I launched Screenity Pro (yes finally!)

Issue #39

Hey! I’m Alyssa X, a serial entrepreneur who’s built 12+ products solo. This email is part of my maker journey, which you’re subscribed to. Feel free to forward it to others if you find it interesting! You can support me through GitHub Sponsors, I’d really appreciate it! ❤️

Hey all,

It’s finally here: Screenity Pro is now live! ✨

But it wasn’t exactly a smooth journey. So I thought I’d share a bit of what happened, the chaos, the delays, and everything I learned along the way.

The false summit

It was back in August when I actually finished Screenity Pro. I remember shipping the last feature and feeling a wave of relief. I thought, okay, I’ve done the hardest part. Now I just need to test everything, smooth out the rough edges, and it’ll be out in a few weeks. No problem... right?

That same month, I’d planned a surprise trip for my partner’s birthday, a proper break. No work, no laptop, no last-minute coding (which I’m very guilty of 😅)

We started in Annecy, a stunning little town in the French Alps with canals and cobbled streets. We cycled around the lake, swam at little beaches, and hiked through forests. Then we took a train to Zermatt, a peaceful, car-free mountain town in Switzerland. We stargazed, rode the funicular, and did long hikes through the mountains.

Wherever you went, the Matterhorn was there, looming in the distance. Steep, massive, impossible to ignore. After months of building Screenity, I couldn’t help but wonder: had I reached the top, or was the real climb still ahead?

Then one afternoon, somewhere between a hike and a hot chocolate, I started getting some… concerning notifications.

Make it stop

1 star reviews. Bug reports. More emails than I could keep up with. People were losing minutes of their recordings in the extension, and freaking out. Honestly, me too 😭

I was stuck in the mountains with no laptop, just my phone, trying to piece together what was happening, watching it all fall apart in real time.

As soon as I got home, I dropped my bags, opened my laptop, and started digging. Chrome had silently changed something behind the scenes, and it was breaking recordings for some users. I had to fix it fast before things got worse.

After hours of testing on every Mac and Windows laptop I could find, I finally patched the bug. The data was still there, it just wasn’t fully downloading. I hacked together a recovery script and helped users get their recordings back, one by one.

Somehow, I got through it. People were kind, some even turned their 1 star reviews into 5.

What surprised me most was how many were shocked to find out it wasn’t a big company behind it all. Just me, at home, trying to keep it all together.

The point of no return

After that exhilarating week, I got back to testing for Pro, with the help of some friends. It didn’t exactly go smoothly, with my todo list growing even as I crossed things off.

What I thought would be a quick launch turned into delay after delay, week by week.

I kept onboarding users from the waitlist in batches, fixing bugs, collecting feedback, polishing things a little more each time.

Until eventually… I ran out. That was the last batch, the waitlist was empty.

It was time for the public launch. And that meant updating the real Chrome extension.

Until then, I’d been using a separate beta version, a quiet way for Pro users to access the new features, keeping it secret. But now everything had to merge. The actual version, the one with over 250,000 installs.

It felt daunting, these users had used Screenity completely for free since the very beginning. If I didn’t get the messaging right, they’d think I’d sold out, added a paywall, made things worse. I wanted them to know nothing had changed, but that something more was now possible: cloud sharing, multi-scene editing, zooms, templates… If they wanted to.

I must have redone the onboarding a dozen times. Was it clear enough? Out of the way, but still obvious? Easy to ignore, but easy to find?

One night, I took a deep breath, and I hit publish. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. Until finally, a few days later, I got the email: it was approved.

What happened next? Well… that’s a story for next time.

P.S. If you want to see what Pro actually feels like, you can try it out now (please be kind! ❤️): screenity.io/pro

See you,

Alyssa X