Crash Catch Got Its First Sale - Almost ?

Chris Board

Sep 15, 20214 min read
crash-reportingcrash catchcrash-catch

Crash Catch was released in March and have been I've been waiting for the day to get my first user. In case you are not aware, Crash Catch is our new crash monitoring solution for every developer, every platform and every programming language.

I almost got my first user a couple of months ago when someone signed up but didn't continue, unfortunately didn't get any feedback as to why - its annoying when that happens.

But towards the end of August I got a signup to the Pro plan with a new Android project being created and started receiving initialisations and crashes from their project.

This was the first real user and was delighted that everything worked without any issue (apart from a slight glitch in the backend not incrementing crash count quotas correctly, but it was in the users favour so wasn't a massive issue and was a relatively easy issue to fix).

Within a few days, they had processed 100,000 and hit their plan crash quota limit. This was more to do with that they left the test crash in place that is suggested during the project creation and released the app which meant everytime someone loaded the app, or went to a particular screen the test crash would be submitted.

I contacted the user a couple of times, one within a couple of days of them signing up, to welcome them and see if they needed any help or have any feedback and then another email to warn them about hitting the quota limit due to the test crash (offered to remove those test crashes so the quota was lower and they would continue to receive crashes but unfortunately never got a reply).

Towards the end of their trial I saw they had actually converted and submitted their card details for payments and I was ecstatic that I had my first user convert which gave me hope that although I haven't been marketing Crash Catch recently (due to some backend rewrites that were started before this user signed up - so not as a result of any issues - I did a blog post at about the reasons about this rewrite at https://blog.boardiesitsolutions.com/the-future-of-crash-catch-converting-the-api-to-laravel/).

But unfortunately I then got a notification from stripe that the payment was declined with the message "The bank does not support this type of transaction".

Shortly afterwards they raised a support ticket (not about the payment failure but something else) which I responded to but again no reply from them.

I contacted them separately stating the issue that I can see from Stripe regarding the payment and extended the trial by 7 days to give them chance to resolve but again no reply.

Then noticed they removed the original project, and created a new project for a separate Android app which received a few crashes - around 1000+ over the 7 day trial extension but unfortunately the trial period has been reached again and there's been no contact from the user unfortunately.

Therefore I think I've lost this user due to a bank issue outside of anything I can do, but again no feedback for improvements, what worked and didn't work etc.

Although I am at least happy, that although there's been no recent marketing, I had someone find Crash Catch, sign up and did convert to a paid user even if it didn't work out its a good sign, so hopefully once the backend stuff has been re-done and released, I can hopefully do a bit of a marketing push (pretty useless at marketing so that could be interesting) and hopefully have a bit more luck for any future signups.

At the time of writing, Crash Catch has processed 290,000+ devices and 17000+ unique devices.

If you want more information, or want to sign up to Crash Catch, you can visit https://crashcatch.com or feel free to drop me in an email at [email protected].

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