wise. So now this is the new character for AfterWord.
I ran into some issues with the notes parsing and took a couple days to sort that out. Also had some issues with safe failure for ingestion jobs so fixed that as well. Then I got a bit burnout so I took a week-ish off. Now though, the app definitely feels more complete. I even uploaded all my kindle and koreader highlights and it was actually so fun to see my notes in books from like 7-8 years ago.
This is entirely why I built this app so I'm very happy with it.
Here's a preview of what my personal dashboard looks like!
What I've learnt working on this
(1) Larger scale parsing and processing is simple enough to get right but also quite easy to get wrong. (2) There is SO MUCH more to launching an app than I thought.
Besides working on my app and fixing the kinks, I also needed to work on building a landing page, getting good screenshots, setting up good analytics, onboarding design, drawing out (yes I've been drawing out the little cranes myself on my beaten up old iPad) the assets, setting up a waitlist, setting up feedback boards, getting domains, figuring out how to price (and if) the app and I haven't even started on actually marketing this.
I know it sounds like I'm getting ahead of myself but I've actually really enjoyed using this myself and I'm friends with a lot of readers that I think would also get a lot out of this so I want people to actually be able to use it.
Anyway, I'm taking my time with this app cause I'm having a lot of fun with it, it's pretty fulfilling, and it's actually pretty cool to develop an app all by yourself.
Here's the landing page for those of you that have scrolled so far!
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to:
- Finish analytics setup
- SMTP
- Onboarding Screens
- Final touches on mobile design
And then I'll finally be packaging it up and hosting it for beta testing with my friends first before I try to get it on the Play Store. I wish I could also do App Store but my god it's so expensive.