Backtrack

How We Launched An App In 14 Days

Idea Aug 9th

August 9th:

On August 9th, we met with a venture capital company, Bluerun, in Menlo Park, California for a secondary discovery meeting. The purpose was to see if we’d be a good fit and talk about the possibility of them leading our seed round (which is now open as of this writing). 

Immediately after leaving their office, I looked at my co-founder, Jordan Walker, and said, “Wow that was amazing. I wish we recorded that.” He said, “I was thinking the same thing” and so I took out my camera to try and document the discussion as best I could because we learned a lot and enjoyed speaking with them.

(Insert video in Sf talking about Bluerun meeting)

When we were boarding our plane, we discussed the meeting in greater detail. And that’s when it hit me.

“What if we built an app that lets you rewind audio?Just click and select a time from a dropdown and it saves to your desktop?”

Justin, my other co-founder/CEO, said, “We can make that work. But I saw this interaction once that lets you drag it down. I think that would work better.”

Our 5 hour flight just got more interesting.

We bought the plane wifi ($25, ugh), selected a name & domain, mocked up a website & logo, and assigned tasks to the team all before we even took off.

By the time we landed, our website was (mostly) finished and UI was well underway.

This blog is a timeline of how we came up with an idea from a VC meeting, built the mockups on the plane ride home, and launched to the app store in 16 days and how 7 days later we got 500+ downloads from our Product Hunt launch, all while working remote and dodging a hurricane!

Design Aug 10th

August 10th:

Plane ride -  Instagram wireframe design

(Insert plane ride video of justin making website, pitching idea)

Website designed

Initial logo designed with Instagram stories

End of the plane ride finished website design:

Designer reuses YAC UI to have designs ready for devs the next morning

August 11th:

Simon mocks initial logo for Backtrack

Fixed mobile for website

Logo swapped to YAC branding colors and the App Store button swapped out for an email capture.

Development Aug 13

August 13th

Developer let’s us know he can finish the app in 15 hours of work

Tag Manager installed on site with digital plumbing in place

Backtrack domain being decided

Backtrack.team decided, bought, and launched

Feedback Aug 15th

August 15th:
Justin asks others for feedback

People’s #1 concern was privacy we found out very early on. This caused us to reconsider plans to go to the cloud and pivot to 100% local and private.

We toyed with the idea of charging for the app as well in this stage and ultimately sacrificed the nominal short term profit for brand awareness and long term upsells into other YAC products.

Once we solved the product issues, we had an education issue since most people didn’t understand the app’s value prop.

For an app with 1 feature and only one section on the home page, we had to NAIL the copy in 2 lines.

But people didn’t understand “time machine”. They didn’t get how you could record backwards.

There were so many options it was tough to nail it down to just 2 lines.

August 19th:

We got a taste of our first build for Mac and the team went wild.

(Insert video of Hunter showing off Backtrack August 19th)

We spent time figuring out how we should display in seconds vs minutes.

Found Backtrack valuable in 1 hour and 3 minutes flat!

So. Many. Copy. Changes. Needed the name and subtitle to be

1. Easily searchable with the right keywords (Audio, Backtrack, Record)
2. Explain what the app does without an explanation

Easier said than done.

Impressively fast fix for the dev

Feedback came in droves. We needed to be more clear what the value prop was, differentiate between our core product, YAC.

Based on their feedback, one of the final copy changes was born.

We liked how Ryan Hoover’s company, Stacks, had a link to create a tweet and wanted the same functionality for people to share the app. The app was free and we weren’t collecting emails anymore so the least we could get was a built in virality system to get people to share and spread the word organically.

Early iteration of the thank you page:

There were too many emojis and the tweet button wasn’t big enough for people to click on. We changed it so people are more likely to share.

August 21st:

We launched the website with the email signup and so I checked on the Hotjar heatmaps:

August 22nd:

We had several small wins early on that let us know we were on to something: 10 signups out of the 40 people on the site. Not something we usually care about but we were 12 days from when I came up with the idea!

We got to work on the screenshots for the App Store. We were on fire.

Which was then dropped in a background but the fonts and colors didn’t show the app off well enough.

Playing with the YAC colors, our designers came up with a unique design that was a bit too busy for Backtrack. Backtrack needed to be simple, clean, elegant. This was a bit too much for the branding we were going after.

When someone looks at your screenshot on the app store, you put text above to show what the benefits are without looking at the UI itself. More importantly, the UI is so small for Mac apps that you need to display the UI up close so they can see what the app looks like.

Heather stepped in to help.

Beta List Aug 20th

August 20th:

Featured on BetaList

August 21:

Trended on Betalist for the week.

Small and stead growth from Betalist hitting ~200 visits to the site.

Jason Calacanis responds to a tweet to me pitching YAC.

AB Testing Aug 21st

August 21st:

I wanted to test the button color to see if a contrasting button would help with conversion.

My hypothesis was that purple would be the only color on our website and would attract the eye.

Purple button

Black button

Results:
The sample size was not big enough to be conclusive (n=345) but the test showed that the purple button was beating the black button pretty badly before we pulled the plug. Unfortunately we launched to the App Store 2 days later so we were not able to carry this learning over but it was a good test to run before heavy traffic hit the site.

App Store Aug 23rd

August 23rd:

Submitted to the App store for the first time.

App Store rejected us.

 They rejected our app for several reasons:

1. There was no indicator that the app was recording. We ended up just adding a red circle over the icon in the menu bar to indicate recording.

2. There was no way to turn off recording. We just added a “pause recording” button.

So we decided to toy with the idea of just launching on our website and going around the App Store. The straw poll didn’t help.

Warming The Audience Aug 26th

August 26th:

Finally we were approved!

Now we needed some traction.

The majority of distributed teams work from home or work from a coffee shop. Of those that work at home, many of them live off of coffee like us so it made sense to try and warm up our audience for the launch with a YAC Coffee Review.
(Insert video of first coffee review

The response was good enough to warrant a second coffee review which released day of the Backtrack launch on Product Hunt.

Hurricane Aug 29th

Hurricane Dorian threatens central Florida (and our launch)

Which caused everyone to rush to grocery stores and run out of water, gas, and bread.

This could have been bad news bears since we were launching Monday morning, when the storm was supposed to hit.

Thankfully the weather held up long enough for us all to not lose power and press on for the big day.

Product Hunt Launch Day Sept 2nd

Sept 2nd:

We asked ex co-founder of Product Hunt, Ben Tossell, to Hunt us in hopes his notoriety would propel us to the top of the list for the day. He recently made the switch to working full time on his startup, Makerpad, which is now making a splash of its own in the no-code space. We were fortunate to have him Hunt us because he is one of our investors but a normal person would not be able to. We always recommend that people try to make genuine connections with top Hunters before the launch because you do not want to hunt your own product.

We knew that Product Hunt is all about traction and that the team that gets in first place within the first few hours typically stays there all day. That remained true for us as you’ll read later on.

Here’s a few things we did right (and wrong)

1. Tweeted pre-launch announcement 4 hours ahead of launch. I attempted to get some buzz going before we actually launched on Product Hunt. It was 12am EST and we launched 3am EST. Not only did I get the time wrong but it was a holiday. Already not off to a great start.

2. Announced launch itself. This one was obvious but worth showing the copy since I intentionally mentioned the keywords “Product Hunt”, asked for an upvote explicitly, tagged Backtrack (Which of course had the Product Hunt URL), and then commented right away thanking Ben, our Hunter, for Hunting us. This gave him an incentive to share and get both Backtrack and YAC a chance to see traffic and awareness.

3. Updated audience to let people know they are appreciated and the momentum is growing. I always love seeing a good story unfold before me so I figured other people should see that their votes are being counted and appreciated. Not enough founders take the time to thank their users. Probably because they call them users… hmmm...

4. Send email to any existing Product Hunt audience
   Initially the email didn’t do that well:

But then it picked up steam later on:

5. Hit the magical 100 upvote milestone

When you hit 100 upvotes, you trigger several platforms to send out automated Tweets, Facbeook posts, and Pinterest pins via IFTT & Zapier. This means all focus has to be on getting 100 upvotes as fast as possible. Before this moment, we were messaging friends, family, etc. to all upvote and comment.

6. Made a promo video from our coffee review and told people about Backtrack to get extra attention. This caused many conversations offline about the coffee reviews, Backtrack, AND YAC. My parents enjoyed brainstorming with me all the ways they could get involved and review coffee with me and told all their friends. Free press is free press right?

(insert video of coffee review pt 2)

7. Made an actual promo video of the app itself with no distractions. This was largely based off of a previous ad I did with my chatbot agency, Bot Sause. The idea was to keep it super clean and snappy with minimal editing. The most important part was to line up the music with the video itself, kinda like how a good movie trailer uses music.

(insert video of promo video by Emilio)

8. Finally, thank your audience for their help when the day is over

We placed second for the day with 700+ visitors to the site with 300+ upvotes which gave us a nice badge for our site.

And just for fun, I cold emailed Jason Calacanis.

Backtrack seemed to be done and over with but the next day, we got a surprise.

September 3rd:

Product Hunt put out a newsletter about us

Which spurred a whole new day of activity that was bigger than the day we launched.

It didn’t hurt the CEO commented on the project loving the UX.

This made us jump to the top spot for that day, giving us a chance at becoming a top product of the week, unfortunately it was the day after so we weren’t able to snag the top spot, even though we have fewer comments and upvotes.

September 3rd:
Jason responded and I guess he liked the video :)

And then signs up...

The App Store rankings started to go higher and higher.

Sept 4th:

Since the App Store doesn’t let you see how many downloads you have live, we waited until the 4th to find out. 542 downloads in 2 days.

We were happy about this because most apps don’t even see 10 downloads and we had over 500 in a few days!

It still kept going after we thought it was over.

Snazzy Q featured Backtrack as #7 on his list of Underrated Free Mac Apps which has amassed over 130k views on Youtube and gave a 1k spike to our download count in one single day.

Here’s the final breakdown of the little marketing stunt we pulled off in a few weeks from an idea in a VC meeting:

Comments

Jason Calacanis watched our video and said, “seems like a good idea... watched the video” and then introduced us to his team.

Ryan Hoover, CEO of Product Hunt, commented, “Love the drag to set the time UX. Creative.”

A developer loved the menu bar UX so much he tried copying it.

“I really like the drag menubar interaction. I would love to see this open-sourced because I've seen it in another app and spent a couple of weeks trying to reproduce it with no luck. :(“

“What a great idea! And I always love to see fellow independent desktop developers with great products. Good luck!”

“very impressive and great idea. can totally see this as the first step to creating an alternative for chorus / gong less targeted at sales!”

“That's an awesome hack. So many times I wish I had recorded ideas etc that came to me on the spur of the moment.”

“Yes would use it! To be able to capture those aha moments you really only experience through spontaneous conversation? Brilliant.”

“One of the smartest and functional app that I discovered last 3 months...”

“Really a great idea. I don't see a reason why this shouldn't be on anyone's Mac right now :) Very well implemented, and thanks for giving it away for free, to you and your team.”

Results

3k+ downloads

3k+ total website visitors

1 newsletter by PH

1 Investor introduced

1 Featured Youtube video

What next?

We may implement some Backtrack features into YAC at some point but for now, we are raising our seed round and enjoying our in person brainstorming sessions that can now be shared with our remote teams!