Celebrating one year of Moderation

On the 14th October, 2018, Moderation was launched on the App Store ^[1]. The year hasn’t quite played out as I expected. I decided to do a Leadership qualification in work which took up about 6 months of my free time, and work itself has been more challenging than normal, which has also made it more difficult for me to find the energy needed to work on Moderation in my spare time. None of this is unique to me, and time seems to be the biggest problem for any indie out there that also has a full time job.

That being said, I wanted to share some key numbers and milestones that I hit along the way:

• 3,122 Downloads (~8.5 per day).
• 1,034 (~33%) of these were in a single week I call the ‘super week’, where Moderation was #4 of ProductHunt.
• 1,424 were in January (~45% versus an expected 8.3% based on a uniform distribution). It's hard to unpick how much of this was a result of it being January, an expected busy month for a food diary App, or an outcome of the ProductHunt success.
• The most recent release (which only supports iOS 13) has had 350+ updates. According to MixPanel, iOS 13 adoption rate as of writing is currently 60%. Grossed up, you can assume that roughly 580 (or 18.5%) of the years downloads are still on peoples devices. I have no idea if this is high or not?
• 6 versions of the App shipped.
• £0 Revenue.

While I didn't have any real expecations of how many downloads I wanted to get in the first year, I did expect to have reached a point where I would be attempting to monetise the App via a subscription model. Unfortunately, there are still some core features I want to build into the free version of the App before I am going to start working on that.

What's the plan for the next year?

At a high level, I am hoping to achieve the following:

• Get some of the missing core functionality in place before Jan, to maximise the amount of attention (press) and downloads I can get in that month. For an idea of these features, you can read this post over at the Moderation blog.
• Get a first version of a Pro Subscription live in Q2.
• Optimise and continue growing the user base and feature set.

I still believe that there should be a radically simple and fun way to track what you eat, so I am going to continue pushing Moderation forward over the next year.

Here's to the future! 🍻