Curtis Herbert
Monday was a pretty big day - Slopes is now employing 12 people full-time (not that 12 is a particular number of interest, but we just crossed the 10 people threshold mid-May, so I figured I'd wait until now to write about it 😅).
Oh boy, it's been a spicy few months in the Apple ecosystem 🍿. But this might just let us answer the big question we've long been unable to answer with anything but speculation.
After working nights and weekends since April, Slopes 1.0 launched on September 24 2013. The launch ... didn't go exactly as planned.
I've been thinking a lot about a problem we all face time and time again: one of our favorite apps dies. Either through a pivot, or an acquisition / acqui-hire.
There’s always a lot of talk about optimizing your paywall - hell, I usually redesign and test new version of mine at least once a season 😅. It makes sense that you'd focus so much on the paywall – it is a single screen that every purchase goes through, so the potential for impact is high.
One thing I've noticed about Slopes's downloads since 2018 is that my download rate per season has been pretty consistent, fluctuating somewhere between 250k and 280k.
This season brought a major expansion to Slopes: Android. I talked a lot about the rollercoaster of development that came with it in my previous post, and I wanted to follow up with what all that effort yielded and how the season went.
So that free trial idea I was toying with back in September? It launched, and I think it has been a success for Slopes.
Well, it finally happened. The "1.0" for Slopes launched in the Play Store yesterday. I've tweeted here and there about the journey over the last year+, even chatted about it on a podcast, but I haven't written much about it since I started.
Slopes Diaries is my ongoing journey to turn my indie app into a more sustainable part of my business. First time reading? Catch up on the journey so far . What is Slopes ? Think Nike+, Runkeeper, Strava, MapMyRun, etc for skiers and snowboarders. I've put off writing about how
While exploring a lot of the possibilities with Slopes's pricing, if I were to change it, a light bulb went off. Some pieces of the puzzle had changed over the years, but I had never taken a step back to look at how they all fit together now.
If you had told me 2 months ago that the Mac Catalyst version of Slopes was not going to be the first Mac app I'd launch, I would not have believed you.
Going into the 2019/20 season I had an ambitious plan: finally ship the iPad version of Slopes I've been wanting to see for years. It isn't so much that I thought that the additional platform would be a huge boon to my business,
I always have been ... one might say squeamish ... about upselling my premium IAPs within Slopes. Which is of course silly because Slopes Premium is the lifeblood of the app and the only reason I'm able to build and grow the product (vs selling user data or monetizing some other way).
Back when I was working on implementing my sync engine over the summer of 2017 the main problem I was trying to solve was helping protect customer data. I hated getting emails from users who didn't realize they needed to use iTunes / iCloud backups to move Slopes data to a new phone,