The best morning surprise 🌅

When 10 months of work start paying off in 4 hours…

Last Thursday, March 16th, I woke to one of the greatest surprises one could hope for! 😁

A day earlier, on Wednesday afternoon, I finally finished building paid subscriptions for Polar Habits.

Jesse and I had planned to announce the Pro plan together with some new features, but we weren’t ready for that announcement yet.

Then, I had this “crazy” idea to just put it out there. Silently. 🤐

Dude, uhh, just do it! —Jesse J. Anderson

Jesse gave me the affirmation I needed, but I was nervous, so I procrastinated (no surprise there! 😅) for a good few hours. Six hours later, at 2:30am, I finally did it! 😬

No announcements…

Just a silent launch that would only be noticed by active users who’d open the app to track a weekly habit—our only Pro feature for now. Before this, weekly habit tracking was behind a 🔒 icon with a call-to-action that read “Try while it’s free.” 142 people had tracked at least one weekly habit since the beginning of March, so we had a good idea of how many potential customers (or angry users 😅) we’d have.

I stayed up for another hour or so to make sure I hadn’t broken anything, but also anxiously waiting for our first signup.

Crickets. 🦗

I went to bed just before 4am. 😴

A few hours later…

I woke up to amazing news! 🤩

I don’t usually wake up early if I go to bed so late, but it was different this time. I woke up just after 7am, and the first thing I did? Of course, checking my phone, and…

We had customers! 🥳

Not 1… Not 2… Not 3…

EIGHT people had decided to sign up for annual subscriptions while I slept!

How amazing is that? 🤯

I don’t think I’ve ever been so alert after waking up from a 3-hour sleep! 😅

We had 20 more signups by the end of that day, most of which were annual subscriptions.

As of this writing, we have 48 paid users, and almost $1,000 in gross revenue! 🥳

I’m excited not only because this is a major milestone in my journey with Polar Habits (a project I started in June last year) but also because there’s something extra special about money earned through something I made from scratch. Somehow, $1,000 from my own product feels more “earned” than $100,000 from freelancing.

I’m just really excited! 🤩

What next?

We’ve priced the Pro plan for Polar Habits at $8 per month, or $48 per year (50% off the monthly price,) but for our early supporters—our first 50 customers—we decided to offer a 50% discount, reducing the cost to $4 per month or $24 per year.

With 48 customers, the 50% discount is almost over, but we want to continue offering a discount to our early customers beyond the first 50.

We’re not ready to charge the full price for Polar Habits, perhaps partly because I’m afraid of charging “too much” but also because Polar Habits is still very early as a product. The only feature exclusive to the Pro plan right now is the ability to track weekly habits—a feature that’s been around since before our big launch on January 1st! 🤷🏻‍♂️

So, Jesse and I have agreed to replace the 50% discount (once we hit 50 customers) with a 25% discount until April 24th.

OK… Enough about money! 🤑

After weeks of working on the “boring” stuff like email reminders, push notifications and paid subscriptions, I’m excited to get back into nerd mode to solve interesting problems again! 🤓

One of the problems I hope to explore in the next few weeks is tracking habits that grow and evolve over time. For example, if you’re trying to get into the habit of going to the gym, you may wish to start with once a week—as you should, if you’re currently at 0—and slowly work your way up to 4–5 times a week. Right now, there’s no way of tracking the evolution of a habit like that within Polar Habits. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I was surprised to learn that most (if not all) other habit trackers aren’t designed to evolve with your habits, either. I could take that as a cue that it’s not crucial, but one of the reasons I enjoy working on my own product is that I get to challenge accepted defaults while choosing where to focus my energy.

Some time ago, while writing The Bumpy Ride, I came up with a guiding principle for making our product decisions:

How can we help people build and maintain momentum with their habits?

It’s clear to me that we need to encourage our users to start small, and we can’t do that if we don’t allow them to evolve their habits over time. 📈

That’ll be a relatively big piece of work, but I hope to make some progress with it—and share updates—in the next couple of months.

For my next post, though, I want to talk about “skipped” days and why, just like streaks, they don’t have a place in Polar Habits. ⛔️

Expect to hear from me again by April 13th!

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Thanks for joining me on this ride! 🚗

It means the world to me, so thank you! 💙