Pub Quiz Creator: Year 1 review

Last year, I created a web-app to quickly generate pub/trivia quizzes. I built it mainly as a side-project, but also as a way of keeping my coding skills intact after a few years of being in management.

I wrote about it a little at the time, but didn't go into a huge amount of detail or mention any numbers. As it's been over a year  since I launched it, I thought it was worth writing down a few thoughts and showing a few numbers.

First, some metrics - I'll go into detail on them more soon.

• Number of Visits to the site: 24,547
• Number of those who created an account: 790 (3.2% of visitors)
• Number of Quizzes created: 806 (so about 1 quiz per user)
• Number of Rounds created: 3148 (so about 4 rounds per quiz)
• Revenue: Very little. Let's say €0 for the sake of simplicity, but there is a tiny amount from ads.

What do you think of those numbers?

Overall, I'm  quite happy with them, considering:

• I haven't promoted the app in any meaningful (apart from a brief experiment with Google Ads when building it). I used to link to it in my Twitter Profile, and it has it's own Twitter account, but beyond that, I've done no promotion at all. I'll discuss this a bit later.
• It was a side project, if it made money, great, if not, so be it. I got great experience in building something end-to-end for the first time in a while.

What are my goals/what could I improve in the next 12 months?

• Promotion/Marketing - part of my personality is that I can be reluctant to share things publicly, but I'm improving (this blog post is a part of that new approach). I have used Google SEO as my primary source of generating customers and I should branch out into more specialised groups, like Reddit or other message boards, to search for users.
• Business model improvement 1 - I suspect my free plan is too generous (2 quizzes, 10 rounds per quiz). What's the incentive to upgrade?
• Business model improvement 2 - I have 800 users and I've never emailed them, nor have I gone out looking for users (see promotion). So it's very much organic growth. There are competitors in the space (some legitimate, some not so much) and I should study their business models to understand how they generate revenue, and how it differs from mine.
• Business (model) improvement 3 - Is this the right area to be in? Can I take this idea/code/learnings and apply them in a different way/pivot?
• The product itself. The perfectionist in me is never happy with the design of anything I build and this project is no exception. I built an MVP in a month or two, and then I didn't work on it for a few months. I think a more consisten approach is needed. Daily or even 2/3x a week hour-long coding and design sessions would make a big difference over a year. Big rock, small chisel.

Overall though, it feels like there is the core of a nice little product there. The code is relatively reusable (I reused the code from another project for this project), it's growing (slowly) and so I'm keen to see in 12 months how the app and metrics will change. I'll publish those numbers too.