Why I secretly launched Screenity, and what happened after
Not your typical launch story (well, maybe)
Issue #36
Hey! I’m Alyssa X, a serial entrepreneur who built 12+ products on her own. This email is part of my maker journey, which you’re subscribed to. Feel free to forward it to others if you find it interesting! You can support me through GitHub Sponsors, I’d really appreciate it! ❤️
Hey all,
I hope you had some nice holidays. I’ve been up to a lot myself, and I have some exciting news to share about Screenity. Let’s dive right in!
Yes, it’s here
In my last issue I wrote about getting the extension ready for launch, and doing private beta testing. I was hopeful to launch Screenity promptly after that, and while it took longer than expected, I’m happy to say: I did it! 🥳
You can try it out already if you want, but first, I’d like to explain how I got here, and what happened behind the scenes.
The pre-launch tasks
In the days after I posted on the newsletter, I made lots of improvements thanks to the feedback I received, and resolved lots of issues. The extension felt complete, but this was really just the beginning. There was still a lot of work to be done, such as:
To avoid spending all day handling support queries, I decided to set up a help center (I used HelpKit as they very kindly offered to sponsor Screenity). I wrote 30+ different articles about how to use the product, together with images and GIFs. It’s proven to be very useful.
To make the extension accessible for as many people as possible, I had originally translated the old version into multiple languages. I was worried that removing the multi-language support would tank my reviews, so I translated the new version (with a lot more text) into Catalan and Spanish, and got friends and acquaintances to translate into the other languages. I sped up the process using ChatGPT, and then having people review the output (which in some cases wasn’t great, but it was a start). This took ages, and now every time I add a new feature I need to translate it into 18 languages. Ugh.
I created a landing page to get people to know more about Screenity, share FAQs, features, and help gain more users through SEO. Since I’m a designer at heart, it took a few days to get the right visual style and language for it, especially since I want to portray the brand in a very specific way: friendly, down to earth, and calm.
I also created materials for the Chrome Store, among them a thumbnail for the search listing, a banner, and multiple gallery images. To make my life even harder, Chrome made me upload gallery images for each of the 18 different languages (some of which I also translated).
Then I made a video to showcase the product in action. It isn’t very good as I made it quickly, but it does the job. I will likely replace it with a proper one when I do a more formal launch.
…and a lot more tasks, like crafting the right copy for the tagline and descriptions, testing on different Chrome versions, laptops, and virtually with Browserstack, preparing the code for publishing on GitHub, and much more.
The (secret) launch
I finally pulled the trigger on the 26th of December, right after Christmas Day. I decided it would be the perfect time to launch, as I thought not many people would be using Screenity during the holidays (I was so wrong…), so it would be pretty safe. It was probably one of the most stressful and nerve-wracking nights of my life. I tested the extension over and over (while fixing some last minute bugs, thankfully), and submitted it to the Chrome Store to replace the old one, which had over 180K users.
And then I could relax… Except not really, because right after publishing it at 4AM, I quickly had to make my way to the airport and fly all the way to Portugal, worrying about the launch, but completely exhausted as I had not slept at all.
But once I got there, I could finally take a break. I spent a few days in my partner’s beautiful hometown with her family and friends, eating Portuguese food, admiring the sights, and taking some nice pictures.
The extension was approved a few days after publishing it, which made it available for everyone. The instant I received the email, my heart jumped out of my chest. I didn’t feel ready, and I didn’t even dare to try the live version in the Chrome Store, fearing I had made a terrible mistake I could not undo. But I had no choice - I installed it, and thankfully it seemed to work just fine. There was nothing to worry about… was there?
The (bloody) aftermath
It didn’t take long to get my first bug report. Then another one, some minutes later. And they kept coming, every few hours. Some people were praising it, sure, but plenty others were telling me about issues when recording, and how they just wanted to go back to the old version because they didn’t like the new one. It was discouraging, and I had to dreadfully go through the different issues. Most of them had one thing in common, they were using older devices, with low specs, and making long recordings (1 hour or longer). I had tested it on Windows plenty of times before, but on a relatively powerful laptop. By comparison, a lot of my users were on Chromebooks, or old machines, which I didn’t have access to.
I quickly did some digging. I released multiple patches, trying to address issues when recording, adding countless fallbacks, options to recover videos, better communication, and more. I did it all in the following days, as I traveled to Lisbon to welcome the new year.
It was a chaotic time, and I lost my holiday spirit. I couldn’t sleep, I was tired, and my to-do list seemed never-ending. I prioritized Screenity because I was worried about my reviews dropping overnight, losing all of my users, and the possibility of all the effort I had invested over the past year going to waste.
But while the reports were decreasing, they still didn’t stop. A couple of people had lost lengthy recordings, which made me really upset. I decided to take action right away.
I looked into the recording and processing code inside and out, and rewrote it almost from zero. I minimized the amount of memory it was using while recording, just saving the data locally in IndexedDB, chunk by chunk. Detecting at any point the amount of memory it was using, and how much it had available. Adding safety measures, like automatically stopping before running out of memory, or preventing users without enough memory to start to begin with. Also options to troubleshoot, and send me logs for review.
It took me a while, but I did it. Once it was approved and live on the Chrome Store, I could finally relax.
My experience
While I definitely didn’t enjoy how the launch went, I’m still glad about a few things. I’m glad I held off on launching, doing private testing first, it could have been much worse. I’m also glad I didn’t launch publicly, like I’ve done for every single one of my products in the past. And most of all, I’m glad it’s done, and that I took the leap. Now I can focus on moving forward, and keep making Screenity better.
Also, it wasn’t all bad. I was able to get over 160 people interested in the paid cloud version of Screenity, and I didn’t even advertise it at all. I received some really nice comments from people who tried it and absolutely loved - they were really surprised (in a good way) that I had built it all by myself. Some people even wanted to invest (which I declined, as I’d like to keep Screenity bootstrapped), they really saw the vision and the path forward for the product and were very excited about it.
But for now, I just need to keep building. I’ll be working on the cloud offering, and porting the extension over to Firefox. I’ll also be trying to look into automating tests, although it’s a bit harder to do for extensions, especially when using chrome APIs, accessing the camera and microphone, and recording the screen.
If I could ask you one thing, it would be to try out Screenity for yourself. I would love to know about any feedback, ideas, and (begrudgingly) any issues you come across. It has been discouraging to get a couple 1 star reviews with the problems I had on the previous versions, so I would also appreciate any reviews.
Thanks for reading, I hope you like Screenity!
See you,
Alyssa X
Congrats! Amazing extension
Hey Alyssa, Love the work you're putting out.
Would be great if you could share your workflow with us, how long have you been doing this, how many hours do you work/day etc...
This would make an awesome blog post imo. 15 or so products, You're in the top 1% of makers ever. I would die to know more.
And I am sure that a lot of people would like to as well .
Appreciate it, keep it up!