We blew through some milestones this last 6 months. Right now Shmeppy has over 700 registered users and 132 of those users have been in a “real game where people are using Shmeppy to play some RPG” in the past 30 days. This tidily surpasses my goals for the early access launch I shared the plans for in Roadmap Snapshot: Towards an Early Access Launch.
I’m overjoyed with Shmeppy’s success so far. But the next milestone is a big one: Shmeppy’s gotta get a lot more users. I think around 10,000 using Shmeppy for real games each month. At that point, I think I can switch Shmeppy out of “earliest access” and start charging users and finally start making money instead of burning through my savings like I’m currently doing.
I’m very unsure about how I’m going to get to that number. My vague plans at the moment are:
- Features and Polish: Continue polishing the map making powers of Shmeppy: I want users to be blown away by the experience so they’ll reccomend it to others.
- Marketing: Explore the efficacy of various advertising and marketing channels, so that when (1) is in a good place I can dump a huge sum of money in a big marketing push and have confidence that I’ll get a good return on investment.
- Robustness: Continue mitigating risk of failure by investing in good backup infrastructure and security.
I don’t really know where “good enough” will be for (1) and that’s a pretty important question. I’ll probably just have to feel it out.
Anyways, that’s basically my grand plan at the moment. I’m hoping my plans will get more and more concrete as the year continues. Stay tuned.