marcperel

It sure has been a crazy passed few weeks all around the world. With social distancing, lock downs, closed schools and everything else going on, staying productive has been more difficult than ever.

With that said, to help productivity, I’ve decided to make Thought Train pay-what-you-want until the end of April.

My own primary use for Thought Train in the last month has been to take notes while on Zoom, Skype or Hangout calls, so I thought that since almost everyone is going to be working from home, I want you to have the same option to streamline your workflow.

Thought Train is a small app with a small audience of loyal users, so it’s really the best I can do in this climate to help in a small way.

I’ve read a few posts like this one but none which start from the absolute bottom like this, thanks Kyle!

Pricing is hard.

I thought I'd bring this to Hacker News because I know that many users on this platform build apps or market apps for a living.

My journey in the world of apps came after a career selling WordPress themes. I was tentative to launch my app, but when I finally did, the response blew my mind, the reason? The pricing. It was a pay what you want app!

So many users enjoyed the app, so I thought I'd release a new version, and this time I'd add cloud syncing, better features, a new interface, and... a recurring pricing model.

I was happy with this decision, so in May I launched the app to my 15,000 strong email database and to Product Hunt. It went relatively well, but as the months went on the over-arching feedback was... users are growing tired of the subscription model.

Dang!

I knew I had to make a switch, but changing your pricing is difficult, I was already working on some cool new features. So I thought I'd just take the dive, and update my pricing at the same time.

I settled on a once-off $19.

Well, a few days into it and I'm pretty happy with the result. I sucked it up and mailed my users, many of them happy with the change, and some have even converted.

The moral of the story is: it's never too soon to change pricing and go in a new direction.

I my post another update here on the long-tail affect, but for now, pretty keen to chat about pricing in general.

Very nice implementation Emkaka. I built a sticky notes replacement app too called Thought Train, but I really like your implementation :)

Makes sense to me, I've build a mobile version of Thought Train but it's really just for myself to test out the mobile UX right now.

Appreciate the comments

The users of the app like the ease of access on their Mac, ie. no tabbing around, always in your menubar.

Many users also use it as a quick way to compile to-do lists.

Lastly, the carousel in the menubar, which is the original idea, is a novel way to keep your notes in a just-obtrusive-enough manner.

Hey ya'll

A few months ago I posted a preview of my app built to replace your sticky notes, after loads of work by myself and co-developer, I'm pretty happy to say it's finally live and ready to download.

The app has a subscription pricing model, however there's a trial period to get going, and if you are arriving from HN and you want to activate after trial just mail me if you want a coupon, I'll gladly work out what you need.

I really just want people to use the app and enjoy it the same way I do.

Thanks!

Really appreciate the comment thanks!

That's interesting thinking, definitely something I'm going to take on and see how I can implement.

Hey fam!

A few months ago I linked a preview to the second version of the app I've been working on.

Thought Train originated by me losing my train of thought while busy at work, and morphed neatly into a way for myself and others to replace the plethora of sticky notes lying around our desks.

The app sits neatly in your Mac menubar or Windows taskbar and is quick to access with a useful short cut on both OS's.

The features are lightweight, focussed on productivity.

Cloud syncing with full note encryption. Drag & drop re-ordering. Edit, copy and paste functionality for quick use. A full markdown editor for more in-depth note taking. Cross-device compatibility. A shortcut key for quick app access. Windows and Mac support

Let me know what you think!

It's funny this thread exists.

I actually created a to-do/note app that works for loads of users, I called it Thought Train because I kept losing my train of thought as I tabbed through Slack/Skype/Email all day.

It's not "The answer" but it's helped me daily since I built it.

The trick to creating something like this in a crowded space is not to compete against the others, but compliment them.

I haven't had a great experience with co-working at all, I wish there was something like Breather where I live.

Has anyone here had experience with Breather.com?

I work from home but would really like to tap into that "private space" vibe now and then. Regus is available here but it feels like going to the "PC room" in 1999.

I love this, while the rest of the industry is focussing on coupling admin interfaces with the front end, Ghost's focus on decoupling is a no-brainer.

Incredible work!

This is great advice thanks.

A great point about the path-to-$100 which for my affiliates would be referring 100 sales or about 45% of the current volume.

That said, from a Lifehacker post and Product Hunt feature, the conversion of paid users was very high, almost 10% so I think its not impossible for the right affiliate to make decent revenue.

I'll hit up some blogs in the space, see if they're willing to take a punt, it makes sense to keep the traffic as geniun as possible.

Thanks!

True to the title, this is a medium length post of how I changed my app's pricing to unlock $25/day of revenue.

It's funny how your conception of what you think something is worth compared to what people are willing to pay can be wildly different.

I'd call this a small win for iteration.

I was a pretty early beta on the editor, and I'm happy to see the production version turn out as good as it did.

Cards is a smart way to re-phrase the rich content without dipping into the "site builder" mould.

Nice work.

Thanks to your feedback I made a tidy gif showing how it works :)

Sure, so:

- If you highlight more than one note it automatically scrolls, you just need to leave one note highlighted at a time and it'll stop scrolling (this isn't obvious in the UX, so I need to change how it works, maybe adding a checkbox)

- You can delete notes, just hover over them, click the green tick, then go to archives (bottom right), and delete them from there.

But thanks for the feedback, I want to release an update which helps get on top of these common questions.

Thanks, I'm still working on the way the video is integrated, I haven't been able to sit down and style that portion as well as I'd like.

The Gumroad embed has actually worked really well so far as a clear call to action, the download-to-paid rate is 10%.

Thanks that's worthwhile feedback!

I got really tired of using the default sticky note widget on my Mac, so I created an app which I can use to remember stuff in between checking Hacker News, Twitter and Product Hunt.

I got really tired of using the default sticky note widget on my Mac, so I created an app which I can use to remember stuff in between checking Hacker News, Twitter and Product Hunt.

Ya'll after almost 1yr of personal use I went and released Thought Train into the wild.

A 'task' app that sits in your menubar, and helps you remember what you've been busy with!

Thanks Steve :)

Our company is called Obox, you can get the git repo here:

http://GitHub.com/Obox/Layerswp

Enjoy :)

Varnish does go a long way, on the HTTP side combining and minifying scripts helps a lot too. I think the heavy load is almost the nature of the system, but there are some ways to alleviate the pain!

It seems to be up maybe it was a temp glitch :)

You're downloading a theme for WordPress.

Currently it's just for pages, we are working on ways to bring the builder into any post type so which will help users make beautiful posts as well as pages.

We are trying as much as possible to take inspiration from Squarespace in that our main focus is the User Experience.

Anything decision we take with Layers has to meet our UX expectations before being added, which I think is something lacking from the WordPress industry at the moment, features are added but are not usable, which sucks for the end user.

We want to fix that as much as we can.